At the close of the eighteenth century, all the governments of Catholic Europe were aroused with jealousy and suspicious hatred against the Jesuits. The society, organized primarily for missionary labor, had gradually taken on much of a secular character. The society was distinguished, as we have seen in its history in the Philippines, by men with great capacity and liking for what we may call practical affairs as distinguished from purely religious or devotional life. The Jesuits were not alone missionaries and orthodox educators, but they were scientists, geographers, financiers, and powerful and almost independent administrators among heathen peoples. They had engaged so extensively and shrewdly in trade that their estates, warehouses, and exchanges bound together the fruitful fields of colonial provinces with the busy marts and money-centers of Europe. Their wealth was believed to be enormous. Properly invested and carefully guarded, it was rapidly increasing. What, however, made the order exasperating alike to rulers and peoples were the powerful political intrigues in which members of the order engaged. Strong and masterful men themselves, the field of state affairs was irresistibly attractive. Their enemies charged that they were unscrupulous in the means which they employed to accomplish political ends. It is quite certain that the Jesuits were not patriotic in their purposes or plans. They were an international corporation; their members belonged to no one nation; to them the Society was greater and more worthy of devotion than any state, in which they themselves lived and worked. Dissolution of the Society of Jesus.--Europe had, however, reached the belief, to which it adheres today, that a man must be true to the country in which he lives and finds shelter and protection and in which he ranks as a political member, or else incur odium and punishment. Thus it was their indifference to national feeling that brought about the ruin of the Jesuits. It is significant that the rulers, the most devoted to Catholicism, followed one another in decreeing their expulsion from their dominions. In 1759 they were expelled from Portugal, in 1764 from France, and April 2, 1767, the decree of confiscation and banishment from Spain and all Spanish possessions was issued by King Carlos III. Within a year thereafter, the two most powerful princes of Italy, the king of Naples and the Duke of Parma, followed, and then the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta expelled them from that island. The friends of the order were powerless to withstand this united front of Catholic monarchs, and in July, 1773, Pope Clement XIV. suppressed and dissolved the society, which was not restored until 1814.