For two months these excellent men lived in the midst of those exasperated Indians, nay, one of them remained there alone for a considerable time, labouring to soothe their wrath, to convince them of better treatment, and dispose them to peace. The fiercer natives threatened them daily with death, and with being devoured, but the better spirits and their own blameless lives protected them. They built a little church, and thatched it with palm-leaves, where they preached and celebrated mass daily, and at length effected a peace, and the salvation of the colonies; for they found that a wide-spread coalition was forming amongst the Indian tribes to sweep their oppressors out of the land. One would have thought that such instances as these of the wisdom and sound policy of virtue, would have been enough to persuade the Portuguese to adopt more righteous measures towards the natives; but avarice and cruelty are not easily eradicated—a famine broke out—they purchased the Indians for slaves with provisions! Nothing can equal the blindness of base minds. Whenever affairs went wrong with them, the Portuguese had recourse to the Jesuits, and the Jesuits by their influence with the Indians, achieved the most signal service for them. They marched against the French, and drove them out. They built towns; they protected the state from hostile tribes. A Jesuit, with his crucifix in his hand, was of more avail at the head of armies than the most able general; but these things once accomplished, all these services were forgotten—the slave-hunters were at work again, and the colonies fell again as rapidly into troubles and consequent decline. By the end of the century, from the discovery of Brazil, the Jesuits had collected all the natives along the coast as far as the Portuguese territories reached, into their aldeas, or villages, and were busy in the work of civilization. Nothing indeed would have been easier than for them to civilize the whole country, had it been possible to civilize the Portuguese first. But their conduct to the natives was but one continued practice of treachery and outrage. When they needed their aid to defend them from their enemies, out marched the natives under their Jesuit leaders, and fought for them; and the first act of the colonists, when the victory was won, was to seize on their benefactors and portion them out as slaves. The man-hunters broke into the villages and carried off numbers, having, in fact, depopulated the whole country besides. There is no species of kidnapping, no burnings of huts, no fomenting of wars between different tribes; no horror, in short, which has made the names of Christians so infamous for the last three hundred years in Africa that had not its parallel then in Brazil.