Bucareli, as soon as he knew what was going on, advised that all the priests appointed by himself should be replaced by others. This accordingly was done, but it was even then too late: the missions went from bad to worse; of the vast quantities of cattle few were left; the priests followed the example of their prototypes Hofni and Phineas, went about armed, took Indian mistresses, and neglected all religious duties, treating the Indians after the fashion of the Spaniards in the settlements. Thus the Arcadian life, which had subsisted more than two hundred years, in the brief space of two short years was lost. The vast estancias, in which at the expulsion more than a million head of cattle pastured,[347] were but bare plains, in which the cattle that were left had all run wild or perished from neglect. Wild beasts roamed round the outskirts of the half-deserted towns. A dense low scrub of yatais and of palmettos invaded all the pasture-lands, and in the erstwhile cultivated fields rank weeds sprang up, and choked the crops which in the Jesuits’ times had made the mission territories the most productive of the American possessions of the Spanish crown. The churches were unserved, and in the evening air no more the hymns resounded, nor did the long white-robed processions headed by a cross pass to the fields to peaceful labour, marshalled by their priests. The fruit-trees round the missions were either all cut down for firewood or had degenerated, and the plantations of the Ilex Paraguayensis,[348] from which they made their _yerba_, which had been brought from the up-country forests with vast pains, were in decay, and quite uncultivated. The Indian population had almost disappeared within the space of eight-and-twenty years.[349] The Guaranís collected from the woods with so much effort to the missionary, then guided down the Paraná by the most noble and self-sacrificing of their priests, Ruiz Montoya, and after that redeemed with blood from the fierce Mameluco bands, had shrunk away before the baneful breath of unaccustomed contact with the civilizing whites. The simple ceremonious, if perhaps futile, mission-life had withered up at the first touch of vivifying competition—that competition which has made the whole world gray, reducing everything and everyone to the most base and commonest denominator. The self-created goddess Progress was justified by works, and all the land left barren, waiting the time when factories shall pollute its sky, and render miserable the European emigrants, who, flying from their slavery at home, shall have found it waiting for them in their new paradise beyond the seas.