Such is a sketch of the civil government of the Reductions, and of the kind of life led by the inhabitants. Objections and reproaches, and perhaps not always unfounded, have been raised against such a system. It has been said that the inhabitants of the Reductions were low and abject slaves, led on by the scourge, deprived even of the faculty of thinking, and confined in a perpetual imprisonment, though within a large space. Quinet, with perhaps more eloquence than reason, exclaims, “Are we sure that it (Paraguay) contains the germ of a great empire? Where is the sign of life? Everywhere else, indeed, one hears at least the squalling of the child in the cradle; here, I greatly fear, I confess, that so much silence prevailing in the same place for three ages, is but a bad sign, and that the regime which can so quietly enervate virgin nature, cannot be any other than that which develops Guatmozen and Montezuma.” All this is very well said, and may be in part true. Doubtless, these people were kept in perpetual infancy. Doubtless, nothing great, nothing of a creating stamp, must be expected from them. Doubtless, they did not develop and expand the new element of life imparted to them, as other nations have done who were more left to themselves; nor did they exercise the noblest part of their nature—the intelligence—in that pursuit for which we think man was created—the search after truth. But surely there are nations who have been placed in worse circumstances, and subjected to more disastrous influences, and more deserving our pity and commiseration. Thus, if a nation, that has, through the free exercise of all its faculties and activities, arrived at a high state of civilisation and refinement, should be at once crushed, as France is at the present moment, under the iron hand of despotism, that people would be really miserable, and such doleful lamentations as those of the eloquent ex-professor of the College of France would not in this case be misplaced. But these Americans, who knew nothing of the pleasures of moral and intellectual refinement but what was presented to them by their instructors, and found therein contentment, we do not know how far they deserve to be pitied. Were these people, we ask in our turn, less happy or more miserable than those tens of thousands who wallow in vices of all sorts in the free and civilised towns of Paris and London? Are, then, squalid poverty, the groans of the oppressed, and reckless sensuality, necessary elements of national happiness? These are questions which in our opinion deserve some consideration; and although we think the human race has been destined by the Creator to greater and nobler purposes than the mere enjoyment of a material life; and although we know that humanity must progress in its career, and that this progress cannot be attained without great commotion and great evil, nevertheless, when we contemplate all the miseries which surround our state of civilisation,