The mechanics of modern culture is complicated. The individual has access to materials outside his group, from the world at large. His consciousness is built up not only by word of mouth but by the printed page. He may live as much in German books as in fireside conversation. Much more mail is handled every day in the New York post-office than was sent out by all the thirteen states in a year at the close of the eighteenth century. But by reason of poverty, geographical isolation, caste feeling, or "pathos," individuals, communities, and races may be excluded from some of the stimulations and copies which enter into a high grade of mind. The savage, the Negro, the peasant, the slum dwellers, and the white woman are notable sufferers by exclusion. Easy communication of ideas favors differentiation of a rational and functional sort, as distinguished from the random variations fostered by isolation. And it must be remembered that any sort is rational and functional that really commends itself to the human spirit. Even revolt from an ascendant type is easier now than formerly because the rebel can fortify himself with the triumphant records of the non-conformers of the past. The peasant [at the middle of the nineteenth century], limited in a cultural respect to his village life, thinks, feels, and acts solely in the bounds of his native village; his thought never goes beyond his farm and his neighbor; toward the political, economic, or national events taking place outside of his village, be they of his own or of a foreign country, he is completely indifferent, and even if he has learned something of them, this is described by him in a fantastic, mythological way, and only in this adopted form is it added to his cultural condition and transmitted to his descendants. Every peasant farm produced almost exclusively for itself, only to the most limited extent for exchange; every village formed an economic unit, which stood in only a loose economic connection with the outer world. Outwardly complete isolation of the village settlements and their inhabitants from each other and from the rest of the country and other classes of society; inwardly complete homogeneity, one and the same economic, social, and cultural equality of the peasant mass, no possibility of advance for the more gifted and capable individuals, everyone pressed down to a flat level. The peasant of one village holds himself, if not directly hostile, at least as a rule not cordial to the peasants of another village. The nobles living in the same village territory even wanted to force upon the peasants an entirely different origin, in that with the assistance of the Biblical legend they wished to trace him from the accursed Ham (from this the curse and insult _Ty chamie_,