xiety about the provision of his family. His
judgment in the portioning and disposing of his property is never called
forth; all the qualities and virtues that arise out of the practice of
domestic economy lie dormant, and the man remains an infant. It would
have been easy to remedy this, by allowing the Indians to possess
private stock, and to provide for their own families after the first
generation. The newly reclaimed did require to be provided for, but the
children growing up in the Aldeas might have been intrusted with their
own property. They would have become men; and when the removal of their
spiritual fathers took place, that wide and deep desolation would not
have overwhelmed them, nor would Paraguay have gone back as it has done
towards a savage state.

The Jesuits of Brazil were expelled in 1760, in the most cruel and
arbitrary manner. Those of the Spanish American colonies eight years
later. Whatever might have been their faults, or even their crimes, in
other countries, in these their conduct had been exemplary. They had
been the protectors of a persecuted race, the advocates of mercy, the
founders of civilisation; and their patience under their unmerited
sufferings forms not the least honourable trait in their character.

The history of Brazil, for the next thirty years, is composed of the
mismanagement and decay of the Jesuit establishments; the enlargement of
the mining districts, particularly in the direction of Mato Grosso; some
disputes with the French on the frontier of Cayenne; and the more
peaceful occupations of opening roads, and the introduction of new
branches of commerce, and the improvement of the old.

This tranquillity was for a moment interrupted by a conspiracy in the
province of Minas Geraes, headed by an officer named Joaquim Jose de
Silva Xavier, commonly called Tiradentes. The project of the
conspirators was to form an independent republic in Minas, and, if
possible, to induce Rio de Janeiro to unite with it. But their measures
were most inadequate for the end proposed, and their conduct so
imprudent, that, although there was a pretty general feeling of
discontent on account of the taxes and some other grievances, the
conspirators were all seized before they had formed anything like a
party capable of resistance, much less of beginning the meditated
revolution.

The direct effects upon Brazil of the first thirteen years of the
revolutionary war in Europe were confined to some sl