In 1769 the king of Spain issued his famous decree banishing the Jesuits from all his dominions. It was feared that in the centre of their power on the Upper Parana they might offer resistance. They commanded a population of more than two hundred thousand Indians, fairly well armed and disciplined and absolutely devoted to them; nevertheless, they submitted quietly. Spanish officials replaced the Jesuits in control of the civil and commercial interests of the mission towns, and priests of other Orders were sent up to continue spiritual instruction. The Spanish officials were, however, not successful in holding the Indians together. Their exactions and cruelties drove the Indians to despair, and within a very few years emigration began. The seven missions to the east of the Uruguay had been traded by Spain to Portugal in 1750, and most of their inhabitants had then been killed or driven across the Uruguay. The most populous missions lay between the Uruguay and the Parana, in the territory that to-day forms the upper part of Corrientes, and the Missions Territory. A large proportion of their inhabitants fled down the Uruguay into Entre Rios and Uruguay proper. Those on the west side of the Parana largely remained or removed only far enough to coalesce with the secular Indians of Paraguay; some of the outlying and more remote missions were abandoned altogether, and Paraguay then assumed its present extent. The population was fairly homogeneous, and its vast majority was composed of descendants of the aborigines, with comparatively few Spaniards and Creoles of mixed blood forming the upper strata of society. The country felt few of the quickening and disturbing influences which were already animating the regions at the mouth of the river toward the end of the eighteenth century. Little effort was necessary to get a subsistence from the teeming soil, and, content with their luscious oranges, their matte, and their unlimited tobacco, the Paraguayans led an idyllic existence. They had little sympathy with the turbulent, active-minded population which was crowding into Buenos Aires and making it a commercial, political, and intellectual focus. Agricultural in their habits, they disliked the hard-riding gauchos of the southern plains hardly less than the turbulent Indians of the Chaco. In the movements that preceded the revolution of 1810 they took no part. CHAPTER III FRANCIA'S REIGN