ith such an array of scrofula and cutaneous disorders as are horrible
to think on. The household books of expenditure of the noblest families
in England in the fourteenth century scarcely show as much linen used
annually among a hundred people as would serve now for one mechanic.
People of the highest rank slept naked to save night-clothes. If in
Flanders or in Italy we find during their high prosperity some
exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is
none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar
vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess
at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the
poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out
of the actual, and with all the tact of repulsion avoided common facts.

But it is with the multitude that truth and common sense and humanity
have to deal. And here, whether in Greece or in England, in Italy or in
France, lies in the past an abyss of horror whose greatest wonder is,
that we, who are only some three centuries distant, know so little of
it. There is a favorite compensative theory that man is miraculously
self-adaptive to all circumstances, and that deprived of modern comforts
and luxuries he would only become more vigorous and independent--that in
fact he was on the whole considerably happier under a feudal baron than
he has been since. I will believe in this when I find that a man who has
exchanged a stinging gout for a mere rheumatism finds himself entirely
free from pain. No, the serfs of the Middle Ages were in no sense happy.
Stifled moans of misery, a sense of their unutterable agonies, steal up
from proverb and by-corners of history--we feel that they were more
miserable than jail prisoners at the present day--for then, as now, man
groaned at being an inferior, and he had much more than that to groan
over in those days of strifes and dirt. And yet every one of those serfs
was God's child, as well as the baron who enslaved him. To himself he
was a world with an eternity, and of as much importance as all other
men. Through what strange heresies and insurrections, based either on
innate passion or religious conviction, do we not find Republicanism
bursting out in every age, from remote Etruscan rebellions down to
Peasants' wars, Anabaptist uprisings, and Jack Cade out-flamings. It was
always there, that sense of political equality and right--it always