In order to teach the confiding Indians that obedience to authority was their chiefest duty, they were subjected to rules of conduct and intercourse which were enforced with the strictest severity. They were watched in everything, the searching eyes of the Jesuits being continually upon them. They constituted, in fact, a state of society reaching the Jesuit ideal completely; that is, docile, tractable, submissive, obedient, without the least real semblance of manhood. Having thus completed their subjugation, energetic measures were adopted to render any change in their condition impossible. For this purpose care was taken to exclude all other than Jesuit influences, and to sow the seeds of disaffection towards everything European, the object being to surround them with a high wall of ignorance and superstition, which no European influences could overleap, and within which their authority would be unbounded. They were instructed that the Spaniards and the Portuguese were their enemies, that the ecclesiastics and monkish missionaries sent over by the Church were unworthy of obedience or imitation, and that the only true religion was that which emanated from their society and had their approval. If these simple-minded people were taught anything about the Church, it was with the view of convincing them that the Jesuits represented all its power, authority, and virtue, and that whatsoever did not conform to their teachings was sinful and heretical. If they were told anything about the pope, it was to represent him as inferior to their general, who was to be regarded by them as the only infallible representative of God upon earth. That all other ideas should be excluded from their minds, they were not permitted to hold any intercourse whatsoever with Europeans; for fear, undoubtedly, they might hear that there was a Church at Rome, and a pope higher than their general. They were not allowed to speak any language but their own, so as to render it impossible to acquire any ideas or opinions except such as could be expressed by means of its limited number of inexpressive words; that is, to keep them entirely and exclusively under Jesuit influences. To sum up the whole, without further detail, the Indians were regarded as minors under guardianship, and in this condition they remained for one hundred and fifty years, without the possibility of social and national development. They were saved, it is true, from the miseries of Portuguese slavery, but kept in such a condition of inferiority and vassalage as unfitted them for independent citizenship. Their limbs were unchained; but their minds were "cabined, cribbed, confined," within bounds too narrow for matured thought, sentiment, or reason.