Thus the monastic orders had become the System. Accumulated wealth had wrought upon them the effects it ever achieves everywhere. Originally they had come to the Philippines with a pure notion of doing good; now they were caught in the soiled entanglements of gain. Through all the sequel a gap widened between the four orders and the rest of the church. Other clergy, notably the native priests, continued to serve, according to their lights, the professed objects of religion; the four orders were four great corporations, indurated with profits, playing the callous landlord, extorting rents, harassing tenants, extending their operations, and with every new peso of their hoards strengthening their influence upon Malacañan, the seat of the administration. So works the law that inevitably attends upon accretion. Gradually they dispossessed the military, official, and merchant castes that at first had been all in all. Such potency as in other countries belongs to banks or great industrial companies lay now in their hands. Whatsoever they wished, that, by one means or another, they won. It is not humanly possible that under such conditions men should not deteriorate; the men that sway so gross a rule, the men upon whom it is swayed. It was so here. The friars of the orders became intolerable local tyrants. In the rural regions, the word of the curate, if he was of the dominant caste, outweighed the command of the provincial governor. As a rule the governor-general himself dared not in any way oppose the clerical domination; a few words lightly whispered at Madrid would be enough to make sure his recall and ruin. One of these governors that tried to assert his own authority had to fight a clerical mob in his own palace, and fell dead, sword in hand, across the body of his son. [16] The lesson did not need repetition; thenceforth the successors of the Governor-General Bustamante of 1719 made haste to placate a power so great and so malignant. Even the redoubtable Emiliano Weyler himself was careful and obsequious to maintain good relations with the four orders. Nay, he went to the length of supervising the ejection of settlers from the lands the friars claimed, and in at least one instance, as we shall see, accelerated the work with a battery of artillery.