Having Heard Much Concerning The Moralite Of The People, I Asked
The Maid At A Respectable Private House Where I Was Staying:
"Have
you a father?" "No, sir," she answered, "we Paraguayans are not
accustomed to have a father." Children of
Five or six, when asked
about that parent, will often answer, "Father died in the war." The
war ended thirty-nine years ago, but they have been taught to say
this by the mother.
As in Argentina the first word the stranger learns is manana (to-
morrow), so here the first is dy-qui (I don't know). Whatever
question you ask the Guarani, he will almost invariably answer, "Dy-
qui." Ask him his age, he answers "Dy-qui" To your question: "Are
you twenty or one hundred and twenty?" he will reply "Dy-qui."
Through the long rule of the Jesuits the natives stopped thinking;
they had it all done for them. "At the same time that they enslaved
them, they tortured them into the profession of the religion they had
imported; and as they had seen that in the old land the love of this
world and the deceitfulness of riches were ever in the way of
conversion to the true faith, they piously relieved the Indians of
these snares of the soul, even going so far in the discharge of this
painful duty as to relieve them of life at the same time, if
necessary to get their possessions into their own hands," [Footnote:
Robertson's "Letters on Paraguay."]
"The stories of their hardness, and perfidy, and immorality beggar
description.
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