A separate article of the constitutions furthermore reserved for the General the right of accepting any donation whatsoever, made in favor of the whole Company, and of assigning capital or revenue as he judged wisest.
[Footnote 168: Quinet calculates that at the close of the sixteenth century there were twenty-one houses of the professed (incapable of owning property) to 293 colleges (free from this inability).] Scholastics, even after they had taken the vow of poverty, were not obliged to relinquish their private possessions.

Sooner or later, it was hoped that these would become the property of the order.

In a word, the principle of this solemn obligation was so manipulated as to facilitate the acquisition and accumulation of wealth by the Jesuit like any other corporation.

Only no individual Jesuit owned anything.

He was rich or poor, he wore the clothes of princes or the rags of a mendicant, he lived sumptuously or begged in the street, he traveled with a following of servants or he walked on foot, according as it seemed good to his superiors.