All this relatively large population of Indians was ruled, as has been seen, by a quite inconsiderable number of priests, who, not disposing of any European force, and being almost always on bad terms with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay on account of the firm stand they made against the enslaving of the Indians, had no means of coercion at their command. Hence the Indians must have been contented with their rule, for if they had not been so the Jesuits possessed no power to stop them from returning to their savage life. Azara,[213] although in the main an opponent of the Jesuits, in the same way that a ‘good Liberal’ of to-day would oppose anything of a Socialistic tendency, yet has this most significant passage in their favour. After enumerating the amount of taxes paid by the missions to the Crown, he says ‘en faisant le bilan tout se trouvait égal, et s’il y avait quelque excédant, il était en faveur des Jésuites ou des peoplades.’[214] Seldom enough does such a result take place when the balance is struck to-day in any country between the rulers and their ‘taxables’. Following their system of perfect isolation from the world to its logical sequence, the Jesuits surrounded all the territories of their different towns with walls and ditches, and at the gates planted a guard to prevent egress or ingress between the missions and the outer world.[215] Much capital has been made out of this, as it is attempted to be shown that the Indians were thereby treated as prisoners in their own territories. Nothing, however, has been said of the fact that, if the ditches, palisades, and guard-houses kept in the Indians, they also had the effect of keeping the Spaniards out. When men who looked upon the Indians as without reason, and captured them for slaves when it was possible, began to talk of liberty, it looks as if the ‘sacred name of liberty’ was used but as a stalking-horse—as greasy Testaments are used to swear upon in police-courts, when the witness, with his tongue in his cheek, raises his eyes to heaven, and then with fervency imprints a kiss upon his thumb.