eterodox of the absolute need of a church. I earnestly wish that
there could be such an increase in the personnel and equipment of the
Catholic Church in South America as to permit the establishment of one
good and earnest priest in every village or little community in the
far interior. Nor is there any inconsistency between this wish and the
further wish that there could be a marked extension and development of
the native Protestant churches, such as I saw established here and
there in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, and of the Y. M. C.
Associations. The bulk of these good people who profess religion will
continue to be Catholics, but the spiritual needs of a more or less
considerable minority will best be met by the establishment of
Protestant churches, or in places even of a Positivist Church or
Ethical Culture Society. Not only is the establishment of such
churches a good thing for the body politic as a whole, but a good
thing for the Catholic Church itself; for their presence is a constant
spur to activity and clean and honorable conduct, and a constant
reflection on sloth and moral laxity. The government in each of these
commonwealths is doing everything possible to further the cause of
education, and the tendency is to treat education as peculiarly a
function of government and to make it, where the government acts, non-
sectarian, obligatory, and free--a cardinal doctrine of our own great
democracy, to which we are committed by every principle of sound
Americanism. There must be absolute religious liberty, for tyranny and
intolerance are as abhorrent in matters intellectual and spiritual as
in matters political and material; and more and more we must all
realize that conduct is of infinitely greater importance than dogma.
But no democracy can afford to overlook the vital importance of the
ethical and spiritual, the truly religious, element in life; and in
practice the average good man grows clearly to understand this, and to
express the need in concrete form by saying that no community can make
much headway if it does not contain both a church and a school.

We took breakfast--the eleven-o'clock Brazilian breakfast--on Colonel
Rondon's boat. Caymans were becoming more plentiful. The ugly brutes
lay on the sand-flats and mud-banks like logs, always with the head
raised, sometimes with the jaws open. They are often dangerous to
domestic animals, and are always destructive to fish, and it is good
to shoot them. I ki