The strong man was fortunate in having a weak, timid, and indolent monarch, and hardly less fortunate in the fact that the King had a stronger and more attractive brother on whose associates suspicion could easily be cast. It is difficult to-day to ascertain what truth there is in the charge that Dom Pedro aspired to the throne and had the secret support of the Jesuits. King Joseph was not indisposed to believe such a charge, and events soon occurred which gave it plausibility. In 1752 the Portuguese proposed to cede Sacramento to Spain in return for a part of Paraguay in which the Jesuits had seven of their profitable "reductions," and, when the troops went to enforce the change of frontiers, the pupils of the Jesuits made a sanguinary resistance. It is possible to quote letters in which the Jesuits advised submission, but a _secret_ letter from one of the leading Spanish Jesuits to the American fathers was intercepted and was found to advise resistance. Further troops were sent, the Jesuits and their pupils were expelled, and Pombal drew up and circulated a memoir on the action of the Jesuits and the virtual slavery which they maintained in the reductions. Their monopoly of trade with the natives was abrogated, and Pombal was interested in a company which sought to secure the trade. The Jesuits fiercely attacked this change, and two members of the Society were exiled. For a time the campaign of Pombal was then arrested by the appalling earthquake which devastated Lisbon in the year 1755. The timid and superstitious King was undecided as to the nature of the omen. At first, when it was found that Pombal's house had been spared while seven Jesuit houses had been wrecked, he was disposed to see in the catastrophe a punishment of the sins of the Jesuits; but those artful casuists easily persuaded the country that the only new event in the life of Portugal to account for this outpour of divine wrath was the persecution of the Society, and their zeal in succouring the homeless earned for them a great deal of sympathy. The exiled Jesuits were recalled, and they seemed to recover all the ground they had lost in the preceding ten years.