up the Paraguay 59 



reflection on sloth and moral laxity. The government 

 in each of these commonwealths is doing everything pos- 

 sible to further the cause of education, and the tendency 

 is to treat education as peculiarly a function of govern- 

 ment 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 spir- 

 itual, 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 destruc- 

 tive to fish, and it is good to shoot them. I killed half 

 a dozen, and missed nearly as many more — a throbbing 

 boat does not improve one's aim. We passed forests 

 of palms that extended for leagues, and vast marshy 

 meadows, where storks, herons, and ibis were gathered, 

 with flocks of cormorants and darters on the sand-bars. 



