and if it made them happy -- more happy or less happy
than those Indians who were directly ruled from Spain, or through
the Spanish Governors of the viceroyalties. For theories of advancement,
and as to whether certain arbitrary ideas of the rights of man,
evolved in general by those who in their persons and their lives
are the negation of all rights, I give a fico -- yes, your fig of Spain --
caring as little as did ancient Pistol for `palabras',
and holding that the best right that a man can have is to be happy
after the way that pleases him the most. And that the Jesuits
rendered the Indians happy is certain, though to those men who fudge
a theory of mankind, thinking that everyone is forged upon their anvil,
or run out of their own mould, after the fashion of a tallow dip
(a theory which, indeed, the sameness of mankind renders at times
not quite untenable), it seems absurd because the progress of the world
has gone on other lines -- lines which prolonged indefinitely
would never meet those which the Jesuits drew. All that I know
is I myself, in the deserted missions, five-and-twenty years ago
often have met old men who spoke regretfully of Jesuit times,
who cherished all the customs left by the company, and though they spoke
at secondhand, repeating but the stories they had heard in youth,
kept the illusion that the missions in the Jesuits' time had been a paradise.
Into the matter of the Jesuits' motives I do not propose to enter,
holding that the origin of motives is too deeply seated
to be worth inquiry until one has more information about the human mind
than even modern `scientists' seem able to impart. Yet it is certain
the Jesuits in Paraguay had faith fit to remove all mountains,
as the brief stories of their lives, so often ending with a rude field-cross
by the corner of some forest, and the inscription `hic occissus est'
survive to show. Some men -- such is the complexity of human nature --
have undergone trials and persecutions for base motives,