"Serfdom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... uttered a word about herself, except to say that her name was Tchi. But although Tong had such awe of her that while her eyes were upon him he was as one having no will of his own, he loved her unspeakably; and the thought of his serfdom ceased to weigh upon him from the hour of his marriage. As through magic the little dwelling had become transformed: its misery was masked with charming paper devices,—with dainty decorations created out of nothing by that pretty jugglery of which ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... for a moment regret our philanthropical move, despite its awful waste of life and gold. England, however can do her duty to Africa without cant, and humbug, and nonsense about the 'sin and crime of slavery.' Serfdom, like cannibalism and polygamy, are the steps by which human society rose to its present status: to abuse them is ignorantly to kick down the ladder. The spirit of Christianity may tend to abolish servitude; ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... St Petersburg has probably cramped the growth of Russian power. Even Poland has only given her a desert, a kingdom scantily cultivated, scantily peopled, discontented serfdom and a broken frontier. Yet all may be for the best. Moscow, as the head of the Empire, might have made her too powerful, and Europe might have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... suffered severely by Peter's reforms. The peasants as tenants of the large landowners had enjoyed some liberty and were legally free men; they were by him assigned to the soil, which they were not permitted to leave. Thus they, too, passed into serfdom. If the proprietor sold the estate, the rural population (p. 166) went with it. The owners paid a poll-tax for their serfs. These unfortunates could also be sold without the land, but the czar made a law ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... announcement of your plan," was one of Napoleon's own principles, and it was his intention so to proceed in this case. At Dresden, also, was promulgated the new constitution of Warsaw. Modeled on that of France, it was far from liberal; but it abolished serfdom, made all citizens equal before the law, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... announced. It will not end with the mere annihilation of slavery as an institution; it will affect the relations of the poor and the rich, the unlucky and the prosperous, in every Christian country until justice and love become dominant principles. What a stride from Roman slavery to mediaeval serfdom! How benignant the attitude of the church, in all ages, to the poor man! The son of a peasant becomes a priest, and rises, in the Christian hierarchy, to become a ruler of the world. There was no way for a poor peasant ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... finally secured me, for the sum of twenty-five dollars. A kind of speculative interest was attached to my nativity. Had my sale not been effected previous to my appearance in the world, I should have become the property of my mother's master, who, in accordance with the laws of serfdom, might then dispose of me, if he pleased, at a rate far exceeding my mother's slender savings; and, if nature had destined me for a healthy boy instead of a girl, my value ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... Godunof The Way to Power A Boyar Tsar of Russia Serfdom Created The False Dmitri Mikhail ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... exertions; it did not get beyond gossip. And yet the story is a very significant one. You heard, no doubt, Avdotya Romanovna, when you were with them the story of the servant Philip who died of ill treatment he received six years ago, before the abolition of serfdom." ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... oppressed and the down-trodden? Among those whose heritage of freedom you have torn from them? What do they call you—those whom you have forced into serfdom?" For a fleeting instant the girl caught the faintest flicker, a tiny twinkle of amusement, in the steely eyes. But, when the man answered, his eyes ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... love. I had not lost it; I had thought that here it was simply a useless art. When first I saw you I loved you as a boy loves. I ran hither and thither at your slightest bidding; I was the veriest slave, and I was happy in my serfdom. You could have asked me any task, and I should have accomplished it. You were in my thoughts day and night; not only because I loved you, but because you had cast a veil about you. And of all enchanting mysteries ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... During the first week of his reign he abolished torture in trials, made the administration of law more equitable, instituted a limited freedom for the press, [2] and extended religious toleration. [3] He also partially abolished serfdom on the royal domains, and tried to uplift the peasantry and citizen classes, but in this he met with bitter opposition from the nobles of his realm. He built roads, canals, and bridges, encouraged skilled artisans ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... way to make a wild beast cower is to look him in the eye, but the best way to treat the temptations I have described is to turn your back and fly! O! my heart aches! I see men struggling to get out of the serfdom of bad habits, and I want to help them. I have knelt with them and heard their cry for help. I have had them put one hand on each of my shoulders, and look me in the eye, with an agony of earnestness that the judgment shall have no power ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... company, now; he walked in a leash of conspicuous captives. These unfortunates followed Laura helplessly, for whenever she took a prisoner he remained her slave henceforth. Sometimes they chafed in their bondage; sometimes they tore themselves free and said