Amazing as was the effect of this celebrated sermon, of course it did not last long. But Vieyra did not rest here. He hastened to Portugal, and stated the treatment of the Indians to the king. He obtained an order, that all the Indian settlements in the state of Maranham should be under the direction of the Jesuits; that Vieyra should direct all expeditions into the interior, and settle the reduced Indians where he pleased; and that all ransomed Indians should be slaves for five years and no longer, their labour in that time being an ample compensation for their original cost. Here was a sort of apprenticeship system more favourable than the modern British one, but destined to be just as little observed. CHAPTER XII. THE PORTUGUESE IN BRAZIL,—CONTINUED. I regret that my limits will not permit me to follow further the labours and enterprises of Vieyra and his brethren in behalf of the Indians, whom they sought far and wide in that immense region, and brought in thousands upon thousands into settlements, only to arouse afresh the furious opposition, and bring down upon themselves the vengeance of the colonists. But the history of this great strife between Christianity and Injustice, in Brazil, fills three massy quarto volumes, and runs through three centuries. It is full of details of the deepest interest; but there is no chapter, either in that history or any other, more heart-rending, than that of the transfer of the seven Reductions of the Jesuits lying east of the Uruguay. These were ceded by Spain to Portugal in 1750, in a treaty of demarcation. “They contained,” to use the words of Mr. Southey, “thirty thousand Guaranies, not fresh from the woods or half reclaimed, and therefore willing to revert to a savage state, and capable of enduring its exposure, hardships, and privations; but born as their fathers and grandfathers had been, in easy servitude, and bred up in the comforts of regular domestic life. These persons, with their wives and their children, their sick and their aged, their horses, and their sheep and their oxen, were to turn out, like the children of Israel from Egypt, into the wilderness; not to escape from bondage, but in obedience to one of the most tyranical commands that ever were issued in the recklessness of unfeeling power.” Mr. Southey adds, “Yet Ferdinand must be acquitted of intentional injustice. His disposition was such, that he would have rather suffered martyrdom than have issued so wicked an edict, had he been sensible of its inhumanity and wickedness.”