labours as had, in all organised communities, been for centuries assured for other classes of producers. Against such obstacles and difficulties, the recognition of literary productions as property and the actual commercial value of the labour of literary workers had, through the first century of printing been making an assured, though fitful and interrupted, progress. Early in the 16th century, however, the rulers of the State and the authorities of the Church began to find occasion for alarm at the increasing range of influence of the printed word, and came to the conclusion that if the community was not to be undermined by heretical, dangerous, and demoralising opinions, measures must be taken to maintain supervision and control over the production of books. The interference on the part of the political rulers was fitful and intermittent, and appears at no time to have arrived at the dignity of a continued policy or system. In a number of States, while the rulers continued to claim for themselves the exclusive control of the printing-press (as was, for instance, the case with Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire), they were willing to confide to the ecclesiastics the selection of the books to be condemned and prohibited. The actual work of censorship, at least in the countries which remained Catholic, fell, therefore, more and more into the hands of the Church, and was, as a result, carried on with reference to the clerical standard of orthodoxy and morality, and to the clerical theories of what was required for the welfare of the community. In the series of the Indexes, the proportion of works of a purely political character was small as compared with the long lists of books which had been condemned on doctrinal grounds. It is in order, however, to bear in mind, as a limitation of this statement, that during the two centuries in which censorship was the most active and exerted the largest influence upon intellectual development, say from 1550 to 1750, the minds of men were directed more largely to doctrinal questions than to political matters. It was not the State but the Church whose authority and existence had been assailed and the contest was fought out over creeds and not political platforms. When, with the outbreak of the Reformation movement, it became apparent how great a range of influence was possessed by the printed sheet, the problem which confronted the authorities of the Church was certainly serious in more ways than one. For the space of fifteen centuries, the education of the people had remained almost exclusively under the direction of the Church. The faithful believers (and the unbelievers were but few) had accepted their entire intellectual sustenance at the hands of the priests. The instruction given in the parish schools instituted by the Church was almost entirely oral, although some use was made of written alphabet tables and of written psalters with the musical notations.