Spanish possession in America. To all the others Spanish women
seem to have gone in greater or in smaller numbers. To Paraguay,
at the foundation of Asuncion, it seems that hardly any women went.

--
* Thus it will be seen that the Franciscans were at work in the country
long before the arrival of the Jesuits. It may be on this account
that they became such bitter enemies of the later comers.
--

So there a different state of society arose to that, for example,
in Chile or in Mexico. In both those countries few Spaniards ever married
native women. Those who did so were either members of the highest class
-- who sometimes, but rarely, married Indian women of position
from motives of policy -- or else the lowest class of Spaniards;
in this case, after a generation, their children became
practically Indians. In Paraguay it was quite the contrary,
and the grandchildren of Indian mothers and Spanish fathers
were almost reckoned Spaniards, and the next generation always so.

Washburne, in his `History of Paraguay' (p. 32, cap. i., vol. i.),
points out the contrast between the effects of the treatment meted out
by Penn to the Indians in Pennsylvania and that by Irala in Paraguay.
Where, he asks, are the Indian tribes with whom the celebrated Quaker treated?
In Paraguay, on the other hand, at least in the time when Washburne
was Minister from the United States to Lopez (from 1861 to 1868),
the few remaining Paraguayans of the upper class were almost all descended
from the intermarriages of the followers of Irala with the natives.

The tyranny of Lopez, and the effects of the disastrous war