Catharine's correspondence, La Ferriere, urged me to make some
allowance for persons who lost their lives on the byways in attempting
to escape. That is a probable conjecture, but no evidence takes us as
high as eight thousand. I reached that conclusion many years ago, and
it is confirmed by what has since appeared, especially by the new
Histoire Generale, which accepts the limit I have mentioned. The
higher estimates commonly given are not based on a critical
investigation. The character of the event, and of its authors and
admirers, is not affected by numbers. For the massacres of September
and the revolutionary tribunal wrought less bloodshed in twenty-three
months than the French Catholics had done in about as many days. At a
time when papal agents estimated the Huguenots at one-fifth of the
entire population, the loss of five thousand, or even of eight
thousand, would not seriously weaken them. It checked their increase,
and injured mainly the royalist element among them, for Coligny was
the leader of the party that desired to support the monarchy.

Lord Clarendon has said that it was a massacre that all pious
Catholics, in the time in which it was committed, decried, abominated,
and detested. There were, of course, many in France who thought it
possible to be a good Christian without being a professional murderer,
and who sincerely desired toleration. For such men it was impossible
to continue associated with the Catholics of the League, and they were
in far closer sympathy with the Protestants. In this way a new party
arose, which was called the Politiques, and consisted of those whose
solicitude for dogma did not entirely silence the moral sense and the
voice of conscience, and who did not wish religious unity or
ascendency to be preserved by crime. It was on an ethical issue that
the separation took place, but it necessarily involved political
consequences of a definite kind.

The Politiques became promoters of the regal authority against the
aggression of the clergy, the aristocracy, and the democracy. They
had their strength among the jurists and the scholars in an age when
France was at the head of all scholarship and jurisprudence. The very
reason of their existence was the desire to resist the influence and
the spirit of Rome, and to govern France on contrary principles to
those professed by ecclesiastical authority and enforced by
ecclesiastical law. Therefore they strove to reduce the acti