The salient points of his character are his devotion to the three great needs of humanity as they present themselves in his time. He made it the aim of his life that men should have justice, and education, and when for any misfortune they needed it,--charity; and every portion of his career is taken up with successful achievement in these great departments of social action. It is well known that when he became conscious that the judges sometimes abused their power and gave sentences for partial reasons, the monarch himself took up the onerous duty of hearing appeals and succeeded in making the judges of his kingdom realize, that only the strictest justice would save them from the king's displeasure, and condign punishment. For an unjust judge there was short shrift. The old tree at Versailles, under which he used to hear the causes of the poor who appealed to him, stood for many centuries as a reminder of Louis' precious effort to make the dispensing of justice equal to all men. When the duty of hearing appeals took up too much of his time it was transferred to worthy shoulders, and so the important phase of jurisprudence in France relating to appeals, came to be thoroughly established as a part of the organic law of the kingdom. {opp290} [Illustration] NOTRE DAME (PARIS) As regards education, too much can not be said of Louis' influence. It is to him more than to anybody else that the University of Paris owes the success it achieved as a great institution of learning at the end of the Thirteenth Century. Had the monarch been opposed to the spread of education with any idea that it might possibly undermine his authority, had he even been indifferent to it, Paris would not have come to be the educational center of the world. As it was, Louis not only encouraged it in every way, but also acted as the patron of great {291} subsidiary institutions which were to add to its prestige and enhance its facilities. Among the most noteworthy is the Sorbonne. La Sainte Chapelle deserves to be mentioned, however, and the library attached to it, which owed its foundation and development to Louis, were important factors in attracting students to Paris and in furnishing them interestingly suggestive material for thought and the development of taste during their residence there. His patronage of Vincent of Beauvais, the encyclopedist, was but a further manifestation of his interest in everything educational. His benefactions to the Hotel Dieu must be considered rather under the head of charity, and yet they also serve to represent his encouragement of medical education and of the proper care for the poor in educated hands.