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The cultivators were, in fact, rack-rented up to the minimum of subsistence. but this much was insured to them; in other words, they were predial serfs.

Others speak of the Britons, not as extirpated, but as reduced to a state of slavery; and here these writers fix the origin of personal and predial servitude in England. I shall lay fairly before the reader all I have been able to discover concerning the existence or condition of this unhappy people.

It is true that these villages are always in theory the patrimony of some noble proprietor and the peasants have within historical times been converted into the predial, and to a great extent into the personal, serfs of the seignior.

Others speak of the Britons, not as extirpated, but as reduced to a state of slavery; and here these writers fix the origin of personal and predial servitude in England. I shall lay fairly before the reader all I have been able to discover concerning the existence or condition of this unhappy people.

Before the rapid increase of population had forced governments to study political economy and to investigate the means of subsisting a people, statesmen had contented themselves by attributing to political causes these predial disturbances, and by recommending for them political remedies.

A plebeian oligarchy is a monster; and no people, not absolutely domestic or predial slaves, will long endure it. The Protestants of Ireland are not alone sufficiently the people to form a democracy; and they are too numerous to answer the ends and purposes of an aristocracy. Admiration, that first source of obedience, can be only the claim or the imposture of the few.

The predial groove might indeed nourish kindly the infant seeds and shoots of the peculiar vegetable to which it was appropriated, but was not a comfortable place of repose for adult man.

His cabinet immediately recognized a distinction between political and predial sources of disorder. The first, they resolved into a mere system of agitation, no longer justifiable by the circumstances, and this they determined to put down. The second, they sought in the conditions under which land was occupied, and these they determined to investigate.

Yet for myself I will say was one only redeeming quality, and that was the pure love I bore to my solitary orphaned child, the little Margery. Now, our Vicar a patient and God-fearing man, for all his predial tithes were impropriated by his lord, that was an absentee and a sheriff in London did little to stem that current of lewdness that had set in strong with the Restoration.

But this particular description of slavery does not, I believe, now exist in Europe, nor in any other civilized portion of the habitable globe. It is not a predial slavery. It is not analogous to the case of the predial slaves, or slaves glebae adscripti of Russia, or Hungary, or other states.