certainly not developed enough, or afflicted enough, to have any history.

I believe that the masses, during the early middle age, were very well
off; quite as well off as they deserved; that is, earned for themselves.
They lived in a rough way, certainly: but roughness is not discomfort,
where the taste has not been educated. A Red Indian sleeps as well in a
wigwam as we in a spring bed; and the Irish babies thrive as well among
the peat ashes as on a Brussels carpet. Man is a very well constructed
being, and can live and multiply anywhere, provided he can keep warm, and
get pure water and enough to eat. Indeed, our Teutonic fathers must have
been comfortably off, or they could not have multiplied as they did. Even
though their numbers may have been overstated, the fact is patent, that
howsoever they were slaughtered down, by the Romans or by each other,
they rose again as out of the soil, more numerous than ever. Again and
again you read of a tribe being all but exterminated by the Romans, and
in a few years find it bursting over the Pfalzgrab or the Danube, more
numerous and terrible than before. Never believe that a people deprest
by cold, ill-feeding, and ill-training, could have conquered Europe in
the face of centuries of destructive war. Those very wars, again, may
have helped in the long run the increase of population, and for a reason
simple enough, though often overlooked. War throws land out of
cultivation; and when peace returns, the new settlers find the land
fallow, and more or less restored to its original fertility; and so
begins a period of rapid and prosperous increase. In no other way can I
explain the rate at which nations after the most desolating wars spring
up, young and strong again, like the phoenix, from their own funeral
pile. They begin afresh as the tillers of a virgin soil, fattened too
often with the ashes of burnt homesteads, and the blood of the slain.

Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough
education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived,
while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we should
say now, was never overstocked. This is the case with our own gipsies,
and with many savage tribes--the Red Indians, for instance--and accounts
for their general healthiness: the unhealthy being all dead, in the first
struggle for existence. But then these gipsies, and the Red Indians, do
not increase in numbers, but the