World Leaders Biography

We saw in our last letter that five different classes were formed. The biggest class was that of the peasants and laborers. The peasants plowed the land and tilled the soil and grew the food. If the peasantry had not done so and no one else had worked on the land, there would have been no food, or at any rate very little food. So the peasants were very important. Without them, everybody would have starved. The laborers also did useful work on the land and in the towns. But although these people did such important work, and were so necessary to everybody, they got very little out of it. Most of what they produced went to others, especially to the king and his class of people, including the nobles. The king and his class, as we have seen, had a great deal of power. During the days of the early tribes, the land belonged to the whole tribe, and not to any one person. But as the king's class grew in power, they said that the land belonged to them. They became the landlords, and the pe...

Boys and girls and even grown-ups are often taught history in a peculiar way. They learn the names of kings and others, and dates of battle and the like. But surely history does not consist of battle and a few persons who became kings and generals. History should tell us of the people of a country; how they lived, what they did, and what they thought. It should tell us of their joys and sorrows; of their difficulties and how they overcame them. And if we study history in this way we can learn a lot from it. If we have to face the same kind of difficulty or trouble, our reading of history may help us to get over it. Especially, our study of past times will help us in finding out if people have been getting better and better or worse; if there has been progressed or not. Of course, one must try to learn something from the lives of great men and women of past times. But we must also try to learn what the condition of various kinds of people in olden days was. I have written to y...