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ted to a French officer, whose name was Bonneval, who there found papers, which the Jesuits, in the first tumult, had forgotten: and among these papers, a plan of instructions and operations of general Riccy, for a conspiracy against the government. He deposited them in the hands of a friend, with orders to transmit them to the court. He mistrusted Cevallos, already corrupted by the Jesuits.

The officer of the Jesuits, who had evacuated the fortress, recol. lecting his own inadvertency, addressed himself to Bonneval, who pretended not to know what he demanded: and upon the demand of the Jesuit and the refusal of the officer, Cevallos put him under arrest, where he remained till the time of his return to Madrid. He committed the papers to the king. At that time the count D'Aranda had

been appointed president of the council, an office which had been suppressed, but had been revived on occasion of a commotion, which we will now describe.

The Jesuits unceasingly remonstrated to the Spaniards, that the installation of the reigning family had enkindled the war in Europe, from 1700 to the peace of Vienna in 1725. They represented how bloody and ruinous it had been for the nation; that they were crushed with taxes, un

known before the house of Bourbon ascended the throne; how many slaughters had followed, and how much money had been absorbed in the establishment of the Infant, Don Philip; the conquest of Naples, the expedition to Sicily, the siege of Oran. the passage of the Spanish monarchy into the hands of foreiguers, the disunion of the patricians, fifteen years of civil troubles. They declaimed against the great employments of the ministry, oceupied by intruders, the humiliation of the native Spaniards, cringing with the vilest flatteries to ob tain a miserable employment, under chiefs, whose pride could be equalled only by their power, and whose power could only be compared to their imbecility. We support all the necessities of the state, but few of us participate in the advantages of it; few of us are permitted to know the cares of the administration. is not difficult to conjecture, from the temperament of the human heart, the impression of these discourses upon a proud nation. The Spaniards fall into discontentments, their minds become uneasy and agitated; they insensibly lay hold on the hope of ameliorating their condition, by a change of administration.

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The Jesuits had persuaded the Spaniards, that the conquest of America was the price of their labors. That the king had only lent his name; and it was unexampled, that a people suffered so patiently the restraints imposed upon the enjoyment of their own property and prosperity. It was in this manner, that they enervated and enfeebled the attach

ment and fidelity of the Spanish people to the government. The people murmured; silent tears flowed from their eyes; and nothing was seen on every side, but the symptoms of a fury, confined and struggling to break out.

The national impatience was still more increased by the conquest of the Havanna; by the bad defence of that place, and by the loss of the immense riches which passed into the hands of the English, by the number of bankruptcies, which followed that event, the war of Portugal, and the sacrifice of five and twenty thousand men, who perished by diseases, the failure of subsistences, and other faults, imputed to the incapacity and corruption of Squilaci, who had raised himself from the shop of an artisan in Sicily, to the highest dignity of the empire; the support which the sovereign afforded him, the abuse of the power that had been given him, the monopoly of grain, the contempt of ancient usages, the abolitions of old customs, almost always objects of the fanatical attachment of the people, the outrages upon the persons of the citizens stripped of the national dress, and insulted in the streets, in the public squares and walks. Such were the real causes which lighted up a concealed flame, which blazed at the bottom of the souls of the Spaniards, and which the Jesuits supplied with fuel, and blew up. But before we come to the exp sion, it will be convenient to return, for a moment, to the counties of America.

The duties of the Spanish fi nances in America were fixed.

They consisted in a tax upen commodities imported into those countries from Europe. By his authority as sovereign, the king appointed the governors, the viceroy, the alcades, and the other officers in the magistracy and the finances. He raised an impost under the form of a capitation, upon all the inhabitants of the Indies, and all the nations of Spanish America are comprehended under the generical name of dos Indias. The king enjoy. ed the right of exploring mines, of the sale of spirituous liquors, of the plant called Chicha, cards, stamped paper, quicksilver, the assessment of las mitas, or the obligation to furnish a certain number of hands to the public works. These burthens the peo ple bore without murmuring, when Squilachi took the fancy to augment the oppression, by creating a council of domains, by reducing the natives of America to the condition of the inhabitants of Castille, by restraining the liberty of franchises, and by demanding, under the form of loans, considerable sums from the different sorts of corporations. The Jesuits did not fail to take advantage of these circumstances to excite a fermentation, which would have had the most fatal consequences, if the prudence of the ministry had not appeased it, by dissimulation and by mildness. The people, however, had trampled on the seals of the king; they had torn to pieces the orders of his minister, as well as his own; they had attacked his officers in their houses, who had escaped assassination only by flying to their country seats, where

the populace held them blockaded. The revolt had been pushed so far, that they had chosen a king, who was, however, wise enough to refuse the office. The ministry were not ignorant, that these seditious dispositions of the South Americans were nourished by their spiritual guides, and seconded by England, attentive to undermine the forces of the House of Bourbon in all its branches. At that time, gold was seen distributed by handfuls to a miserable populace, by the Jesuits and the others offering them friendship and protection.

