Nothing was done to favor their intellectual development; indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant.

Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields.

Intercommunication and locomotion, which tend so powerfully to expand the ideas, received no encouragement; the majority of men died without ever having ventured out of the neighborhood in which they were born.

For them there was no hope of personal improvement, none of the bettering of their lot; there were no comprehensive schemes for the avoidance of individual want, none for the resistance of famines.
Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries.

Bad food, wretched clothing, inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result, and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled.
If policy may be held accountable as much for the births it prevents as for the deaths it occasions, what a great responsibility there is here! In this investigation of the influence of Catholicism, we must carefully keep separate what it did for the people and what it did for itself.
When we think of the stately monastery, an embodiment of luxury, with its closely-mown lawns, its gardens and bowers, its fountains and many murmuring streams, we must connect it not with the ague-stricken peasant dying without help in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey, his hawk and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder.