and thrifty people in France.  It was now that the Holy Inquisition came into existence, and after forty years of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated.  The practice of burning heretics, first enacted by statute in Aragon in 1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe during the thirteenth century, but in England not until the beginning of the fifteenth.  The Inquisition was never established in England.  Edward ii. attempted to introduce it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the Templars, but his utter failure showed that the instinct of self-government was too strong in the English people to tolerate the entrusting of so much power over men’s lives to agents of the papacy.  Mediaeval England was ignorant and bigoted enough, but under a representative government which so strongly permeated society, it was impossible to set the machinery of repression to work with such deadly thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of Roman methods.  When we read the history of persecution in England, the story in itself is dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the horrors enacted in other countries, we arrive at some startling results.  During the two centuries of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James I., some 400 persons were burned at the stake, and three-fourths of these cases occurred in 1555-57, the last three years of Mary Tudor.  Now in a single province of Spain, in the single year 1482, about 2000 persons were burned.  The lowest estimates of the number slain for heresy in the Netherlands in the course of the sixteenth century place it at 75,000.  Very likely such figures are in many cases grossly exaggerated.  But after making due allowance for this, the contrast is sufficiently impressive.  In England the persecution of heretics was feeble and spasmodic, and only at one moment rose to anything like the appalling vigour which ordinarily characterized it in countries where the Inquisition was firmly established.  Now among the victims of religious persecution must necessarily be found an unusual proportion of men and women more independent than the average in their thinking, and more bold than the average in uttering their thoughts.  The Inquisition was a diabolical winnowing machine for removing from society the most flexible minds and the stoutest hearts; and among every people in which it was established for a length of time it wrought serious damage to the national character.  It ruined the fair promise of Spain, and inflicted incalculable detriment upon the fortunes of France.  No nation could afford to deprive itself of such a valuable element in its political life as was furnished in the thirteenth century by the intelligent and sturdy Cathari of southern Gaul. [Sidenote:  The Cathari, or Puritans of the Eastern Empire] [Sidenote:  The Albigenses] [Sidenote:  Effects of persecution; its feebleness in England]