their serfdom was ended; but sooner or later they always came back penitent and worshiping. Laura pursued her usual course: she encouraged Mr. Buckstone by turns, and by turns she harassed him; she exalted him to the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... could not go from one tract to another, neither leave those which they cultivated, and raised. They paid tribute to nobody else but the master of the land." This tends to show that there existed not an established obligation, a serfdom, but a voluntary contract, that the "tlalmaites" were not ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... of Germany, for instance, at the close of the eighteenth century, was serfdom as yet completely abolished. Nothing of the kind had existed in France for a long period of time. The peasant came, and went, and bought and sold, and dealt and laboured as he pleased. The last traces ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... career in St. Petersburg, the early forties of last century, was one of a great revival of idealism in Russia. The iron reaction of the then Emperor Nicholas I. made independent political activity an impossibility. But the horrible and degrading conditions of serfdom which existed at that time, and which cast a blight upon the energy and dignity of the Russian nation, nourished feelings of grief and indignation in the noblest minds of the educated classes, and, unable to struggle for their principles in the field ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... generally throughout your experience in the parish?-I don't see any improvement in that respect, taking the whole population. There might be one here and one there who have got free of debt this year, because it has been an exceptionally good year in cattle; but, taking them as the same state of serfdom as they were twenty-three years ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... woman has not been defrauded of elementary natural rights; that Justice, as distinguished from egalitarian equity, does not prescribe that she should be admitted to the suffrage; and that her status is not, as is dishonestly alleged, a status of serfdom or slavery. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... to the inland province of Dalecarlia, where most of the previous movements on behalf of national liberty had originated, and having cleared the country of foreign invaders, chiefly by the help of an aroused peasantry that had never known the yoke of serfdom, he was elected king at a Riksdag held in the little city of Straengnaes, not far from Stockholm, ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... Grellet and William Allen, men deeply imbued with the spirit of Woolman, and upon whom it might almost be said his mantle had fallen, that drew the attention of Alexander I. of Russia to the importance of taking measures for the abolition of serfdom, an object the accomplishment of which the wars during his reign prevented, but which, left as a legacy of duty, has been peaceably effected by his namesake, Alexander II. In the history of emancipation in our own country evidences of the same original impulse of humanity are not wanting. In 1790 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... favor is a free granting, a giving and taking without speculation. No prostitution; for the economic and social power of one person over another exists no longer, and with the falling off of external oppression many an internal serfdom of feeling will be done away with, which often is only the reflex of hard external compulsion. Then the longing of large hearts may take tangible shape. Utopias are arrows aimed into the future, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... industrial system ten millions of Asiatics, either directly, or through their products sold in open competition with our own; or, if we do not do that, to hold them, ascribed to the soil in a sort of old Saxon serfdom, with the function assigned them of consuming our surplus products, but without in return sending us theirs. The great counterbalancing consideration will not, of course, be forgotten that, like ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... and the disturbed political and religious conditions impelled many groups in western Europe to emigrate to new lands after the geographical discoveries that ushered in the sixteenth century. They were free to go, for serfdom was disappearing from most of the European countries. The village life of Europe was transplanted to America. In the South the mediaeval feudal village became the agricultural plantation, where the planter lived on his own estate surrounded by the rude cabins of his ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... to you, no doubt, Edmund, and it appears only natural that some men should be born to rule and others to labour, but this might be so even without serfdom, since, as you know, the poorer freemen labour just as do the serfs, only they receive a somewhat larger guerdon for their toil; but had the two races mixed more closely together, had serfdom been abolished and all men been free and capable of bearing arms, we should have been able ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... compete successfully for them. Then if woman were unsuccessful it would be her own fault, and the majority of the population of this country could no longer complain that they live under a different law to the minority, and that they are held down in poverty and serfdom, with every road to ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you long to understand that henceforth I can dream of very little personal ambition and future wrapped up in myself. In political relations serfdom may have an end, but the dominion of one soul over another in the region of spirit, is not that indestructible?...You, my dear, honored friend, will assuredly not answer this question with ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... the slow formation of small states, the