The Mexican liberals fought continuously the encroachments of the Church, which used the army to support it politically. The military strength created by the Church and landowners was maintained, not to protect the nation from foreign aggression, but to guard the government from the assaults of the people. The climax of the struggle took place during the three years’ war, 1857-1860, when the liberal leaders enforced the laws of the reform, which entitled the nation to possess all the properties of the clergy, both religious and secular, and the Church was denied the right to own real estate. Religious orders as contrary to public welfare were dissolved. Church and State were absolutely separated, and religious freedom was fully and firmly established. Benito Juarez, a pure-blooded Indian, continued the strife of the Liberals, initiated by Gomez Farias, Melchior Ocampo and other martyrs of the cause. After the three years’ war, the Church was ostensibly eliminated as a political power. The land which had been absorbed by the Church from the Indians, and known as “egidos,” communal lands, reverted to them, and over three million Indians became small landowners. Defeated but not discouraged, the clericals then brought about French intervention and placed on the throne of Mexico a clerical, Emperor Maximilian, who met his defeat and death in Queretaro in 1867. Porfirio Diaz came into power as a liberal through a revolution, and ended as a clerical. Under his régime of spoliation, all the lands which belonged to the Indians were taken away from them by trickery and legal frauds, and distributed among Diaz’ generals and political supporters. Government land was sold to foreigners. Through the influence of Carmelita Diaz, the wife of General Diaz, the religious orders, foreign priests, friars and nuns, came back to Mexico and acquired property, and the clericals began reorganizing themselves and taking breath for another struggle which they knew was coming soon. When Diaz was tottering to his fall, the Church placed the clerical, De la Barra, in the provisional presidency. The Madero cabinet was composed of clericals and neo-Científicos who sat tight in a passive policy of non-intervention in Mexican internal affairs, as if the government reforms were none of their business. Meanwhile, the clericals were very active politically and financially; they contributed millions of dollars to the downfall of the Madero government. As usual, the clericals corrupted the army chiefs, and succeeded in having the reform government overthrown.