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The freemen in the eleventh century began to rebel against fighting with a despised serf, and refused the duel, whereupon early in the next century the king and his court decided that the serfs might lawfully testify and fight against freemen, and whoso refused the trial by battle should lose his suit and suffer excommunication.
The official style required that all persons presenting petitions should subscribe themselves "Your Majesty's humble serf." This formula she abolished, and boasted that she had cast out the word serf from the Russian language. Poets and philosophers echoed this boast over Europe and the serfs waited. The great Empress spurred hope by another movement.
You shall fill a cart high with faggots, and in it shall conceal a dozen of your best men. You, dressed as a serf, shall drive the oxen, and when you reach the castle shall say, in answer to the hail of the sentry, that you are bringing in the tribute of wood of your master the franklin of Hopeburn.
"With each year we may expect reforms, and where will they strike first if not in the cities? Nicholas already has plans under consideration, whereby the condition of the serfs may be bettered." "How will that benefit our race?" "How? I will tell you. The serf persecutes the Jew because he is himself persecuted by the nobility.
And you are all proud of this liberty a liberty at which the despised serf in Russia or the man of the street in London sneers there is to-day more individual liberty in England and Germany than in the United States. Don't smile! I can prove it. As for France or Italy they are a hundred years ahead of you in municipal government. But I shan't talk blue-books at you, Arthur!"
Half an hour later, the great red slumber-flag floated over the castle. All slept, except the serf with the wounded arm, the nervous Grand Marshal, and Simon Petrovich with his band of dramatists, guarded by the indefatigable Sasha.
The free Frisians, nearest blood-relations of, in this respect, the less favoured Anglo-Saxons, had never bowed the knee to the feudal system, nor worn nor caused to be worn the collar of the serf.
"All the worse for them," said the prince. "Is then a serf in Skaane to have more rights under the law than a nobleman in the rest of Denmark? Let the law for the serf be theirs." And the judgment stood.
I bled and cried under all those horrible shadows. Lo! it was there that they precipitated me, under the crush of those who come and go, under the trampling feet of men, under the undermost of the human race, lower than the serf, baser than the serving man, lower than the felon, lower than the slave, at the spot where Chaos becomes a sewer, in which I was engulfed.
Even within the same race there was no brotherhood. In effect the clergy as a body did not insist that the noble was a brother of the serf, and did not exact fraternal treatment of the serf. Thus the phrase, "the brotherhood of man," which had been a most prominent and active principle of early Christianity, became little more than a useless theological thesis.
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