est way of
maintaining him in his stupidity, however it may shake his prejudice.

Another questionable plan for elevating the peasant is the supposed
elevation of the clerical character by preventing the clergyman from
cultivating more than a trifling part of the land attached to his
benefice; that he may be as much as possible of a scientific theologian,
and as little as possible of a peasant. In this, Riehl observes, lies
one great source of weakness to the Protestant Church as compared with
the Catholic, which finds the great majority of its priests among the
lower orders; and we have had the opportunity of making an analogous
comparison in England, where many of us can remember country districts in
which the great mass of the people were christianized by illiterate
Methodist and Independent ministers, while the influence of the parish
clergyman among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old women in
scarlet cloaks and a few exceptional church-going laborers.

Bearing in mind the general characteristics of the German peasant, it is
easy to understand his relation to the revolutionary ideas and
revolutionary movements of modern times. The peasant, in Germany as
elsewhere, is a born grumbler. He has always plenty of grievances in his
pocket, but he does not generalize those grievances; he does not complain
of "government" or "society," probably because he has good reason to
complain of the burgomaster. When a few sparks from the first French
Revolution fell among the German peasantry, and in certain villages of
Saxony the country people assembled together to write down their demands,
there was no glimpse in their petition of the "universal rights of man,"
but simply of their own particular affairs as Saxon peasants. Again,
after the July revolution of 1830, there were many insignificant peasant
insurrections; but the object of almost all was the removal of local
grievances. Toll-houses were pulled down; stamped paper was destroyed;
in some places there was a persecution of wild boars, in others, of that
plentiful tame animal, the German _Rath_, or councillor who is never
called into council. But in 1848 it seemed as if the movements of the
peasants had taken a new character; in the small western states of
Germany it seemed as if the whole class of peasantry was in insurrection.
But, in fact, the peasant did not know the meaning of the part he was
playing. He had heard that everything was being set right in