‘No storm is so insidious’ (said St. Ignatius) ‘as a perfect calm, and no enemy so dangerous as the absence of all enemies.’ This dangerous state of calm without an apparent enemy in sight was the position of the Jesuits in Paraguay in 1761. By desperate efforts and intrigues in Spain they had kept their thirty missions from being mutilated; their influence amongst the Indians had never been more absolute. The governors of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay had tried a fall with them, and the honours of the struggle were with the Jesuits. They had succeeded in getting put into force the clauses of the ‘Laws of the Indies’, which kept Spaniards out of the Indian settlements. Even those sent against them had been forced to testify to their utility[303] in Paraguay. But throughout Spain and her enormous empire in America and in the East perpetual hostility between the Jesuits and the regular clergy had been going on for years. In every portion of America the Jesuits were unpopular, the excuse alleged being their wealth and power;[304] but the real reason was their attitude on slavery. After repeated grumblings of distant thunder, at length the storm broke, and the decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Spain and her dominions was signed, and the order sent to Bucareli, Governor of Buenos Ayres, in June of 1767, to put it into force in Paraguay. The reasons which induced King Charles III. to expel the Jesuits, mysterious as they were, and locked up a dead secret in the royal breast,[305] may or may not have been sufficient in Spain, but could in no respect have held good for Paraguay, where there existed little scope for court intrigue, and where the Jesuits were far removed from their fellow Spanish subjects, and occupied entirely with their mission work. Many and various have been the explanations which historians have set forth for this decree. Certain it is in Spain this Order had attained to considerable power, and that in Rome the abler of their Generals occasionally kept the Popes in mental servitude. Some have accounted for the act of Charles III. as being but revenge for the tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,[306] arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it was but the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his brother Don Luis upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas. Others, again, have stated[307] that the Jesuits set about a calumny that Charles III. was not the Queen’s son by her husband, but by a lover whom they said she had. The only reason which seems feasible is that the King was worked on by the fear that the Order had risen to too much power, and that if he did not at once take steps the monarchy would be rendered but a mere appendage of the General of the Jesuits.[308]