era of slavery, then feudalism and serfdom, and at last the birth of modern nations, the development of machinery, and the vast nexus of exploitation known as capitalism—the stage which at one blow had been utterly destroyed just as it had been ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... brain of the Isosceles class shall begin at half a degree, or thirty minutes, and shall increase (if it increases at all) by half a degree in every generation; until the goal of 60 degrees is reached, when the condition of serfdom is quitted, and the freeman enters the class ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... honest earnest man must stand and work, The woman also—otherwise she drops At once below the dignity of man, Accepting serfdom. I count that Heaven itself is only work ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... as well as from our parents and a long ancestral line. When the first men and women were created, forces were set in action which have resulted in this Me that to-day thinks and wills and loves. Heredity includes savagery and culture, health and disease, empire and serfdom, hope and despair. Each man can say: "In me rise impulses that ran riot in the veins of Anak, that belonged to Libyan slaves and to the Ptolemaic line. I am Aryan and Semite, Roman and Teuton: alike I have known the galley and the palm-set ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... constraint have done their work, when the spirit of the child has been broken, when his vitality has been lowered to its barest minimum, when he has been reduced to a state of mental and moral serfdom, the time has come for the system of education through mechanical obedience to be applied to him in all its rigour. In other words, the time has come for Man to do to the child, what the God whom he worships is supposed to have done to him,—to ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... cultivation has had time to prove itself there the destructive pest which, in time, it will prove itself wherever it prevails. The vast estates and large fortunes that once maintained, and were maintained by, the serfdom of hundreds of negroes, have dwindled in size and sunk in value, till the slaves have become so heavy a burthen on the resources of the exhausted soil and impoverished owners of it, that they are made themselves objects of traffic in order to ward off the ruin that their increase would otherwise ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... of the Freedmen in America is an anomaly in the world's history. European nations have gradually abolished serfdom, and the master and the slave being of the same race, the line of separation has soon broken down. In America, slavery is abolished, but the master and ex-slave are as far apart as ever. America is a nation of immigrants, mostly ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... through his representative in Parliament the Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... What a change! The same creatures, serfs yesterday, became men, conscious of their human dignity; their aspect, their language, are those of free men. In the mean while, in getting rid of their serfdom, they preserved their usual good sense, wisdom, and bonhomie; no impertinence, no arrogance whatever can be detected in them; they are full of self-respect, yet polite. I saw them discussing with the authorities some business of theirs. They maintained their new rights, and, when wrong, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... knew the purpose for which he intended it. Hradzka was not content with having enslaved a whole Solar System: he hungered to bring tyranny and serfdom to all the past and all the future as well; he wanted to be master not only of the present but of the centuries that were and were to be, as well. I never took part in politics, Zarvas Pol; I had no hand in this revolt. But I could not be party to such a crime as ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... sincere and spiritual Christian. What character the temptations of the throne may develop, time only can determine. He is now struggling, against the opposition of the nobles, to emancipate the boors from the slavery of serfdom, being ambitious of elevating all his subjects to the highest manhood. The temporal welfare of perhaps ninety millions of men is placed in the hands of this one monarch. An indiscreet act may plunge all Russia into the horrors ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... to be bound by the cruelty of life. And her attitude, despairing though it seems to us, is indeed the revolt of the spirit in a land where Tolstoi's doctrine of non-resistance is the logical outcome of centuries of serfdom in a people's history. The merchant Dikoy, the bully, the soft characterless lover Boris, the idealistic religious Katerina, Kuligin the artisan, and Madame Kabanova, the tyrannical mother, all these are true national types, true Russians of the changing ages, and the counterparts ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... lendeth thee." And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the highest sanctions, he tried to guard against the wrong that converted ancient civilizations into despotisms—the wrong that in after centuries ate out the heart of Rome, and produced the imbruting serfdom of Poland and the gaunt misery of Ireland, the wrong that is to-day crowding families into single rooms and filling our new States with tramps. He not only provided for the fair division of the land among the people, and for making it fallow and common ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... her service. Mavra was left alone in the workroom, a large, well-lighted chamber, furnished simply with tables and chairs for the use of the innumerable women and girls invariably attached to the service of those noble ladies who knew so well how to maintain their rank in that blessed time of serfdom. At this hour the workroom was empty. Some of the women