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In the political sphere they have retained the weakness produced by ages of political serfage, and are still the debris of broken clans, with little about them of the genuine republican, apt blindly to follow the leader who stands to them as a chief, while they are instinctively hostile to law and government as their immemorial oppressors in their native land.
On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags.
It has frequently been remarked, and with much truth though the indiscriminate application of the principle has often led to unjustifiable legislative inactivity that the practical result of institutions depends less on the intrinsic abstract nature of the institutions themselves than on the character of those who work them. So it was with serfage.
It is better to abolish serfage from above than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below. I request you, gentlemen, to consider how this can be put into execution, and to submit my words to the Noblesse for their consideration." These words were intended to sound the Noblesse and induce them to make a voluntary proposal, but they had not the desired effect.
Some interesting scenes followed their return. The gates of the Abbey of St. Albans were forced open, and a throng of townsmen crowded in, led by one William Grindcobbe, who compelled the abbot to deliver up the charters which held the town in serfage to the abbey. Then they burst into the cloister, sought the millstones which the courts had declared should alone grind corn at St.
On the Continent, and especially along the Rhine, the struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the older burghers had been complete. In Köln the craftsmen had been reduced to all but serfage, and the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the ears of "the man without heart or honour who lives by his toil."
From all the members he demanded a complete forgetfulness of former differences and a conscientious execution of his orders; "For you must remember," he significantly added, "that in Russia laws are made by the Autocratic Power." From an historical review of the question he drew the conclusion that "the Autocratic Power created serfage, and the Autocratic Power ought to abolish it."
And to this general principle there was an important corollary: if severe restrictions were to be placed on free migration, it would be necessary to provide the peasantry with land in the immediate vicinity of the villages; otherwise they must inevitably fall back under the power of the proprietors, and a new and worse kind of serfage would thus be created.
It is the abolition of the proletarian condition; abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name; the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as slavery was of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations, all our joys.
Its main features were, a period of transition from serfage to personal liberty, extending through twelve or fourteen years, the arrival of the serf at personal freedom, with ownership of his cabin and the bit of land attached to it, the gradual reimbursement of masters by serfs, and after this advance to personal liberty, an advance by easy steps to a sort of political liberty.
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