derable prosperity. The
missionary padres, backed by a little soldier help from the Spanish
Government, were more able to control their Indian converts, and compel
them to work--so that a certain amount of prosperity was visible in the
mission settlements, and some of them had even attained to a degree of
wealth. This, however, was but an apparent civilisation; and its
benefits only extended to the monks themselves. The Indian neophytes
were in no way bettered by the wealth they created. Their condition was
one of pure slavery--the monks being their masters, and very often hard
taskmasters they proved themselves--living in fine conventual style upon
the sweat and labour of their brown-skinned converts. The only return
made by them to the Indians was to teach the latter those trades, by the
practice of which they themselves might be benefited, and that was their
sole motive for civilising them. On the other hand, instead of
endeavouring to cultivate their intellectual nature, they strove in
every way to restrain it--inculcating those doctrines of duty and
obedience, so popular among the priests and princes of the world. They
taught them a religion of the lips, and not of the heart--a religion of
mere idle ceremonies, of the most showy kind; and above all a religion,
whose every observance required to be paid for by toll and tithe. In
this manner they continued to filch from the poor aboriginal every hour
of his work--and keep him to all intents and purposes an abject slave.
No wonder, that when the Spanish power declined, and the soldier could
no longer be spared to secure the authority of the priest--no wonder
that the whole system gave way, and the missions of Spanish America--
from California to the Patagonian plains--sank into decay. Hundreds of
these establishments have been altogether abandoned--their pseudo
converts having returned once more to the savage state--and the ruins of
convents and churches alone remain to attest that they ever existed.
Those still in existence exhibit the mere remnants of their former
prosperity, and are only kept together by the exertions of the monks
themselves--backed by a slight thread of authority, which they derive
from the superstitions they have been able to inculcate. In fact, in
the missions now existing, the monks have no other power than that which
they wield through the terrors of the Church; and in most cases, these
_padres_ constitute a sort of hierarch chieftainc