were washing, others ironing, some cleaning and turning upside down everything in the private apartment the countess had just left. The young peasant girl, with her needle uplifted, rested her ruddy hand upon the ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... them have been imprisoned, and held for ruinous ransom. Others have been tortured and killed. Under the serf, they would suffer additional taxes, until they were driven from the land, or themselves reduced to serfdom and even slavery." He waved ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... examples," Holland said, reseating himself. "For instance, the medieval feudalistic class who dominated the ignorant and highly superstitious serfdom soon found it expedient to add to their titles by grace of God, as though it was God's wish that they be count or baron, prince or king. What serf would dare attempt the overthrow of his lord, in the face of ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... money which we have sucked up from their wheat fields and pastures, from their barns and potato patches, from their humble stores and markets, from their mills and their mines, and we will thus expedite them on the way to serfdom. Meanwhile we will continue to bankrupt their railways, to snatch their local stocks, to convert all shares in all enterprises into bonds, and to put the bonds into our safes to the end—that confidence may be restored ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... quite different. Here are no plantings of trembling poverty under lordly walls, but bold pioneering, forecasting agriculture and commerce; no Babel building, with "Go to, let us build here a Cleveland or a Cincinnati," but rather, "Here for the present we will abide." If, however, serfdom and mediaevalism were absent in New World town-planting, so also were aestheticism or any appreciation of the beautiful apart from the useful. Old cities require reconstruction to make them what modern taste and intelligence demand; settlements in their incipiency are ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... friar. The bard was a freeman born, a skilled weaver of courteous phrases, not a churlish taeog. The monk or friar might be a serf. They worked like serfs, and ennobled labour. The Church condemned serfdom, and we find chapters giving ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... work which were to change the economic foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended, especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in farm-houses and towns. ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... physical or political sense alone, though to this conception their false disavowal had been directed; the liberty He proclaimed was spiritual liberty; the grievous bondage from which He would deliver them was the serfdom of sin. To their vaunted boast that they were free men, not slaves, He replied: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin." As a sinner, every one of them was in slavery. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... when I loathed myself. What had I to do? Nought but to endure terror and scorn and bring forth daughters into the world. My daughters! God forgive me if I have had no mother's heart towards them. My wifely duties were as serfdom to me; how then could I love my daughters? Oh, how different with my son! He was the child of my very soul. He was the one thing that brought to mind the time when I was a woman and nought but a woman—and him they had taken from me! He was ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... gravely I say that I know no captivity so sorrowful as that of an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the finest gifts—of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even honestly uttered, might ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... courts tended to become solely institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave the freedmen a power and independence which they could not ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... theory. In fact the Church did an inestimable amount of good to the servile classes, and, at the time that Aquinas wrote, thanks to the operation of Christianity in this respect, the old Roman slavery had completely disappeared. The nearest approach to ancient slavery in the Middle Ages was serfdom, which was simply a step in the transition from slavery to free labour.[1] Moreover, the rights of the master over the slave were strictly confined to the disposal of his services; the ancient absolute right over ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... ukase abolishing serfdom, there has been a great deal of trouble in the more remote districts between the serfs and their masters, arising chiefly from ignorance on the one side, and discontent and disaffection on the other. Every possible ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... to our woodland deeps, To our inland lakes, and rivers, Where the rapid roars and sweeps, Where the brightest sunlight quivers. Loyal souls can never fail; Serfdom crouches in its lair; But our British hearts are hale, England's Hope ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... his long service to his country by his 'History of Serfdom in Pomerania and Sweden,' which contributed largely to the general abolition of the ancient abuse. He became professor of history in the University of Greifswald in 1806, and about that time began ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ungracious disability. But with his weakness came, as is usual, a certain lassitude which even resembled despair, an indifference peculiar to the slave, how opposed to the indifference peculiar to the autocrat. Valentine recognized in the voice the badge of serfdom, even more than in the question, and he smiled with a cold triumph. He had intended telling Julian now, once for all, to break with the lady of the feathers, of whom even yet he stood in vague fear. But