In 1750 King John V of Portugal died. The death of Portuguese monarchs did not as a rule make more than a perfunctory difference to the Colonies, but in this case the succession of José I was important because, with infinite faith in his brilliant Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, afterwards Marquis de Pombal, he left the chief affairs of the kingdom to these able hands. Pombal has been bitterly attacked: he was without doubt a man of iron; but he was a man of unusual foresight and intelligence who thoroughly realized the great value of Brazil, and did much to improve economic conditions in that huge possession. He seems to have had what Brazilians call a _palpite_ concerning the destiny of Brazil and Portugal. Almost the first act of this statesman was the curtailing of the powers of the Inquisition: he abolished _autos da fé_, which must have given relief to Brazil if the historian Porto Seguro is correct in saying that no less than 500 Brazilians had been burnt alive in Lisbon by the Holy Office. With a special eye to Portuguese America he reduced taxes on tobacco and sugar, had the diamond traffic strictly supervised, created commercial companies to trade with Pará, Maranhão, Pernambuco and Parahyba; specially encouraged the plantation of rice and cotton in the North; legislated most of the commerce which was in the hands of the enterprising English into Portuguese channels; inaugurated good ship-building yards in Brazilian ports; settled boundary disputes with the Spanish on Brazilian borders; brought all capitanias still in private control under the Portuguese Crown—Cametá, Caeté, Ilha de Joannes, Itamaracá, Reconcavo de Bahia, Ilhéos, Porto Seguro, São Vicente and Campos dos Goytacazes; and as his most powerful and bitterly assailed effort he laid hands on the Jesuits. The Society, overwhelmed in the South, was strongly entrenched in the North since the opening of Pará and Maranhão; they had done wonderful and self-sacrificing work there; but they hostilized the colonists and made the mistake of arming their protégés the Indians against the settlers. They constituted themselves in Brazil as Bartolomé de las Casas did in Mexico and Guatemala, the Defenders of the Indians; they were extraordinarily successful with them, and it is not impossible that if some working arrangement could have been found between the colonists and Jesuits a great problem might have been solved—that of obtaining some control over the natives and teaching them industries without undermining their peculiar physical constitution. With the best intentions in the world, more modern efforts made to hold the Indian tribes in civic life have ended in their speedy dwindling and extinction; no one except Colonel Rondon seems able to teach the Indian and keep him alive.