Twenty years had now elapsed since the Jesuits had armed the Mission Indians and organised them into an efficient militia. An army was, therefore, ready to the new governor's hand. The Creoles of western Paraguay were riotous and tumultuous, but in that tropical climate they had lost much of the military capacity of their Spanish ancestors. The number of people of Spanish descent was small and while the secular Indians made admirable soldiers when disciplined and well led, they had never been organised by the Creoles for serious warfare. The military system of the Jesuits immediately proved its superiority. Aided by the prestige of his Viceregal commission, the new governor at the head of the Jesuit army quickly overcame the hastily gathered levies of the Bishop. For the next one hundred and twenty years the Jesuits maintained their system in south-eastern Paraguay and the regions on both banks of the Parana and the Upper Uruguay. Until 1728 their territory was nominally under the jurisdiction of the governor of Asuncion. Really, however, it was an independent republic ruled by a superior whose capital was at Candelaria, and who was actually responsible to no one except his General at Rome and the authorities at Madrid. In the secular part of Paraguay, the formerly turbulent and secular Creoles sank more and more into the indifference characteristic of the Indians who surrounded them. Early in the eighteenth century a governor named Antequera, whom the Viceregal authorities attempted to depose, was forcibly maintained for a time by the Paraguayan Creoles--probably the earliest instance of an important movement toward independence which occurred in South America. The Paraguayans only yielded when a compromise was offered. The old ferocity which the original conquerors had felt against the Indians gave place gradually to kindlier sentiments. From slaves the Indians rose into serfs and then into peasants, living on good terms with the proprietors of their lands, and not more oppressed by Spanish officials than the whites themselves. Secular Paraguay, shut in on the west by the impenetrable Chaco with its hordes of dreaded wild Indians, and on the east by the Jesuit territory, could not expand. Indeed the impulse toward conquest and exploration which so distinguished the Paraguayan Creoles in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had completely died out as early as the middle of the seventeenth century.