with knowledge that leads to no good practical result.  The buxom maiden of rural life, in former days absorbed in the duties of home, with no knowledge except that gained in a district school in the winter, with all her genial humanities in the society of equals no more aspiring than herself, is to me a far more interesting person than the pale-faced, languid, discontented, envious girl who has just returned from a school beyond her father’s means, even if she can play upon an instrument, and has worn herself thin in exhausting studies under the stimulus of ambitious competition, or the harangues of a pedant who thinks what he calls “education” to be the end of life,—­an education which reveals her own insignificance, or leads her to strive for an unattainable position.

I am forced to make these remarks to show that the Mediaeval peasant was not necessarily miserable because he was ignorant, or isolated, or poor.  In so doing I may excite the wrath of some who think a little knowledge is not a dangerous thing, and may appear to be throwing cold water on one of the noblest endeavors of modern times.  But I do not sneer at education.  I only seek to show that it will not make people happy, unless it is directed into useful channels; and that even ignorance may be bliss when it is folly to be wise.  A benevolent Providence tempers all conditions to the necessities of the times.  The peasantry of Europe became earnest and stalwart warriors and farmers, even under the grinding despotism of feudal masters.  With their beer and brown bread, and a fowl in the pot on a Sunday, they grew up to be hardy, bold, strong, healthy, and industrious.  They furnished a material on which Christianity and a future civilization could work.  They became patriotic, religious, and kind-hearted.  They learned to bear their evils in patience.  They were more cheerful than the laboring classes of our day, with their partial education,—­ although we may console ourselves with the reflection that these are passing through the fermenting processes of a transition from a lower to a higher grade of living.  Look at the picture of them which art has handed down:  their faces are ruddy, genial, sympathetic, although coarse and vulgar and boorish.  And they learned to accept the inequalities of life without repining insolence.  They were humble, and felt that there were actually some people in the world superior to themselves.  I do not paint their condition as desirable or interesting by our standard, but as endurable.  They were doubtless very ignorant; but would knowledge have made them any happier?  Knowledge is for those who can climb by it to positions of honor and usefulness, not for those who cannot rise above the condition in which they were born,—­not for those who will be snubbed and humiliated and put down by arrogant wealth and birth.  Better be unconscious of suffering, than conscious of wrongs which cannot be redressed.