Arandía's most popular act of government was the expulsion of the Chinese from the provinces, and in large part from the city. They seem to have had in their hands then, perhaps even more than now, the commerce or small trade between Manila and provincial towns. To take over this trade, Arandía founded a commercial company of Spaniards and mestizos, which lasted only for a year. The Christianized Chinese were allowed to remain under license, and for those having shops in Manila Arandía founded the Alcayceria of San Fernando. It consisted of a great square of shops built about an open interior. It stood in Binondo, on the present Calle de San Fernando, in what is still a populous Chinese quarter. Death of Arandía and Decline of the Colony.--Arandía died in May, 1759, and the government was assumed by the bishop of Cebu, who in turn was forced from his position by the arrival of the archbishop of Manila, Don Manuel Rojo. The archbishop revoked the celebrated orders of good government which Arandía had put into force, and the colony promised to relapse once more into its customary dormant condition. This was, however, prevented by an event which brought to an end the long period of obscurity and inertia under which the colony had been gradually decaying, and introduced, in a way, a new period of its history. This was the capture of the Philippine Islands by the British in 1762. CHAPTER XI. THE PHILIPPINES DURING THE PERIOD OF EUROPEAN REVOLUTION. 1762-1837. The New Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century.--The middle of the eighteenth century in Europe was a time when ideas were greatly liberalized. A philosophy became current which professed to look for its authority not to churches or hereditary custom and privilege, but to the laws of God as they are revealed in the natural world. Men taught that if we could only follow nature we could not do wrong. "Natural law" became the basis for a great amount of political and social discussion and the theoretical foundation of many social rights. The savage, ungoverned man was by many European philosophers and writers supposed to live a freer, more wholesome and more natural life than the man who is bound by the conventions of society and the laws of state. Most of this reasoning we now know to be scientifically untrue. The savage and the hermit are not, in actual fact, types of human happiness and freedom. Ideal life for man is found only in governed society, where there is order and protection, and where also should be freedom of opportunity. But to the people of the eighteenth century, and especially to the scholars of France, where the government was monarchical and oppressive, and where the people were terribly burdened by the aristocracy, this teaching was welcomed as a new gospel. Nor was it devoid of grand and noble ideas--ideas which, carried out in a conservative way, might have bettered society.