less sordid. The French peasant as Balzac has painted him, the Spanish villager as Galdos describes him,[1] are very intense types of what country toil tends to produce everywhere an absolute concentration of the mind upon small economies, or, it may be, small pilferings, and a thorough deadening of the moral sense. Countries where the wage-rate is low, and where the peasant is disinclined to move on the chance of bettering himself, seem to be those in which the feeling is strongest, and the Scotchman, who has always had a harder struggle for existence than his Southern neighbour, is, in spite of his superior self-reliance, habitually more frugal than the Englishman. On the other hand, countries where life is easy, and where splendid chances are numerous—such countries as California and parts of Australia have been for a generation—may possess a free-handed, speculative race of countrymen—miners, and even yeomen—with none of the economical characteristics of the European peasant. The greater frugality of the country population is therefore due to its circumstances and its needs, and the comparative lavishness of town life is chiefly noticeable in cities where wealth circulates freely, and where chances are numerous. There is reason to suppose, accordingly, that this
- ↑ "There has been much declamation against the materialism of cities … but there is a more terrible plague in the materialism of villages, which petrifies millions of human beings, killing all noble ambition in them, and confining them within the circle of a mechanical, brutal, and gloomy existence. … For the covetous villager there is no moral law, or religion, or clear notion of right. Under his hypocritical frankness is concealed a sombre arithmetic, which, for acuteness and perspicacity, surpasses all that the cleverest mathematicians have devised. A villager who is enamoured of coppers, and dreams of changing them into silver, to convert them later 011 into gold, is the most ignoble beast conceivable; for he has all the man's malicious and subtle imaginings, and a terrible persistency of aim."—Galdos, Marianela, pp. 41, 42.
