magistrates and rulers, and lastly, the knights and warriors.
Bohemian writers have often remarked that these divisions appear somewhat arbitrary. It is, for instance, strange that matrimony should appear as an "estate" in distinction from other professions or callings. On the other hand, the reader is surprised that Komensky, writing in a country so largely agricultural as Bohemia, should not have mentioned the peasantry as one of the "estates." I venture a conjecture concerning this matter. The sympathy that Slavic writers—from Chelcicky to Count Tolstoy—have always expressed for the peasants, "the humble," is very evident in Komensky also. I need only refer to such passages in the "Labyrinth" as p. 306, when the writer refers to the cruel suffering that the Bohemian peasants underwent at the hands of the lords, and yet more of the overseers, whom the lords—often absentees—placed over them; and to the passage (p. 307) where the peasants receive the ironic answer to their complaints, "that if by willingness, compliance, and true attachment to their superiors and rulers, they could gain their favour, they should be allowed to enjoy it." As the main purpose of the earlier part of the "Labyrinth" is to prove that all professions are but vanity, and contain more evil than good, there was here no place for the peasants, who were humble by necessity, and had willingly or unwillingly to follow Komensky's precept, that it is better to obey than to rule.