the question, the voice of Julian, gave him pause, slid into his soul a new and bizarre desire, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Government circles had made Lilienthal realize that the apprehensions voiced in his presence by the old men of the Vilna community were well-founded, and he thought it his duty to fulfill the pledge given by him publicly. From the land of serfdom, where, to use Lilienthal's own words, the only way for the Jew to make peace with the Government was "by bowing down before the Greek cross," he went to the land of freedom, the United States of America. There he occupied important pulpits in New York and ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... where there was no doctor and no school, and through an evil system of barter and trade the people were practically bound to serfdom, Doctor Wilfred T. Grenfell has established hospitals and nursing stations, schools and co-operative stores, and raised the people to a degree of self dependence and a much happier condition of life. All this has been done through his personal ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... which is the Russian equivalent for Ham of the Bible, describes a man in a state of serfdom. Since the abolition of serfdom in Russia, it has come to define the plebeian; and is a sort of personification of the rabble. The satirist Stchedrin has defined Kham as "one who eats with a knife and takes milk with his after-dinner ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... Nebraska ranches, had roared with his ears back, and the land was in a tumult. "Coin's Financial School" had already taught the people that the "gold-bugs" owned the country and that the people could save themselves from eternal serfdom only by changing the color of their money. Bryan told the westerners that the East was the "enemy's country" and that the gold standard was a game by which the East was robbing the West, and the only way the people of the West could save themselves was to move East ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... of restless hoping, pitiful dreaming and untellable pain; that out of these must come the new generation. Then it appeared to him with splendid cheer, that woman had not fallen to these modern miseries, but risen to them, from a millenium of serfdom, untimely outraging, hideous momentary loving, brute mastery, ownership and drudgery.... These of to-day were finer sufferings; this an age of transition in which she was passing through valleys of terrible shadow, but having preserved her natural greatness through ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... but two things must be noted. In all ages it has been held to be the right of the community to dispossess owners of certain kinds of property without committing any offence against the sacredness of property, provided full compensation was offered to the owners. In the abolition of slavery, of serfdom, of certain burdens on the land, and the like, no one has ever found anything that was reprehensible, provided the owner of the slaves or of the land was compensated to the full value of the property taken from him. In the second place, it is to be noted that the community is bound ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the inner nature of the enterprise. The "model town," as was the case with imitative towns, proved to be a cunning device with two barbs. It militated to hold the workers to their jobs in a state of quasi serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers beyond the ordinary and usual limits of wages and profits. In reality, it was one of the forerunners of an incoming feudalistic sway, without the advantages to the wage worker that ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... South fights for slavery, for the despotism which it represents, for the ignoring the rights of labor, and for reducing to slavery or to serfdom all whose hands ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Disraeli describes there were no schools of any kind, and the masters treated their apprentices "as the Mamelouks treated the Egyptians." The author declares that "there is more serfdom now in England than at any time since the Conquest. . . . The people were better clothed, better fed, and better lodged just before the Wars of the Roses than they are at this moment. The average term of life among the working classes ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... and tribute. Thus the thitherto free peasant's estate was transformed into hired property; and this, with time, was burdened with ever more obligations. Once landed in this state of dependence, it was not long before the peasant lost his personal freedom also. In this way dependence and serfdom spread ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... an accompaniment but the essential condition was slavery. Take away that and you take away Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Plato. Dismiss Greece, if you like. Where then will you turn? To the Middle Ages? You encounter feudalism and serfdom. To the modern world? You run against wage-labour. Ah, but, you say, we look to the future. We shall abolish wage-labour, as we have abolished slavery. We shall have an equitable society in which everybody will do productive work, and nobody will live ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... marks the extended relations of English letters; and, serving to remove the trammels of the French, it gave to the now vigorous and growing English that opportunity of development for which it had so long waited. Out of the serfdom and obscurity to which it had been condemned by the Normans, it had sprung forth in reality, as in name, the English language. Books, few at the best, long used in Latin or French, were now demanded by English mind, and being produced in ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... better mental inheritance, his better home conditions, and his better paid and less overworked