The world, it would appear, is a vast class-room, and its Creator but a professor of political economy, apparently unable to carry out his theories with effect. Therefore, to us, the Western Europeans, he has turned for help, and upon us devolved the task of extirpating all those peoples upon whom he tried his ’prentice hand. On us he laid injunctions to increase at home, and to the happier portions of the world to carry death under the guise of life unsuitable to those into whose lands we spread. Let those made cruel by the want of sympathy with men that the mere poring over books so often superinduces in the mind protest when judging of the Jesuits in Paraguay against the outrage done to their theories by the scheme the Jesuits pursued. It has been nobly said[350] ‘that the extinction of the smallest animal is a far greater loss than if the works of all the Greeks had perished.’ How much the greater loss that of a type of man such as the Indians, whom the semi-communistic Jesuit government successfully preserved, sheltering them from the death-dealing breath of our cold northern life and its full, fell effects! There are those, no doubt, who think that a tree brought from the tropics should be planted out at home, to take its chance of life in the keen winter of the north, in holy competition with the ash and oak; and if it dies, there are still pines enough, with stores of dogwood, thickets of elder, and a wilderness of junipers. They may be right; but, after all, that which has felt the tropic sun is for the tropics, and to grow under the tantalizing sunshine of the north, which lights but does not warm, it must have glass, and shelter from the cold. But of aforethought to deliberately transplant our fogs and chilling atmosphere, and so to nip and kill plants which crave only the sun to live, that is a crime against humanity; a crime posterity with execration will one day taunt us with, and hold us up to execration, as we to-day in our hypocrisy piously curse the memories of Pizarro and Cortés. In the eternal warfare between those who think that progress—which to them means tramways and electric light—is preferable to a quiet life of futile happiness of mind there is scant truce, so that my readers have to take their choice whether to side with Funes or Azara in judging of the Jesuits’ rule in Paraguay. There is no middle course between the old and new; no halting-place; no chink in which imagination can drive in its nail to stop the wheels of time; therefore, no doubt, the Jesuit commonwealth was doomed to disappear. But for myself, I am glad that five-and-twenty years ago I saw the Indians who still lingered about the ruined mission towns, mumbling their maiméd rites when the Angelus at eventide awoke the echoes of the encroaching woods, whilst screeching crowds of parrots and macaws hovered around the date-palms which in the plaza reared their slender heads, silent memorials of the departed Jesuits’ rule.