The occurrences on the Putumayo have at least tended to arouse the religious element, if not the commercial conscience, of the British people. A severe indictment of the directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company was made from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, in August, 1912, in a sermon by Canon Henson. The English directors were denounced by name, and the demand made that they should be arrested and brought to public trial, the preacher stating that he chose that famous pulpit for delivering the indictment in order that the widest possible publicity might be given to the subject. The directors, in the public Press, then made through their solicitors an emphatic and indignant denial of their responsibility, alleging that in the first place they were ignorant of the occurrences, and that when these were shown to have some foundation in fact they voluntarily dispatched a commission to inquire into the matter. Aroused by the revelations made, several religious missions started to being in London, asking for support by public subscription to enable missionary work to be carried out and stations established in the Peruvian Amazon region. There is a strong religious moral to be drawn from the occurrences. In all probability such a terrible situation would never have grown to being if the fine work of the old Jesuit and Franciscan friars in Brazil and Peru had been allowed to flourish. One of the greatest names associated with the Amazon is that of the famous Padre Samuel Fritz, a Bohemian by birth, who passed the larger part of his life in the service of Spain in Peru as a Jesuit missionary, working from 1686 to 1723, among the Indians of the Amazon forests. Living with the native tribes of the Huallaga, the Napo--which parallels the Putumayo--the Ucayali, and others of the great affluents of the Amazon, this devoted priest carried on his Christianising work, winning the natives to Christianity in a way so remarkable as has never been equalled since. Venturing at length farther down the Amazon into Portuguese territory, Fritz fell ill, and was detained for two years at Para by the Portuguese, who were jealous and fearful of Spanish domination in the Amazon Valley. The Portuguese built forts at the confluence of the Rio Negro, where Manaos now stands, in order to assert their sovereignty over that part of the river, and dispatched armed bands upstream which destroyed the Christian missions and settlements Fritz had founded. The atrocious cruelties practised in these slave-raids, for such in effect they were, caused the tribes to flee to remoter regions, and a great diminution of the population followed in the first half of the eighteenth century. Thus the Portuguese conquistadores accomplished for the Amazon what the Spaniards had performed for the Andine highlands, and what the commercial conquest of rubber-gathering, nominally conducted from London, has accomplished in the twentieth century.