It has, therefore, been quite natural for writers on the Jesuits to emphasise the fact that the countries in which they obtained the greatest control have been the most conspicuous Powers to decay, and the imagination instinctively recalls the picture of some giant of a tropical forest gradually embraced and killed by a parasitic growth. This picture should not be admitted too easily. Art, for instance, has often prospered most luxuriantly when a civilisation was beginning to decay, yet it was assuredly not a parasitic growth accelerating the decay. It is possible that the Jesuits flourished _because_ the nation was decaying, not that the nation decayed because they prospered. The problem requires careful analysis and exact proof. We have seen, however, in the case of Spain and Portugal that, in point of fact, the prosperity of the Society was both economically and politically injurious to those States--that the Jesuits really diverted into their own organisation the wealth and power which should have contributed to the well-being of the State--and we shall find the same situation in Poland and Austria. In Poland, as in Austria, a Jesuit of the time would have contended that the Society justified its wealth and power by its educational work. We saw how the Society overran the country and, by intrigue and violence, captured the function of higher education during the reign of Batori. From that date Poland decayed, with a partial revival under Sobieski. In the long and disastrous reign of Sigismund (1590-1632) the decay was continuous, and the power of the Jesuits sustained. One point is clear; there was a grave lack of virile and unselfish patriotism, and Jesuit teachers were certainly not the men to inspire it. The aim of Jesuit education was to promote the interests of the Church rather than the State, and to their influence most particularly were due the religious quarrels and the coercion of Protestant minorities which distracted the kingdom, brought on it the hostility of Protestant neighbours, and fostered selfish intrigue for power. The reign of Wladislas (1632-48) had the same features, and they were more marked than ever when a Jesuit, the late King's brother, John Casimir, ascended the throne. There was now hardly a wealthy house, a school, or a camp that did not contain its Jesuit. The cause of religion was intensely promoted, but the cause of the country fell lower and lower, and its disastrous and distracted condition compelled the Jesuit monarch to abdicate after four years.