Bucareli, on receipt of the first of these simple documents, sent it to Spain, with the ridiculous announcement that he considered it as the forerunner of a rising in favour of the Jesuits, and had, in consequence, ordered a chosen body of troops to proceed immediately from Paraguay and Corrientes to the neighbourhood of the Missions to be in readiness to put down the expected insurrection: thither too he proceeded himself to take the field in person against the rebels. He found them not in arms but in tears:--the Jesuits, though he could not believe it, had brought up the Indians in obedience, and in the love of their King as well as of God,--and, having said their say, they resigned themselves submissively to the orders of their newly-appointed superiors,--giving thanks to the King for having sent a personage of such importance as Bucareli to take care of them. Bucareli met, in fact, with not the slightest opposition from the Indians, in substituting his own system of administration for that of the Jesuits, which he had been amongst the foremost to find fault with. The efficacy of his own measures may be judged by their result:--he sent them civil governors, and appointed Franciscan friars for their spiritual pastors:--the misrule of the first, and the little respect inspired by the latter, compared with the uniformly exemplary lives of their predecessors, brought about in little more than a quarter of a century, the entire ruin and depopulation of these once happy and prosperous communities. The Indians, as they themselves predicted in their letter to him, when there was no longer sufficient wisdom in their governors to prevent it, were lost both to God and the King. In saying this I do not pretend to dispute that the institutions of the Jesuits were not, in many points, defective, like all others of man's creation; they were, however, framed under very remarkable and novel circumstances, for which great allowances must be made in any comparison of them with the social systems of Europe; if we look at the good they did, rather than for the evil which they did not, we shall find that, in the course of about a century and a half, upwards of a million of Indians were made Christians by them, and taught to be happy and contented under the mild and peaceful rule of their enlightened and admirable pastors,--a blessed lot compared with the savage condition of the unreclaimed tribes around them. PARAGUAY, strictly speaking, has no place in this book, being, as it is for the present, a distinct and separate Republic; but, like the Missions, it is impossible to pass so near it without some allusion to its former prosperity, and to its present very singular condition under the despotic rule of Dr. Francia.