With the death of John V. in 1750 the great Marquis of Pombal became prime minister. The enormous energy and activity of this remarkable man revolutionised the administration of Portugal and Brazil. Official corruption was severely punished; order replaced confusion; agriculture, industry, and commerce were protected and encouraged. In spite of the threatened exhaustion of the placers mining flourished. Maranhao and Para took a new start; the worst monopolies were abolished; the price of sugar rose with the great colonial wars and the adoption of reasonable regulations. Wealth and revenues increased apace and peace and security were self-guarded. When Pombal fell, after twenty-seven years in power, Brazil's population had risen to two millions; Rio was a city of fifty thousand and the capital had been transferred there; Bahia had forty thousand; Minas contained four hundred thousand people; the yield of gold was four hundred thousand carats yearly, and the diamond production one hundred and fifty thousand carats, and, finally, Santa Catharina and Rio Grande had been saved from the Spaniards and settled. Pombal had made short work of the Jesuits. In 1755 he took away their rights over their Indians, and four years later issued an order for their immediate and unconditional expulsion and the confiscation of their property. Pombal had no favourites; he spared no individuals and no classes in his work of ruthlessly concentrating all power in the Crown. But he built a Frankenstein of which he himself was the helpless victim the moment his old master died. Unwittingly he prepared the way for the triumph of the ideas of the French Revolution both in Portugal and Brazil, and his most beneficent measures were the most fatal to the permanence of his despotic system. Commercial prosperity gave the Brazilian people resources; the impartial administration of law gave them some conceptions of civic pride and independence; the encouragement of education, small as it was, helped start an intellectual movement which spread over the wilds of Brazil the liberal principle then fermenting in Europe. Immediately upon his fall in 1777 the Portuguese government reverted to most of the old abuses, but the economic impulse did not at once die out.