On many occasions, notably in the time of Cardenas, the Jesuits openly withstood all slavery, and amongst the concessions that Ruiz Montoya obtained from the King of Spain was one declaring all the Indians to be free.[220] If more examples of the hatred that their attitude on slavery called forth were wanting, it is to be remembered that in 1640, when Montoya and Taño returned from Spain, and affixed the edict of the Pope on the church doors in Piritinanga, threatening with excommunication all slave-holders, a cry of robbery went forth, and the Jesuits were banished from the town. But in this matter of slavery there is no saying what view any one given man will take upon it when he finds himself in such a country as America was during the time the Jesuits were in Paraguay. Don Felix de Azara, a liberal and a philosopher, a man of science, and who has left us perhaps the best description both of Paraguay and of the River Plate, written in the eighteenth century, yet was a partisan of slavery.[221] In a most curious passage for a Liberal philosopher, he says:[222] ‘The Court ordered Don Francisco, Judge of the High Court of Charcas, to go to Peru in the character of visitor. The first measure which he took, in 1612, was to order that in future no one should go to the Indians’ houses with the pretext of reducing them (_i.e._, to civilization), and that no _encomiendas_ (fiefs) should be given of the kind we have explained—that is to say, with personal service (of the Indians). I cannot understand on what he could have founded a measure so politically absurd; but as that judge favoured the _ideas of the Jesuits_, it is suspected that they dictated his conduct.’ What stronger testimony (coming from such a man) could possibly be found, both that the Jesuits were opposed to the enslaving of the Indians and that their opposition rendered them unpopular? In the same way, no doubt, some modern, unwise philosopher, writing in Brussels, would uphold the slavery and massacres in Belgian Africa as evidences of a wise policy, because the end condones the means, and in the future, when progress has had time to fructify, there will be workhouses dotted all up and down the Congo, and every ‘native’ will be forced to supply himself, at but a trifle above the cost in Belgium, with a sufficiency of comfortable and thoroughly well-seasoned wooden shoes. So it appears that the aforesaid were the two chief reasons which made the Jesuits unpopular with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay. But in addition it should be remembered that there were in that country members of almost all the other religious Orders, and that, as nearly every one of them had quarrelled with the Jesuits in Europe, or at the best were jealous of their power, the enmities begun in Europe were transmitted to the New World, and constantly fanned by reports of the quarrels which went on between the various Orders all through Europe, and especially in Rome.