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a bold step for one so devoted to the Church. The prohibition of the barbarous custom of duelling to decide personal quarrels was another of his humane laws. These, and divers other ordinances, founded in a like spirit of equity, are known in a collected shape as the _Institutes of St. Louis_. His enactment touching appeals from the Church to the Crown, and the prohibition which he likewise issued against the levying of money in France for the use of the Pope without the king's license, are known as a _Pragmatic Sanction_--a term applied to any especially important national decree. Louis set the example of enforcing the laws personally, and none was fitter to administer them than he. Under an oak in the forest of Vincennes, near Paris, often sat the good king to hear appeals and petitions from his poor subjects. His social and foreign relations were as fully attended to as his political reforms. He first placed the French navy on a substantial footing. To him Paris owed a public library, a hospital for the blind, and the establishment of a body of police. Under his sanction, also, his confessor, Robert de Sorbon, founded the famous theological college called by his name. So scrupulously just and honorable was Louis, that he appointed a commission to ascertain what restitution of territory should be made to nations which had been mulcted by the conquests of his predecessors, and he thus more than once sacrificed extensive possessions for the sake of a principle. By a treaty in 1255, made with Henry III., Louis restored to the English crown the provinces of which Philip Augustus had deprived it, and obtained in return the surrender of Henry's rights in Normandy and other fiefs. The reputation which Louis thus acquired among his fellow-monarchs led to his being asked to act as mediator in several quarrels, and gave him many opportunities of exhibiting his peaceful and loving policy. [Illustration: Louis IX. opens the Jails of France.] The mental blindness of which we have spoken led him to commit errors, which, if his misled conscience had not sanctioned them, would deserve the name of crimes. Toward Jews and heretics he showed no mercy, issuing severe and unjust laws against them "for the good of his soul." The duty of the historian is to record these failings of a noble nature as impartially as its beauties; but the evil must, in all fairness, be credited to the Church and system which taught, and not to the believer
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