This insurrection was followed by another, in Spain. In the year 1766 or 1767, the marquis de Squilaci, by a monopoly of grain, had plunged the empire into the horrors of a universal famine. The people, groaning under this calamity, the author of which was not unknown to them, demanded the dismission of the minister. Squilaci, to humble them, prohibited their cloaks and their flapped hats; and the prohibition was rigorously executed. The people were boiling with indignation; and the Jesuits, the favorable moment arrived for the project they had long conceived, of exciting in Spain a conflagration that nothing could extinguish. Always affecting concealment, but almost always ill Concealed, they employed their adopted and initiated Abbe Hermoso, and the marquis de Campo Flores, and a number of others. They dispersed themselves in the taverns, they seattered money in the bodegones, (dram shops, ale houses, I suppose.) There the intoxication of

rebellion was inflamed by wine. These scenes of debauchery resounded with the cries of "Long live the king, but death to the ministry." The insurrection was to break out on Thursday or Good Friday, when the king and all his court went on foot to the churches, to perform what are called "Stations." The victims were designated: the minister was to be assassinated, and in the confusion, no doubt there would be found among the fanatics, a parricide to strike the king. But the populace, who were not in the secret, and whom the Jesuits had too much inflam ed, broke out too soon, on the day of the "Branches." The glasses of Squilaci were broken with stones; they broke open the doors of his hotel; they sought his person, but could not find him. Their fury fell upon his furniture, which they tore to pieces. From thence they flew to the castle of the king, where they committed a horrible massacre of citizens and the Walloon guards. The carnage never ceased, until the moment when the king appeared in a balcony, and granted to the tumultuous multitude every thing they demanded with such loud eries. The mar. quis of Squilaci fled towards Italy, and the same day the king removed, by circuitous roads, to Aranjuez, a pusillanimons evasion, which endangered a revival of the sedition.

The king had re-created the office of president of Castille, which had been antecedently a bolished, from an apprehension of the power which it conferred upon him who was invested with

it, and had given it to the count D'Aranda, whose first care was to search out the secret causes of the insurrection. The abbe Hermoso, the marquis de Campo Flores, and their accomplices were arrested. By their answers to interrogatories it was discover ed, that the revolt was not to have commenced till the holy Thursday or Friday; and that they had drawn from the treasury of the imperial college of the Jesuits, the real promoters of this detestable project, ths sums of money distributed in the tav

erns.

Notwithstanding these discoveries, which the count D'Aranda had drawn from the mouths of the culprits, he did not think himself yet possessed of sufficient evidence to determine his king. Moreover, he knew that in cases of rebellion, à direct remedy might increase the evil; and that it was convenient to find a pretext for chastising the rebels. He thought it necessary to have irrefragable proofs. But how should he obtain them?

He contented himself to dissemble, to treat the Jesuits with greater distinction than ever, and to hope for every thing from time. Such was the state of things, when the attorney general of the order, father Altamirano, came to court to solicit permission to go to Rome. D'Aranda had no doubt, that he was going to render an account to Ricci of the recent commotion, and that the coffers of the Jesuit contained all the information he wanted. He cajoled Altamirano, and offered him all the assistance he could desire. The

passports, which promised to his person and effects the greatest safety, were expedited to him; but they had been preceded by injunctions, notwithstanding every impediment, to visit at Barcelona the truuks of the father, and to seize upon his papers. At the same time they attached to the sides of the traveller, an officer of cavalry, who took the same road for the service of the king, and who never lost him out of sight. Arrived at Barcelona, the

governor arrested Altamirano, opened and examined his trunks, seized his papers, and in those papers found the conviction of the crime of the society. Then D'Aranda could speak in strong terms to his sovereign, and make him feel the necessity of demolishing a formidable colossus, and deliver himself from a powerful enemy, master of consciences, possessed of immense riches, and capable of undertaking the most desperate enterprises, as well as of paying for the most secret conspiracies. It was then resolved in the cabinet of Madrid, that the Jesuits should be banished; and to complete the enterprise without noise or trouble, they swore themselves to secresy; and they sent to the governors, viceroys, corregi. dores, and heads of plantations, every where within the residence of the Jesuits, from the capital Madrid, as far as the Philippine islands, orders numbered, which were not to be successively unsealed but on a certain day, even at a prescribed hour. was prescribed to some to hold in readiness, ships, carriages, and troops; to others, to enter the

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houses of the Jesuits, to cut the ropes of their bells, to seize their persons, and transport them, through Spain and through A. merica, to the places indicated; and this was executed. They conducted to Carthagena the Jesuits of Madrid, and they were disembarked at Civita Vecchia, before the Pope had any information of it.

The cardinal Palaviani, secretary of state at Rome, was then Nuncio at Madrid. Surprised at this event, as at an unexpect ed crash of thunder, and forever exposed to the reproaches of his holiness, the pope Clement 13th, fell sick of a mortal disease.

The government did not punish the adherents of the Jesuits, nor those who were affiliated or initiated with them. It granted to each of them a pension of six hundred livres; and it may be said, that the Jesuits were expelled from Spain by wisdom, from France by fanaticism, and

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from Portugal by avarice.

The pope wrote violent letters to the Spanish monarch, who, in his answers, expressed infinite respect for the spiritual father of Christians, but declared he would be master of his own household, humbly supplicating his holy benediction.

Such were the serpentine windings, by which that most dangerous society of monks worked its way to destruction in Spain.

Masters of the earth!! What important services can you expect from a race of men, who have forgotten their fathers and mothers, and who have no children?

May this historical abridg ment remind you of the influence they once had; of that which they still have; and of that which they always will have over your subjects and citizens; and of the perpetual dangers to which they will expose your persons.*

No. 3.

ON INTEMPERANCE.

THE evils of intemperance were, thirdly, to be represented. But these, alas! are so numerous and glaring, that, were not new examples of this vice incessantly occurring, it might be deemed almost superfluous to dwell upon its atrocity.

Its first effect is to impair health.

They, who are endued by na ture with the most vigorous constitutions, when addicted to intemperance, become subject to countless diseases. Hard drinkers sometimes indeed attain to old age; but it is, in most instances, to be living monuments of folly and of guilt. They encounter many disorders, which lie concealed from public no

*This article was presented for the Christian Disciple, as a translation made by a gentleman, venerable for his age and his rank in society, and as worthy of consideration on the re-establishment of the society of Jesuits, and the present state of things in Europe and South America.

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