wed to bring
him release. Mendicants also, against whom no crime had been proved,
contraband dealers, those who had been engaged in insurrections, and
others immeasurably superior to the criminal class, nay, innocent
men--Turkish, Russian and negro slaves, and poor Iroquois Indians, whom
the Canadians were ordered to entrap--were pressed into that terrible
service. By these means the benches of the galleys were filled, and
Colbert took no thought of the long unrelieved agony borne by those who
filled them.

Nor was the mercantile marine forgotten. Encouragement was given to the
building of ships in France by allowing a premium on those built at
home, and imposing a duty on those brought from abroad; and as French
workmen were forbidden to emigrate, so French seamen were forbidden to
serve foreigners on pain of death.

Even ecclesiastical affairs, though with these he had no official
concern, did not altogether escape Colbert's attention. He took a
subordinate part in the struggle between the king and Rome as to the
royal rights over vacant bishoprics; and he seems to have sympathized
with the proposal that was made to seize part of the wealth of the
clergy. In his hatred of idleness, he ventured to suppress no less than
seventeen fetes, and he had a project for lessening the number of those
devoted to clerical and monastic life, by fixing the age for taking the
vows some years later than was then customary. With heresy he was at
first unwilling to interfere, for he was aware of the commercial value
of the Huguenots; but when the king resolved to make all France Roman
Catholic, he followed him and urged his subordinates to do all that they
could to promote conversions.

In art and literature Colbert took much interest. He possessed a
remarkably fine private library, which he delighted to fill with
valuable manuscripts from every part of Europe where France had placed a
consul. He has the honour of having founded the Academy of Sciences (now
called the Institut de France), the Observatory, which he employed
Claude Perrault to build and brought G. D. Cassini (1625-1712) from
Italy to superintend, the Academies of Inscriptions and Medals, of
Architecture and of Music, the French Academy at Rome, and Academies at
Arles, Soissons, Nimes and many other towns, and he reorganized the
Academy of Painting and Sculpture which Richelieu had established. He
was a member of the French Academy; and one very characteristic rule,
rec