can fortify
himself with the triumphant records of the non-conformers of
the past.

The peasant [at the middle of the nineteenth century], limited
in a cultural respect to his village life, thinks, feels, and
acts solely in the bounds of his native village; his thought
never goes beyond his farm and his neighbor; toward the
political, economic, or national events taking place outside of
his village, be they of his own or of a foreign country, he is
completely indifferent, and even if he has learned something of
them, this is described by him in a fantastic, mythological
way, and only in this adopted form is it added to his cultural
condition and transmitted to his descendants. Every peasant
farm produced almost exclusively for itself, only to the most
limited extent for exchange; every village formed an economic
unit, which stood in only a loose economic connection with the
outer world. Outwardly complete isolation of the village
settlements and their inhabitants from each other and from the
rest of the country and other classes of society; inwardly
complete homogeneity, one and the same economic, social, and
cultural equality of the peasant mass, no possibility of
advance for the more gifted and capable individuals, everyone
pressed down to a flat level. The peasant of one village holds
himself, if not directly hostile, at least as a rule not
cordial to the peasants of another village. The nobles living
in the same village territory even wanted to force upon the
peasants an entirely different origin, in that with the
assistance of the Biblical legend they wished to trace him from
the accursed Ham (from this the curse and insult _Ty chamie_,
"Thou Ham"), but themselves from Japhet, of better repute in
the Bible, while they attributed to the Jews, Shem as an
ancestor.

The pathetic effect of isolation on the state of knowledge is recorded
in many of the stories of runaway slaves:

With two more boys, I started for the free states. We did not
know where they were, but went to try to find them. We crossed
the Potomac and hunted round and round and round. Some one
showed us the way to Washington; but we missed it, and wandered
all night; then we found ourselves where we set out.

For our purposes race prejudice may be regarded as a form of i