The thought of the happy, quiet-minded people that might be living there, leading their simple lives, so little affected by the current of the world, brought much peace into Hugh's mind. It seemed to him a very beautiful thing, with something ancient and tranquil about it. It was all utterly remote from ambition and adventure, and even from intellectual efficiency; and here Hugh felt himself in a dilemma. His faith did not permit him to doubt that the civilisation and development of the world were in accordance with the purpose of God on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, that expansion brought with it social conditions and problems that appeared to him of an essentially ugly kind, as the herding of human beings into cities, the din and dirt of factories, the millions of lives that were lived under almost servile conditions; and so much of that sad labour was directed to wrong ends, to aggrandisement, to personal luxury, to increasing the comfort of oligarchies. The simple life of the countryside seemed a better ideal, and yet the lot of the rustic day-labourer was both dull and hard. It looked sweet enough on a day of high summer, such as this, when a man need ask for nothing to better than to be taken and kept out of doors; but the thought of the farm-hand rising in a cheerless wintry dawn, putting on his foul and stiffened habiliments, setting out in a chilly drizzle to uproot a turnip-field, row by row, with no one to talk to and nothing to look forward to but an evening in a tiny cottage-kitchen, full of noisy children--no one could say that this was an ideal life, and he did not wonder that the young men flocked to the towns, where there was at all events some stir, some amusement. That was the dark side of popular education, of easy communications, of newspapers, that it made men discontented with quiet life, without supplying them with intellectual resources.