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 Governor de Arrillaga was a friend of the missions; he understood fully their importance, the vast spiritual and industrial labors which they sustained to the glory of God and the welfare of man. Padre Ignacio was fully aware of this. Yet the priest was not animated by any great hope that the outcome of this controversy between the mission and the people, whom he looked upon as interlopers, would be decided as he would have it closed. The governor was a diplomatic man, genial, friendly; but so guarded of word that his mind seemed fallow ground, in which the seed of testimony must be sown and brought to fullness before he would deliver his opinion.

Well enough, quite within the practice of justice, Padre Ignacio admitted. Yet the cause of the missions was so evident that no man could deny the justice of it, except those politicians and schemers whose hands burned to lay hold of these vast enterprises and divide their treasures among themselves.

Not only the treasures of hemp lands, and wheat lands; orchards, vineyards, fair gardens; cattle and sheep numbered by the hundreds of thousands on the ranges of the missions between San Diego and Monterey; not only these, but the poor simple wards of the padres, the Indians redeemed by the faithful labors and marvellous patience, zeal and tender love of these men whose reward was not among the things of earth. These defenseless creatures, only a step removed from the most barbarous state that man ever descended into, the greedy ras-