teachers may give him, there shall be no disadvantages imposed upon the child of any class, there shall be no burking of the intellectual education for any purpose whatever. To keep poor wretches in serfdom on the land by depriving them of all but the most rudimentary literary education, as a very considerable element in the new Nature Study Movement certainly intends, is altogether antagonistic to New Republican ideas, and there must be no ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... important and magnificent changes of policy ever seen in any country. Within the last year or two, the present Emperor of Russia, following the wishes of his father, has insisted upon the abolition of serfdom in that empire; and twenty-three millions of human beings, lately serfs, little better than real slaves, have been raised to the ranks of freedom. Now, suppose that the millions of the serfs of Russia had been chiefly in the South of Russia. We hear of the nobles ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... when, at the beginning of the fifth century, Stilicon recalled the legions in order to defend Italy against the Goths, the German tribes, finding themselves unopposed, invaded the country of the Scheldt and the Lys, reducing into serfdom the old inhabitants who had escaped massacre. The Rhine ceased henceforth to be the Empire's frontier. The latter ran now along the great highway from Tongres to Arras. Before their second line of defences the Romans, under AEtius, put up a last fight, but ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... the trail. There was no longer the slinking, club-driven attitude of a creature at bay in the manner in which he stood in the path of his enemies. He had risen out of his serfdom. The stinging slash of the whip and his dread of it were gone. Standing there in the starlight with his magnificent head thrown up and the muscles of his huge body like corded steel, the passing spirit of Shan Tung would have taken him for Tao, the Great Dane. He was not excited—and ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... for the following tale were furnished to the writer while traveling last year near the spot on which the events it narrates took place. It is intended to convey a notion of some of the phases of Polish, or rather Russian serfdom (for, as truly explained by one of the characters in a succeeding page, it is Russian), and of the catastrophes it has occasioned, not only in Catherine's time, but occasionally at the present. The Polish nobles—themselves in slavery—earnestly ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... alluded to the tremendous change wrought in the national life by the abolition of the liquor traffic, which he designated a second serfdom vanishing at the behest of the Czar. After a few years of sober, persistent labor, we would no longer recognize Russia. The war had further raised the question of the creation in the world's markets of favorable conditions to the export of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the farm servants. So much pride of craft was still left in Pelle. Since his apprentice days, he had been accustomed to regard Sort as a pitiful survival from the past, a species properly belonging to the days of serfdom. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... after her return from the South that Alexis Orloff led her into a barn where were laid out the bodies of all who had died of hunger on the day of her triumphal entry. Like Peter the Great, she even in some ways intensified serfdom. A hundred fifty thousand "peasants of the crown" were handed over by her as serfs to her lovers. Their proprietors could send them with hard labor to Siberia; they could give them fifteen thousand blows for a trifling offence; a Soltikoff tortured seventy-five ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... clinging round the skirts of a mother's garment, casting sly peeps at purchasers as if they had an instinctive knowledge of their fate. They must be sold for the satisfaction of sundry debts held by sundry democratic creditors. How we affect to scorn the tyranny of Russia, because of her serfdom! Would to God there were truth and ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... feed them in infancy, to care for them in sickness, to protect them in age. And thus it will be found in the history of nations, that, whenever population has reached that density in the temperate zones, serfdom, villenage, or slavery, whatever it has been ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the Land Act was first announced. They were to urge that such a measure would be exploitation of the cruelest kind, that it would not only interfere with the economic independence of the Natives, but would reduce them for ever to a state of serfdom, and degrade them as nothing has done since slavery was abolished at the Cape. Missionaries also, and European friends of the Natives, did not sit still. Resolution after resolution, telegraphic and other representations, were made to Mr. Sauer, from meetings in ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... too large to hold together. I always despised the contemptible idea. I had been in correspondence with the Russian Iskander or Alexander Herzen, who was a century in advance of his time. He was the real abolisher of serfdom in Russia, as history will yet prove. I once wrote a very long article urging the Russian Government to throw open the Ural gold mines to foreigners, and make every effort to annex Chinese territory ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... some way to reward Natalia Savishna for her twenty years of care and labour, she sent for her and, voicing in the tenderest terms her attachment and love, presented her with a stamped charter of her (Natalia's) freedom, [It will be remembered that this was in the days of serfdom] telling her at the same time that, whether she continued to serve in the household or not, she should always receive an annual pension Of 300 roubles. Natalia listened in silence to this. Then, taking the document in her hands and regarding ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... and extravagant as her calumnies on all other states. She represents her constitution as the perfection of human wisdom; while in reality it is based on conquest, shaken by revolution, and only qualified by disorder. Her boasted tenures are the relics of a half-abolished serfdom, wherein the cultivator was nothing, and the aristocrat everything, and in which a primogeniture extending from the King to the Gentleman often placed idiocy on the throne, and tyranny in the senate, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... model."