Nor had they been less busy and active speculators in Europe. In Malta, in the year 1639, during a famine, the Jesuits, who had five thousand sacks of corn in their granaries, in order that they might not be obliged to give it up to the government at a lower price than they expected for it, applied to the Grand Master Lascaris for succour to their actual necessities, and were relieved, on account of their supposed poverty, from the public storehouse. But the trick was at last discovered, and they were expelled from the island. But we could not adduce stronger proofs of their eagerness to accumulate wealth than the letters of Vitelleschi, Caraffa, and Nickel, some passages of which we have reported, in which they bitterly complain of that spirit of avarice and speculation which had pervaded all the classes of Jesuits, and which they vainly deprecated. To return to our narrative; Saldanha, either to satisfy the impatience of Pombal, or because the proofs of the Jesuits’ guilt were too numerous and too clear, soon published a decree severely reprobating the commercial pursuits of the order, and empowering the royal authorities to confiscate all merchandise belonging to those ecclesiastics.[332] But, in the meanwhile, the man who had ordered the visitation, and to whom belonged the ultimate decision, Lambertini (Benedict XIV.), had departed from this world. Had God granted him a longer life, he would probably have taken energetic and decisive measures against the order; and any other pontiff than the one who succeeded him, would in all likelihood, in one way or another, have given satisfaction to the public opinion. But, unfortunately perhaps for the Jesuits, Benedict XIV. was succeeded by a man wholly blinded in their favour, who declared that, to the last, he would be the protector and the friend of “the holy Company of Jesus.” This man was Raggonico, who assumed the name of Clement XIII. He was pure in soul, and upright in purpose. He was constantly engaged in fervent prayer, and his highest ambition was to obtain a canonisation. But he was a bigoted fanatic—was convinced that the power of the Papacy should be unlimited; and in the Jesuits he beheld the most faithful defenders of the Papal See and of religion. But, besides the disposition of the Pope in their favour, the Jesuits had, in the Court of Rome, a still more efficient supporter in the person of Cardinal Torrigiani, in whose hand actually resided all the power. “He had the reputation,” says Ranke, “of taking a personal interest in the farming of the papal revenues, and was said to be generally fond of power for its own sake.”[333] It is, then, easy to be conceived that the Jesuits, in order to preserve the bulk of their wealth, did not hesitate to sacrifice a part to satiate the avidity of the cardinal; and that to this is to be attributed the partiality, we should say the servility, evinced by Torrigiani towards the order. But this partiality of the Pope and his