UP THE PARAGUAY 57 



or less considerable minority will best be met by the es- 

 tablishment 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, ob- 

 ligatory, 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 impor- 

 tance of the ethical and spiritual, the truly religious, ele- 

 ment 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 break- 

 fast — on Colonel Rondon's boat. Caymans were becom- 

 ing 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 



