Buenos-Ayres y Tucuman', por Dr. Don Gregorio Funes, Buenos Ayres, 1816.
--

In the vast forests, stretching to the Salto de Guayra,
a few scattered tribes, known as Caaguas, roamed through the thickets,
or encamped upon the streams. In the thirty towns,
once full of life and stir, in every one of which there was a church,
finer, as an old Spanish writer says, than any in Buenos Ayres,
there was naught but desolation and despair. The Indians either
had returned into the woods, been killed in the ceaseless revolutionary wars,
or had been absorbed into the Gaucho populations of Corrientes, Rio Grande,
Entre Rios, and of Santa Fe.

It may be that all Indian races are destined to disappear
if they come into contact with Europeans; certainly, experience would seem
to confirm the supposition. The policy of the Jesuits, however,
was based on isolation of their missions, and how this might have worked
is matter at least for speculation. It was on account of the isolation
which they practised that it was possible for the extravagant calumnies
which were circulated as to their rule and riches to gain belief.
It was on account of isolation that the first conflicts arose
betwixt them and the authorities, both clerical and lay. That the Jesuits
were more highly esteemed than the other religious orders in Spanish America
in the seventeenth century, the saying current in those days,
`Los demas van a/ un~a, los Jesuitas a/ una' -- i.e., The others get
all they can, but the Jesuits have one aim (the conversion of the Indians) --
seems to show.

It is not my purpose to deal with the probable reasons
which induced their expulsion in Europe. Suffice it to say that,