they were utter failures when brought
into practice.

Of Joan of Arc

Some people say the world is getting no better, but if we take a dip
into history and consider the conditions which prevailed there from the
earliest times up to only a few hundred years ago, we will find a race
of human beings which in no wise resemble the present output except in
form and stature. And our own forefathers--the people of the British
Isles, the Anglo-Saxons who are to-day leading in the social world--were
not one iota better throughout those pages than many of the smallest and
most unpretentious of obscure tribes living here and there in ignorant,
local isolation. One of the strongest points in our argument is the fact
that history, as we have it, is composed of the clang of battles and the
private lives of kings and despots. The ordinary, everyday life of the
peasant people--the working classes--the backbone of the nation, so to
speak--was beneath the consideration of the historian throughout all
times. The only virtue, in his estimation, was a strong arm--a large
army to murder and destroy property. And the life of the historian must
needs reflect that of the people. There is no doubt that in a great
majority they were of a cruel, murderous nature. We get rare glimpses,
however (at intervals of sometimes hundreds of years), of the doings,
manners, and customs, likes and dislikes of the common people, that we
can rely upon as authentic; the rest is poetry and legend, and,
although typical, are relations of incidents that did not really occur.

There is no doubt that, although it has been withheld, there was a great
deal of virtue, which blushed and bloomed unseen, amid all this blood
and war.

As though by accident the historian who immortalized Joan of Arc has let
slip a few words in connection with this heroine's early life that are
more valuable to us than page upon page of some of our so-called
history. "Jeanne d'Arc was the child of a laborer of Domremy, a little
village on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne. Just without the
cottage where she was born began the great woods of the Vosges, where
the children of Domremy drank in poetry and legend from fairy ring and
haunted well, hung their flower garlands on the sacred trees and sang
songs to the good people who might not drink of the fountain because of
their sins. Jeanne loved the forest; its birds and beasts came lovingly
to her at her childish call. But at home