A Vanished Arcadia | Page 6

power could have disposed of, they did
not resist, but silently departed from the rich territories which their care
and industry had formed.
Rightly or wrongly, but according to their lights, they strove to teach
the Indian population all the best part of the European progress of the
times in which they lived, shielding them sedulously from all contact
with commercialism, and standing between them and the Spanish

settlers, who would have treated them as slaves. These were their
crimes. For their ambitions, who shall search the human heart, or say
what their superiors in Europe may, or perhaps may not, have had in
view? When all is said and done, and now their work is over, and all
they worked for lost (as happens usually with the efforts of
disinterested men), what crime so terrible can men commit as to stand
up for near upon two centuries against that slavery which disgraced
every American possession of the Spanish* crown? Nothing is bad
enough for those who dare to speak the truth, and those who put their
theories into practice are a disgrace to progressive and adequately taxed
communities. Nearly two hundred years they strove, and now their
territories, once so populous and so well cultivated, remain, if not a
desert, yet delivered up to that fierce-growing, subtropical American
plant life which seems as if it fights with man for the possession of the
land in which it grows. For a brief period those Guaranis gathered
together in the missions, ruled over by their priests, treated like
grown-up children, yet with a kindness which attached them to their
rulers, enjoyed a half-Arcadian, half-monastic life, reaching to just so
much of what the world calls civilization as they could profit by and
use with pleasure to themselves. A commonwealth where money was
unknown to the majority of the citizens, a curious experiment by
self-devoted men, a sort of dropping down a diving-bell in the flood of
progress to keep alive a population which would otherwise soon have
been suffocated in its muddy waves, was doomed to failure by the very
nature of mankind. Foredoomed to failure, it has disappeared, leaving
nothing of a like nature now upon the earth. The Indians, too, have
vanished, gone to that limbo which no doubt is fitted for them. Gentle,
indulgent reader, if you read this book, doubt not an instant that
everything that happens happens for the best; doubt not, for in so doing
you would doubt of all you see -- our life, our progress, and your own
infallibility, which at all hazards must be kept inviolate. Therefore in
my imperfect sketch I have not dwelt entirely on the strict
concatenation (after the Bradshaw fashion) of the hard facts of the
history of the Jesuits. I have not set down too many dates, for the
setting down of dates in much profusion is, after all, an ad captandum
appeal to the suffrages of those soft-headed creatures who are styled
serious men.

-- * This, of course, applies to the possessions of all European States in
America equally with Spain. --
Wandering along the by-paths of the forests which fringe the mission
towns, and set them, so to speak, in the hard tropical enamel of green
foliage, on which time has no lien, and but the arts of all-destroying
man are able to deface, I may have chanced upon some petty detail
which may serve to pass an hour away.
A treatise of a forgotten subject by a labourer unskilled, and who,
moreover, by his very task challenges competition with those who have
written on the theme, with better knowledge, and perhaps less
sympathy; a pother about some few discredited and unremembered
priests; details about half-savages, who `quoi! ne portaient pas des
haults de chausses'; the recollections of long silent rides through forest
paths, ablaze with flowers, and across which the tropic birds darted like
atoms cut adrift from the apocalypse; a hotch-potch, salmagundi, olla
podrida, or sea-pie of sweet and bitter, with perhaps the bitter ruling
most, as is the way when we unpack our reminiscences -- yes, gentle
and indulgent reader, that's the humour of it.
R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
Gartmore, March 30, 1900.

Contents

Chapter I
Early history -- State of the country -- Indian races -- Characteristics of
the different tribes -- Dobrizhoffer's book -- Various expeditions --
Sebastian Cabot -- Don Pedro de Mendoza -- Alvar Nunez -- His
expedition and its results -- Other leaders and preachers -- Founding of
the first mission of the Society of Jesus

Chapter II
Early days of the missions -- New settlements founded -- Relations of
Jesuits with Indians and Spanish colonists -- Destruction of missions by
the Mamelucos -- Father Maceta -- Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya --

His work and