[201] He was "the greatest rider of hobby-horses" in all President Adams's acquaintance, and some of his hobbies were for the most serious studies. He published a work in metaphysics, and wrote essays against serfdom and slavery, and on a number of other subjects, which were found in MS. among President Adams's papers. Yet he was a problem—and not a very soluble one—to the worthy President, for he laid a weight on the ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty—such mutilation of mind and body—were meant to go ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Continental" to commemorate the great reform [the abolition of the serfdom in 1861]. Tedious and incongruous. To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail-coats are running round ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... I. Serfdom, which was generally substituted for slavery, never existed in Ireland, slavery having disappeared before the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the fall of Rome and the rise of the new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in Gaul. When the light dawns, a step has been gained. Slavery has been generally succeeded by serfdom. But serfdom is hard. The peasantry of feudal Normandy conspire against their cruel lords, hold secret meetings, the ominous name commune is heard. But the conspiracy is discovered and suppressed with the fiendish ferocity with which panic inspires a dominant class, whether ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... TERMINATION OF THE CRUSADES: The Crusades came to an end about 1271. "The ulterior results of the crusades," concludes Cox in Encyclopedia Britannica, "were the breaking up of the feudal system, the abolition of serfdom, the supremacy of a common law over the independent jurisdiction of chiefs who claimed the right of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... little white slaves, taking up their serfdom at the loom where the negro left off at the lint, die like ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... the organ of perception, which in its normal state had felt its subjection to the Will to which it owed its existence. In this manner the organ of perception was placed in an abnormal sympathetic condition. It endeavoured to free itself permanently and finally from its disgraceful serfdom, and this it at last achieved in the perfect negation ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... and unmated feminine nature to instigate revolt against the Old Dominion—never more so than when the beautiful Carbonara feels that its shadow is creeping fast over the frontier of her own freedom. Nay, suppose the conquest achieved, and that they themselves are reduced to the veriest serfdom, none the less will they strive to goad other hereditary bondswomen into striking the blow. Is it not known that steady old "machiners," broken for years to double harness, will encourage and countenance their "flippant" ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... at home to swell the exports and imports, to make Britain what Egypt was in the days of the patriarch—the storehouse of the world. Egypt and England both put their agriculturists to pain, and the rural population to serfdom; but they only exchange the stable basis of well-being for an unstable one, for commerce is proverbially ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... your independent working woman of to day comes as near being ideal in her equable self poise as can be imagined. So why should she hasten to give this liberty up in exchange for a serfdom, sweet sometimes, it is true, but which too ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... political writer. Under the pretext of a Voyage from Petersburg to Moscow, he attacked serfdom, absolute government, even religion, for which he was condemned to death and exiled to Siberia. He was pardoned later on by Paul I, but soon after committed suicide. He was verbose, but often ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the foundation of the latest and probably the most complete system of mastery ever perfected. The slave was held only in physical bondage. Behind serfdom there was land ownership and a religious sanction. "Divine right" and "God's anointed," were terms used to bulwark the position of the owning class, who made an effort to dominate the consciences as well as the bodies of their serfs. Job-ownership owes its effectiveness to ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... to monopoly and privilege. Altho the movement for the repeal of medieval laws has continued in Europe from 1776 till the present time, yet custom still is stronger to-day in Europe than in America. Serfdom was not abolished until the first half of the nineteenth century in Austria and southeastern Europe, and not until the last half in Russia. Many economic and cultured forces furthered this movement, ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... one more, because it's so curious, so characteristic, and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities. I've forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men—somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then—who, retiring from the service ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
