although the Jesuits had had no warning of their expulsion,
and had no time for preparation or for concealment of their gold.
Although they stood to the Indians almost in the light of gods,
and had control of an armed force larger by far than any
which the temporal power could have disposed of, they did not resist,
but silently departed from the rich territories which their care and industry
had formed.

Rightly or wrongly, but according to their lights, they strove to teach
the Indian population all the best part of the European progress of the times
in which they lived, shielding them sedulously from all contact
with commercialism, and standing between them and the Spanish settlers,
who would have treated them as slaves. These were their crimes.
For their ambitions, who shall search the human heart,
or say what their superiors in Europe may, or perhaps may not,
have had in view? When all is said and done, and now their work is over,
and all they worked for lost (as happens usually with the efforts
of disinterested men), what crime so terrible can men commit as to stand up
for near upon two centuries against that slavery which disgraced
every American possession of the Spanish* crown? Nothing is bad enough
for those who dare to speak the truth, and those who put their theories
into practice are a disgrace to progressive and adequately taxed communities.
Nearly two hundred years they strove, and now their territories,
once so populous and so well cultivated, remain, if not a desert,
yet delivered up to that fierce-growing, subtropical American plant life
which seems as if it fights with man for the possession of the land
in which it grows. For a brief period those Guaranis gathered together
in the missions, ruled over by their priests, treated like grown-up children,
yet with a kindness which attached them to their rulers,
enjoyed a half-Arcadian, half-monastic life, reaching to just so much