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 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, and stilts, skimmers, and clouds of beautiful swaying terns in the foreground.  About noon we passed the highest point which the old Spanish conquistadores and explorers, Irala and Ayolas, had reached in the course of their marvellous journeys in the first half of the sixteenth century—­at a time when there was not a settlement in what is now the United States, and when hardly a single English sea captain had ventured so much as to cross the Atlantic.

By the following day the country on the east bank had become a vast marshy plain dotted here and there by tree-clad patches of higher land.  The morning was rainy; a contrast to the fine weather we had hitherto encountered.  We passed wood-yards and cattle-ranches.  At one of the latter the owner, an Argentine of Irish parentage, who still spoke English with the accent of the land of his parents’ nativity, remarked