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[4] 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 Guaranís 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.