Leaving upon one side their system of administration, and discounting their unalterable perseverance, there were two things on which the Jesuits appealed to the Indians; and those two things, by the very nature of their knowledge of mankind, they knew appealed as much to Indians as to any other race of men. Firstly (and in this writers opposed to them, as Brabo[224] and Azara,[225] both agree), they instilled into the Indians that the land on which they lived, with missions, churches, herds, flocks, and the rest, was their own property. And in the second place they told them they were free, and that they had the King of Spain’s own edict in confirmation of their freedom, so that they never could be slaves. Neither of these two propositions commends itself to many writers on the Jesuits in Paraguay, but for all that it seems to me that in themselves they were sufficient to account for the firm hold the Jesuits had on their neophytes. The freedom which the Indians enjoyed under the Jesuit rule might not have seemed excessive to modern minds and those attuned to the mild rule of the Europeans of to-day in Africa. Such as it was, it seemed sufficient to the Guaranís, and even, in a limited degree, placed them above the Indians of the Spanish settlements, who for the most part passed their lives in slavery. Chapter VIII Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled state of affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal power—He refuses, and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated and condemned to be executed—He is shot on his way to the scaffold—Renewed hatred against the Jesuits—Their labours among the Indians of the Chaco From the departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon period of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went on in the missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The people passed their time in their semi-communistic labour, sweetened by constant prayer; their pastors may or may not have done all that was possible to instruct them in the science of the time; but, still, the Indian population did not decrease, as it was observed to do from year to year in other countries of America and in the Spanish settlements in Paraguay.[226] During this period the Jesuits had made repeated efforts, but without much real success, to establish missions amongst the wild equestrian tribes in the Gran Chaco upon the western bank of the river Paraguay. Nothing, apparently, pointed to the events which, beginning in the year 1721, finally led to their expulsion, or, at least, furnished additional reasons to King Charles III. to include the Jesuits in Paraguay in the general expulsion of their order from the dominions of the Spanish crown.