composed of portions of a tribe under a chief to whom the Spaniards gave
the position of Alcalde. In the towns thus formed only the men
between eighteen and fifty were liable to be drawn for service in the mines;
originally their term of service was for only two months in the year,
and for the remaining ten months they were in theory as free
as were the Spanish settlers. By 1612 the abuses of their system
had so diminished the number of the Indians that Don Francisco de Alfaro
was named by the Spanish Government to report upon it,
and to reform abuses where he found it possible. His report declared
that the Guaranis and Guaycurus should not be made slaves of,
and it abolished in their favour the forced labour which they had
previously endured. The European settlers in Asuncion thought
that this was owing to the influence of the Jesuits, and therefore
they expelled them from the town. Recalled to Santiago,
they founded there a college, and those who remained in Paraguay
pushed on the mission-work. Brabo*2* points out that
the first twenty reductions founded by the Company of Jesus were settled
in the first twenty years from their first appearance in the land,*3*
and that from the foundation of the Mission of St. George
(the last established of the first twenty towns) to that of San Joaquim,
in the wild forests of the Taruma, they employed a hundred and twelve years.
In the interval they chiefly occupied themselves in the consolidation
of their first settlements, and in various unsuccessful attempts
to institute similar reductions amongst the Indians of the Chaco
across the Paraguay.

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*1* `Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en
las Islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano', decad. v., lib. x., cap. lxxx.
*2* `Inventarios de los bienes hallados a/ la Expulsion de los Jesuitas'