This unjust sentence was not carried out, probably from a fear that the Pope would seriously question the jurisdiction of the civic authorities, but the plight of the Jesuits was lamentable. It was in Portugal that they had first attained power and wealth, and they had enjoyed an almost uninterrupted dominion for two centuries; now they lay on straw in the common jails, or tremblingly discussed the dark future in their overcrowded residences. On the first day of September the sentence of expulsion was enforced. The younger Jesuits were offered a dispensation from their vows by Cardinal Saldanha, but few accepted it, and the majority of them were put on ship and conveyed to the Pope's dominions. Pombal was cruel and unjust to the end in the realisation of his design; it is possible that he feared their later activity on foreign soil. There may be some exaggeration in the stories of their hardships, and indeed such a sentence could not be carried out without hardship, but one cannot defend his action in keeping 221 of the Jesuits in the jails of Portugal. One of them, Father Malagrida, an old man of seventy-two, seems to have been a little deranged by his imprisonment, and certain works which he wrote in prison were submitted to the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burned alive by the very tribunal which the Jesuits had been instrumental in establishing in Portugal. Of the 200 Jesuits, 88 died in jail, and the rest lingered in their humiliating captivity until the death of Joseph I. and dismissal of Pombal in 1777. By that time their Society had ceased to exist. Such was the tragic issue of Jesuit history in the land which they had been accustomed to regard as the safest and most generous country in which they had taken root. However severely we may censure the detailed procedure of the Marquis de Pombal, his action was in substance just and patriotic. Portugal, which, in the sixteenth century, had promised to become one of the greatest powers in the world, had sunk to a humiliating depth, and its decay had proceeded apace with the power of political Jesuits. They were incapable of a patriotic conception of the task of governing, and they took advantage of and encouraged the economic folly of living on overburdened colonies. If they were unwilling to discharge the proper duties of priests and refrain from intrigue for political power, they must depart.