United States or Slovakia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


They were thus hardened into a gross contentment dangerous for themselves, and into an indifference which was a menace to others. The great agricultural populations living in various degrees of serfdom still groaned under the artificial oppressions of a society which had passed away.

The princes alone knew how to profit by the national prostration. Enriched by the confiscation of ecclesiastical property in the sixteenth century and relieved of meddlesome interference on the part of the emperor or the Diet, they utilized the decline of the middle class and the dismal serfdom of the peasantry to exalt their personal political power.

Forthwith he proceeded to confer upon his new subjects the favors of the Napoleonic regime: he decreed equality before the law, individual liberties, abolition of feudalism and serfdom, educational reforms, suppression of the Inquisition, diminution of monasteries, confiscation of church property, public improvements, and, last but not least, the vigorous enforcement of the Continental System.

All that we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediæval poets, noble and plebeian, French, Provençal, and German, against the brutishness, the cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose name becomes synonymous with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness; whose punishment is prayed for from the God whom he outrages by his very existence; a hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred can assume, whose echoes reached even countries like Tuscany, where serfdom was well nigh unknown, and have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, nay, by the peasants against themselves.

The "gentleman" never soils his high-born hands with dirty work; in other words, he holds himself severely aloof from the trades and handicrafts which constitute civilisation. The arts that train and educate hand, eye, and brain he ignorantly despises. In the early middle ages he did not even condescend to read and write, those inferior accomplishments being badges of serfdom.

His fierce and cruel temper had broken forth again and again in acts of brutality or oppression from which there was practically no redress. Free as the Gascon peasant was from much or the serfdom and feudal servitude of other lands, he was in some ways worse off than the serf, when he chanced to have roused the anger of some great man of the neighbourhood.

In this lies the whole secret. Therefore a society aiming at the well-being of all, and at the possibility of all enjoying life in all its manifestations, will give voluntary work, which will be infinitely superior and yield far more than work has produced up till now under the goad of slavery, serfdom, or wagedom.

He was given presents, he was congratulated, his hands were kissed at the front door and at the back door by servants, workmen from the factory, old women and young girls and peasants; the latter, in memory of the days of serfdom, hung around the tables in front of the house, spread out with pies and small bottles of vodka.

I would say that motion is liberty. The serfdom of the middle ages was in good degree maintained by binding man to the soil. Astriction to the soil was at once the foundation and the symbol of that serfdom. The baron became the master of the body of the man; he became also the master of his mental ideas.

Their means were not great, but their peasants supplied them several times a year with all the live stock and provisions they needed, just as in the days of serfdom, and their bailiff appeared once a year with the rents and a couple of woodcocks, supposed to have been shot in the master's forests, of which, in reality, not a trace remained.