But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued until today. And even there it has been greatly modified since the middle of the sixteenth century. It had to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously that even that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to inspect all printed works, was soon years behind in its task. Not to mention the flood of rag-pulp and printers-ink which was poured upon the landscape in the form of newspapers and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify, in less than a couple of thousand years. But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion how terribly this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon the rulers who force it upon their unfortunate subjects. Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman Empire, had declared himself against the persecution of authors as “a foolish thing which tended to advertise books which otherwise would never attract any public attention.” The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner had the Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden books was promoted to a sort of handy guide for those who wished to keep themselves thoroughly informed upon the subject of current literature. More than that. During the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany and in the Low Countries maintained special agents in Rome whose business it was to get hold of advance copies of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon as they had obtained these, they entrusted them to special couriers who raced across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the valuable information might be delivered to their patrons with the least possible loss of time. Then the German and the Dutch printing shops would set to work and would get out hastily printed special editions which were sold at an exorbitant profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory by an army of professional book-leggers. But the number of copies that could be carried across the frontier remained necessarily very small and in such countries as Italy and Spain and Portugal, where the Index was actually enforced until a short time ago, the results of this policy of repression became very noticeable. If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for progress, the reason was not difficult to find. Not only were the students in their universities deprived of all foreign text-books, but they were forced to use a domestic product of very inferior quality. And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from occupying themselves seriously with literature or science. For no man in his senses would undertake to write a book when he ran the risk of seeing his work “corrected” to pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond recognition by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial Board of Investigators.