so dissolute as the ecclesiastical Spaniards. The Jesuits, whose sagacity and skill in the management of affairs were then unequalled, obtained from the King the exclusion of all strangers from the land of Paraguay; they in return for this privilege becoming bound to pay to his majesty a yearly tax of one dollar for every baptized Indian who lived under their dominion. Thus protected, the missionaries proceeded to instruct the savages and form them into communities. Their lives were irreproachably pure; the sincerity of their kindness was assured by their manifest self-denial; the wisdom of the measures which they introduced was quickly approved by the increasing welfare of the population. In a very few years the Jesuits had gained the confidence of the Indians, over whom they henceforth exercised control absolute and unlimited.

They drew together into little settlements a number, fifty or thereby, of wandering families, to whom they imparted the art of agriculture. The children were taught to read, to write, to sing. In each settlement a judge, chosen by the inhabitants, maintained public order and administered justice. The savages received willingly the faith which the good fathers commended to their adoption. They were lenient to the superstitions of their subjects, and the reception of the new faith was hastened by its readiness to exist in harmonious combination with many of the observances of the old. In time the sway of the Jesuits extended over a population of one million five hundred thousand persons, all of whom had received Christian baptism; and they could place sixty thousand excellent soldiers in the field.

The fathers regulated all the concerns of their subjects. All possessions were held in common. Every morning, after hearing mass, the people went out to labour according to the instructions of the fathers. The gathered crops were stored for the general good, and were distributed according to the necessities of each family. No intoxicants were permitted. A strict discipline. was enforced by stripes administered in the public market-place,

and received without murmuring by the submissive natives. When strangers made their unwelcome way into the country, the missionaries stood between their converts and the apprehended pollution. The stranger was hospitably entertained and politely escorted from one station to another till he reached the frontier, no opportunity of intercourse with the natives having been afforded.

The government of the Jesuits was in a high degree beneficial to the Paraguans. The soil was cultivated sufficiently to yield an ample maintenance for all. Education was widely extended; churches were numerous and richly adorned; the people were peaceable, contented, cheerful. In every condition which makes human life desirable, the Jesuit settlements, during a period of considerably over a century, stand out in striking and beautiful contrast to all the other colonial possessions of Spain.

The Church of Rome

1640

to 1770

A. D.

1767

A. D.

But while the Jesuits of Paraguay were thus nobly occupied in raising the fallen condition of the savages over whom they ruled, their brethren in Europe had incurred the hatred of mankind by the wicked and dangerous intrigues in which they delighted to engage. herself cast them out. They were expelled from Spain. The Order was dissolved by the Pope. The fall of this unscrupulous organization was in most countries a relief from constant irritation and danger; in Paraguay it was disastrous. The country accepted new and incapable rulers, and was parcelled out into new provinces. speedily fell from the eminence to which the fathers had raised it, and sunk into the anarchy and misery by which its neigh bours were characterized.

1773

A. D.

It

CHAPTER VII.

BRAZIL.

ING JOHN of Portugal, to whom Columbus first made offer of his project of discovery, was grievously chagrined when the success of the great navigator revealed the magnificence of the rejected opportunity. Till then, Portugal had occupied the foremost place as an explorer of unknown regions. She had already achieved the discovery of all the western coasts of Africa, and was now about to open a new route to the East by the Cape of Good Hope. Suddenly her fame was eclipsed. While she occupied herself with small and barren discoveries, Spain had found, almost without the trouble of seeking, a new world of vast extent and boundless wealth.

Portugal had obtained from the Pope a grant of all lands which she should discover in the Atlantic, with the additional advantage of full pardon for the sins of all persons who should die while engaged in the work of exploration. The sovereigns of Spain were equally provident in regard to the new territory which they were now in course of acquiring. They applied to Pope Alexander Sixth, who, as vicar of Christ, possessed the acknowledged right to dispose at his pleasure of all territories inhabited by heathens. From this able but eminently dissolute pontiff they asked for a bull which should confirm them in possession of all past and future discoveries in Western seas. The accommodating Pope, willing to please both powers, divided

1493

A. D.

the world between them. He stretched an imaginary line, from pole to pole, one hundred leagues to the westward of the Cape de Verd Islands: all discoveries on the eastern side of this boundary were given to Portugal, while those on the west became the property of Spain. Portugal, dissatisfied with the vast gift, proposed that another line should be drawn, stretching from east to west, and that she should be at liberty to possess all lands which she might find between that line and the South Pole. Spain objected to this huge deduction from her expected possessions. Ultimately Spain consented that the Papal frontier should be removed westward to a distance of two hundred and seventy leagues from the Cape de Verd Islands; and thus the dispute was happily terminated.

1494

A.D.

1500

A. D.

Six years after this singular transaction, by which two small European States parted between them all unexplored portions of the Earth, a Portuguese navigator-Pedro Alvarez Cabral set sail from the Tagus in the prosecution of discovery in the East. He stood far out into the Atlantic, to avoid the calms which habitually baffled navigation on the coast of Guinea. His reckoning was loosely kept, and the ocean currents bore his ships westward into regions which it was not his intention to seek. After forty-five days of voyaging he saw before him an unknown and unexpected land. In searching for the Cape of Good Hope, he had reached the shores of the great South American Continent, and he hastened to claim for the King of Portugal the territory he had found, but regarding the extent of which he had formed as yet no conjecture. Three Spanish captains had already landed on this part of the continent and asserted the right of Spain to its ownership. For many years Spain maintained languidly the right which priority of discovery had given. But Portugal, to whom an interest in the wealth of the New World was an object of vehement desire, took effective possession of the land.

She sent out soldiers; she built forts; she subdued the savage natives; she founded colonies; she established provincial governments. Although Spain did not formally withdraw her pretensions, she gradually desisted from attempts to enforce them; and the enormous territory of Brazil became a recognized appanage of a petty European State whose area was scarcely larger than the one-hundredth part of that which she had so easily acquired.

1654

A.D.

For three hundred years Brazil remained in colonial subordination to Portugal. Her boundaries were in utter confusion, and no man along all that vast frontier could tell the limits of Portuguese dominion. Her Indians were fierce, and bore with impatience the inroads which the strangers made upon their possessions. The French seized the bay of Rio de Janeiro. The Dutch conquered large territories in the north. But in course of years these difficulties were overcome. The foreigners were expelled. The natives were tamed, partly by arms, partly by the teaching of zealous Jesuit missionaries. Some progress was made in opening the vast interior of the country and in fixing its boundaries. On the coast, population increased and numerous settlements sprang up. The cultivation of coffee, which has since become the leading Brazilian industry, was introduced. Some simple manufactures were established, and the country began to export her surplus products to Europe. There was much misgovernment; for the despotic tendencies of the captainsgeneral who ruled the country were scarcely mitigated by the authority of the distant Court of Lisbon. The enmity of Spain never ceased, and from time to time burst forth in wasteful and bloody frontier wars. Sometimes the people of cities rose in insurrection against the monopolies by which wicked governors wronged them. Occasionally there fell out quarrels between different provinces, and no method of allaying these could be found excepting war. Once the city of Rio de Janeiro was

1750

A. D.