ABSTRACT
The peasantry are a kind of resting place in the long march from primitive tribal life to a world of universal urbanity. In peasant communities wealth is a good not because it enables a man to have power over another or to humiliate a neighbor with extravagances of personal consumption. The warfare of the Iliad and the Mahabharata expresses a view of life different from that of the peasant. In peasant life, where work and practical good sense join with a spirit of decent restraint, there is little room for sexual exploit as a sport or for bravado. Sex in peasant communities connects in one direction with the generative powers of nature and the divine dispensation of fertility, and in the other with the ways of their own livestock. The peasant's support to the growth of human life, to its widening and its deepening, was of another kind also. The peasant preserved the coherent style of life of small societies.
