xpression. As they would rather speak than
have to write, so they prefer hearing to reading, and they get much more
good from it, because they can ask a question when the matter has not
been made clear to them.

One of the best ways of interesting and instructing your intellectual
inferiors is to give them an account of your travels. All people like to
hear a traveller tell his own tale, and whilst he is telling it he may
slip in a good deal of information about many things, and much sound
doctrine. Accounts of foreign countries, even when you have not seen
them personally, nearly always awaken a lively interest, especially if
you are able to give your hearers detailed descriptions of the life led
by foreigners who occupy positions corresponding to their own. Peasants
can be made to take an interest in astronomy even, though you cannot
tell them anything about the peasants in Jupiter and Mars, and there is
always, at starting, the great difficulty of persuading them to trust
science about the motion and rotundity of the earth.

A very direct form of intellectual charity is that of gratuitous
teaching, both in classes and by public lectures, open to all comers. A
great deal of light has in this way been spread abroad in cities, but in
country villages there is little encouragement to enterprises of this
kind, the intelligence of farm laborers being less awakened than that of
the corresponding urban population. Let us remember, however, that one
of the very highest and last achievements of the cultivated intellect is
the art of conveying to the uncultivated, the untaught, the unprepared,
the best and noblest knowledge which they are capable of assimilating.
No one who, like the writer of these pages, has lived much in the
country, and much amongst a densely ignorant peasantry, will be likely
in any plans of enlightenment to err far on the side of enthusiastic
hopefulness. The mind of a farm laborer, or that of a small farmer, is
almost always sure to be a remarkably stiff soil, in which few
intellectual conceptions can take root; yet these few may make the
difference between an existence worthy of a man, and one that differs
from the existence of a brute in little beyond the possession of
articulate language. We to whom the rich inheritance of intellectual
humanity is so familiar as to have lost much of its freshness, are
liable to underrate the value of thoughts and discoveries which to us
have for years seemed commonpl