As he advanced from town to town, the priests, on his arrival at each place, although living in the midst of Indians, some of whom were armed, and many of whom had served the King of Spain in various wars, and all of whom looked on the Jesuits almost as gods, came out and peacefully gave up the keys of all their houses, and submitted quietly to be made prisoners and be carried off in chains from the territories which they and their order had civilized and ruled over almost two hundred years. Seventy-eight Jesuits and their provincials were sent prisoners to Buenos Ayres, and their places all filled up with other priests taken from different Orders, and none of whom had any experience in mission-work. As Dean Funes tartly writes, the miracle that Bucareli wished, but scarcely dared to hope for, had taken place. The Jesuits, in Paraguay, at least, by their conduct in their last public act, most amply vindicated their loyalty to the Spanish crown. Nothing would have been easier, depleted as the viceroyalty was at the time of troops,[320] than to have defied the forces which Bucareli had at his disposal, and to have set up a Jesuit State, which would have taxed the utmost resources of the Spanish crown to overcome. No doubt the very facility with which Bucareli carried out his plans confirmed him in his own mind of their expediency, for men in general are prone to think that right which they accomplish with success. However, be that as it may, he returned in triumph to Buenos Ayres on September 16, having expended in his expedition less than four months. So in a quarter of a year the Jesuits, after more than two hundred years of rule, were all expelled from Paraguay. They made no fight, nor offered any resistance, letting themselves be taken as a butcher takes a sheep, and that surrounded as they were by a population of upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, cut off by countless leagues from the outside world, defended on three sides by virgin forests and by marshes hardly passable to European troops. One word from the Provincial would have set the missions in a blaze. A word would have brought clouds of horsemen—badly armed, ’tis true, but knowing every foot of marsh and forest, all the deep-beaten tracks which wind in the red earth across the lonely plains, the passes of the rivers, springs, natural fastnesses, and having the varied knowledge of a country which of old made Border horsemen and Northumbrian prickers formidable upon the Scottish marches—into the field.