It is the fashion of some to say that history, of whatever nature, can but be written dispassionately at a period sufficiently removed from the events of which it treats to have allowed the heat of passion to evaporate. This is as false as almost every other dictum which men take on trust, forgetting that to have passed into the proverbial stage a saying must have been foolish at the start, in order that it should have got itself commended by the majority of mankind. The heat of passion never evaporates in regard to events which at the epoch of their acting caused great controversies. From writings of contemporaries the coolest-headed take a bias, in the same way that men unconsciously pass on the microbes of disease to their best friends. Only from inventories and rolls of court, State Papers and the like is it possible to get unbiassed matter, and even then figures, those chief deceivers of mankind, can be well cooked for or against, according to the bias of the man who draws them up. Still, when they are drawn up by enemies, they often quite unwittingly show out the truth. In a letter dated October 30, 1768, Bucareli sends a list to Aranda of the effects of many of the Jesuits taken from Paraguay and sent by him to Spain. The list itself speaks volumes in defence of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Whatever may have been their faults, the Governor himself (or even Charles III.) could not have charged upon the captured priests that they had got together a large stock of property during their mission life.[341] The first upon the list, P. Pedro Zabaleta, took ten shirts, two pillow-cases, two sheets, three pocket-handkerchiefs, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of socks, and a pound and a half of snuff. The others were in general less well set up with shirts,[342] some few had cloaks, and one (P. Sigismundo Griera) a nightcap; but all of them had their snuff, the only relic of their luxurious mission life. Manuel Vergara, their Provincial, testifies in a paper sent with the list that most of the clothes were taken from the common stock, and all the snuff. What sort of treatment they endured upon their passage in the two frigates _San Fernando_ and _San Nicolas_ is quite unknown, but certainly their luggage could not have been in the way; and for their snuff, no doubt they husbanded it with care during the long two months, which in those days was thought a record run.[343] In the missions which they had so long tended with such care, giving their muddle-headed love to the Indians in their Machiavelian way, all was confusion in the space of six short months. Dean Funes and Don Feliz de Azara[344] are the only two contemporary writers who treat of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay outside the official world. The Dean, a man of the old school, was kindly and humane, well educated, and, having been brought up in Tucuman amongst an Indian population, looked on the Indians in a kindly way as fellow-creatures, though differing in essential points from