ure was sunk to a low ebb at the decadence of the Roman
Empire. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should
have tilled the land spurned the plow as degrading. The monks left
their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The
effort was magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but
despised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty.
So well recognized were the blessings they brought, that an old
German proverb among the peasants runs, 'It is good to live under
the crozier.' They ennobled manual labor, which, in a degenerate
Roman world, had been performed exclusively by slaves, and among the
barbarians by women. For the monks it is no exaggeration to say that
the cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over a
whole country. The abbots and superiors set the example, and
stripping off their sacerdotal robes, toiled as common laborers.
Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in the prologue to the
"Canterbury Tales":

"'This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf
That first he wroughte and after that he taughte.'

"When a Papal messenger came in haste to consult the Abbot Equutius
on important matters of the Church, he was not to be found anywhere,
but was finally discovered in the valley cutting hay. Under such
guidance and such example the monks upheld and taught everywhere the
dignity of labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy
and intelligent activity of freemen often of high birth, and clothed
with the double authority of the priesthood and of hereditary
nobility, and, second, by associating under the Benedictine habit
sons of kings, princes, and nobles with the rudest labors of
peasants and serfs."

President Goodell has told the story of how the monks cleared
and reclaimed the land, transformed fens into forests, marshes
into gardens, and swamps into beautiful domains. As he says:

"A swamp was of no value. It was a source of pestilence. But it was
just the place for a monastery because it made life especially hard,
and so the monks carried in earth and stone and made a foundation,
and built their convent, and then set to work to dyke and drain and
fill up the swamp, till they had turned it into fertile plow land
and the pestilence had ceased."

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President Goodell did not hesitate to proclaim that the monasteries
were the early representatives of our