ation of Brazil continued to increase, the moral and intellectual
culture of its inhabitants was left in great measure to chance; they
grew up with those robust and healthy sentiments which are engendered by
the absence of false teachers, but with a repugnance to legal
ordinances, and encouraged in their ascendancy over the Indians to
habits of violence and oppression. The Jesuits from the first moment of
their landing in Brazil had constituted themselves the protectors of the
natives, and though strenuously opposed by the colonists and ordinary
clergy, had gathered the Indians together in many _aldeas_, over which
officials of their order exercised spiritual and temporal authority. A
more efficacious stop, however, was put to the persecution of the
Indians by the importation of large numbers of negroes from the
Portuguese possessions in Africa, these being found more active and
serviceable than the native tribes.

Reforms of Pombal.

The Portuguese government, under the administration of Carvalho,
afterwards marquis of Pombal, attempted to extend to Brazil the bold
spirit of innovation which directed all his efforts. The proud minister
had been resisted in his plans of reform at home by the Jesuits, and,
determining to attack the power of the order, first deprived them of all
temporal power in the state of Maranhao and Para. These ordinances soon
spread to the whole of Brazil, and a pretext being found in the
suspicion of Jesuit influence in some partial revolts of the Indian
troops on the Rio Negro, the order was expelled from Brazil under
circumstances of great severity in 1760. The Brazilian Company founded
by Vieyra, which so materially contributed to preserve its South
American possessions to Portugal, had been abolished in 1721 by John V.;
but such an instrument being well suited to the bold spirit of Pombal,
he established a chartered company again in 1755, to trade exclusively
with Maranhao and Para; and in 1759, in spite of the remonstrance of the
British Factory at Lisbon, formed another company for Parahyba and
Pernambuco. Pombal's arrangements extended also to the interior of the
country, where he extinguished at once the now indefinite and oppressive
claims of the original donatories of the captaincies, and strengthened
and enforced the regulations of the mining districts. The policy of many
of Pombal's measures is more than questionable; but his admission of all
races to equal rights in the eye of th