Buenos Ayres, and maintains the proposition with earnestness, that if the Indians were allowed to have unrestrained intercourse with the Spaniards, "they would derive the worst consequences from their bad example, which is entirely opposed to the principles of morality."[96] In this the Jesuits displayed their wonderful astuteness, and it may be supposed that they employed these and other kindred allegations with effect in Spain, inasmuch as they succeeded in obtaining from the king a special "prohibition for Europeans to set foot in" Paraguay, so that they could thereby secure exclusive control of the natives and bring them under Jesuit influences alone, independent of the monastic orders and the ecclesiastical authorities of the Church.[97] This was a great stroke of policy upon their part, because by ignoring the Church, its ecclesiastics, and the monastic orders, they were enabled to assume prerogatives of the most extravagant character, and to hold themselves out to the natives as the only Europeans worthy of obedience and the only true representatives of Christian civilization. Not only, therefore, in the manner of securing the royal approval of their exclusive pretensions, but in the character of the Government established by them, did they exhibit their chief characteristics of ambition, vanity, and superciliousness--characteristics they have never lost. The Government established by them in Paraguay was essentially monarchical. It could not have been otherwise under the principles of their constitution. Under the false name of a Christian republic, it was, to all intents and purposes, a theocratic State, so constructed as to free it from all European influences except such as emanated from their superior at Rome. All the intercourse they had with the Church and the pope was through him, and whatsoever commands he gave were uninquiringly obeyed by them, without stopping to investigate or concerning themselves in the least to know whether the Church and the pope approved or disapproved them. In order to impress the natives with the idea of their independence and of their superiority over the monastic orders and the Church ecclesiastics, they practiced the most artful means to persuade them to hold no intercourse with either Spaniards or Portuguese, upon the ground that they could not do so without encountering the example of their vices and immoralities. The unsuspecting Indians were easily seduced by acts of kindness, and the result was that, in the course of a brief period, they succeeded in establishing a number of what were called _Reductions_--or, more properly speaking, villages--with multitudes of Indians assembled about them; the whole aggregating, in the end, several hundred thousand. These constituted the Jesuit State, and were all, by the mere ceremony of baptism, brought under Jesuit dominion. At each Reduction the natives were allowed to select a secular magistracy, with limited and