It is thus that the Jesuits have acquired in Paraguai a monarchical authority, founded, it is said, on persuasion alone, and, on the lenity of their government: sovereigns in that vast country, they render happy, it is assured, the people there who obey them, and whom they have at last effectually subjected to them without employing violence. The care with which they exclude strangers, prevents our knowing the particulars of this singular administration; but the little which has been discovered of it, speaks its praise, and would render it perhaps to be desired, if the relations be faithful, that many other barbarous countries, where the people are oppressed and unhappy, had had, as well as Paraguai, Jesuits for apostles and masters. If they had found in Europe as few obstacles to their domination, as in that vast country of America, it is to be believed that they would rule there at this day with the same empire: France, and the states into which philosophy has penetrated for the happiness of mankind, would without doubt have lost greatly thereby; but some other nations perhaps would not have been more to be pityed for it. The people know but one thing only, the wants of nature, and the necessity of satisfying them; the moment they are by their situation sheltered from misery and suffering, they are content and happy: liberty is a good which is not made for them, of which they know not the advantage, and which they possess not but to abuse it to their own prejudice; they are children who fall down and hurt themselves the moment they are left to go alone, and who get up again only to beat their nurse; they must be well fed, kept employed without crushing them, and led without suffering them to see too plainly their chains. “This (say they) is what the Jesuits do in Paraguai; this probably is what they would have done every where else, if the world had been disposed to permit them.” But in Europe, where they had already so many masters, they did not think proper to suffer any new ones: this resistance, tho’ so natural, irritated the Jesuits, and rendered them wicked: they made those nations, which refused their yoke, feel all the evils which those nations endeavoured to inflict on them: useful and respectable in Paraguai, where they found only docility and gentleness, they became dangerous and turbulent in Europe, where they met with dispositions a little different; and it is not without reason it has been said of them, that seeing they did so much good in a corner of America, and so much ill elsewhere, it was necessary therefore to send them all to the only place where they were not hurtful, and to purge the rest of the earth of them.