were sent out to extinguish the usurpation. Negotiations were in the mean time opened between Spain and Portugal relative to an exchange of territory, and troops were ordered to effect the exchange. Measures of this rank were unexpected by the Jesuits. They had reckoned upon the proverbial tardiness of the Peninsular councils; but they were determined not to relinquish their prize without a struggle. They accordingly armed the natives, and prepared for a civil war. The Indians, unwarlike as they have always been, now headed by their Jesuit captains, outmanoeuvred the invaders. The expedition failed; and the baffled invasion ended in a disgraceful treaty. The expedition was renewed in the next year, 1755, and again baffled. The Portuguese government of the Brazils now made renewed efforts, and in 1756 obtained some advantages; but they were still as far as ever from final success, and the war, fruitless as it was, had begun to drain heavily the finances of the mother country. It had already cost the treasury of Lisbon a sum equal to three millions sterling. But the minister at the head of the Portuguese government was of a different character from the race who had, for the last hundred years, wielded the ministerial sceptres of Spain and Portugal. His clear and daring spirit at once saw where the evil lay, and defied the difficulties that lay between him and its cure. He determined to extinguish the order of the Jesuits at a blow. The boldness of this determination can be estimated only by a knowledge of the time. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits were the ecclesiastical masters of Europe. They were the confessors of the chief monarchs of the Continent; the heads of the chief seminaries for national education; the principal professors in all the universities;--and this influence, vast as it was by its extent and variety, was rendered more powerful by the strict discipline, the unhesitating obedience, and the systematic activity of their order. All the Jesuits existing acknowledged one head, the general of their order, whose constant residence was at Rome. But their influence, powerful as it was by their open operation on society, derived perhaps a superior power from its secret exertions. Its name was legion--its numbers amounted to thousands--it took every shape of society, from the highest to the lowest. It was the noble and the peasant--the man of learning and the man of trade--the lawyer and the monk--the soldier and the sailor--nay, it was said, that such was the extraordinary pliancy of its principle of disguise, the Jesuit was suffered to assume the tenets of Protestantism, and even to act as a Protestant pastor, for the purpose of more complete deception. The good of the church was the plea which purified all imposture; the power of Rome was the principle on which this tremendous system of artifice was constructed; and the reduction of all modes of human opinion to the one sullen superstition of the Vatican, was the