"Serfdom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 to publish the first series ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... modern capitalists. Since Mankind emerged from the state of Primitive Communism typified by the Garden of Eden in the Hebraic myth, there have been three great systems of economic organization: 1. Slavery; 2. Serfdom; 3. The Wage System. It is interesting to note the varying appearances of surplus or unpaid labor under ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... 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 ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... official hypocrisy; a Church in which conduct counted for nothing, orthodoxy and ceremonial observance for everything; economical and financial conditions scarce recovering from the verge of ruin; and lastly, that curse of Russia,—serfdom. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the very 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 and prosperity come back like ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... been internal as well as external. The whole social fabric had been convulsed and transformed. The monarchy had been undermined. The privileged orders had aggrandized themselves at the expense of the community. The yeoman class had sunk into semi-serfdom. In a word, the natural cohesion of the Danish nation had been loosened and there was no security for law and justice. To make an end of this universal lawlessness Valdemar IV. was obliged, in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... 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 ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... passengers that America meant freedom. Never had he been so suddenly and vigorously deluged with such an avalanche of legal interference and investigation. Many a Russian, fleeing here in search of liberty, has been dismayed into concluding that he has but stumbled into a new serfdom, when blue-coats and brass-buttons have descended on him as his ship ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... sorrowful wonder. Jack bears himself with great equanimity in his new condition; but it is apparent, nevertheless, that he has changed from what you knew him. In the first place, he has built up a comprehensive system of domestic serfdom to which he cheerfully submits. He glories in his enslavement; he rattles his chains. He actually boasts of the habit he has acquired of dropping in at the grocer's every morning on his way to the office. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... shaping the character of a people. Examples of this influence are not wanting. The peculiar position of the Persians, surrounded on all sides by enemies, required a martial education as a preparation for defensive and offensive measures. Physical education was dominant among the Spartans, because of serfdom which involved the absolute control of the many by the few. No less striking are the effects of physical conditions upon all peoples in stimulating mental activity and in developing moral life, both of which processes are essential to true education. The intellectual product of the temperate ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... I craved to see, Knights, burghers, filtering through those gates ajar, Their age of serfdom with my spirit free; We cannot all have wisdom; some there are Believe a star doth rule their destiny, And yet they think to overreach the star, For thought can weld together things apart, And contraries find meeting in ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... its way quite apart and almost always in direct contradiction to their convictions. Sviazhsky was an extremely advanced man. He despised the nobility, and believed the mass of the nobility to be secretly in favor of serfdom, and only concealing their views from cowardice. He regarded Russia as a ruined country, rather after the style of Turkey, and the government of Russia as so bad that he never permitted himself to criticize its doings seriously, and yet ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... 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 the lowly possessed ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... accustomed to stand to each other in the relation of master and slave have been so much the most horrible that by general consent the exciting of a servile insurrection has been considered as beyond the pale of legitimate warfare. This had been held even in the case of European serfdom, although there the rulers and the ruled are of the same blood, religion and language. But the conflict between the white men and the negro, and particularly the American white man and the American negro, is likely to be more ruthless than any which the ancient world, ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... production of serfdom, a stupefied, ignorant, unprincipled man, who had not even any religion. Euphemia was his mistress, and a victim of heredity; all the signs of degeneration were noticeable in her. The chief wire-puller in this affair was Maslova, presenting the phenomenon ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... fraught with so much danger as is the present. To have been vanquished on the field of battle would have involved much of misery; but to be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought victories, and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of negro disfranchisement, negro serfdom, would be a defeat and disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars, equalled only by that which the Revolutionary fathers entailed upon their descendants by their fatal compromises with slavery. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... were set at 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. Women naturally participated in these activities, generally ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... 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 dominated ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... the product of human energy that it has improved continuously the economic status of the mass of people. Ours has been a highly productive social organization. On the way up from the elemental stages of society we have eliminated slavery and serfdom and are now far on the way to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... was ordinarily a bad farmer and workman. He cultivated the soil in a very crude manner, and his crops were accordingly scanty and inferior. Obviously serfdom could exist only as long as land was plentiful. But in the twelfth and thirteenth century western Europe appears to have been gaining steadily in population. Serfdom would, therefore, naturally tend to disappear when the population ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... of a nobler life than that which had been destroyed. The base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by tyranny, political and social, into serfdom. The base of the new English society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with the material civilization of Britain while the struggle went on, it was impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... are alike—they must be watched every moment, because they have been so long watched and driven. If women who are hired and paid by the month break or destroy the least thing, its value is taken out of their wages and they are beaten. It was very astonishing to me to see, notwithstanding this serfdom, that they remain submissive to ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... and they continued to buy. Against the old idealism, against bugbears and mythology, fairy tales and astrology, dreams, spells, charms, muttered exorcisms, commandments to obey master, ship and serfdom, de jure divino, clouds, mists, and lies infinite; slowly rose that stupendous power of truth and of Nature which had hitherto in humanity only visited the world in broken gleams. We may assume different eras for this dividing point between immutability and progress, between slavery and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... will do this, I doubt not, for in my heart of hearts, I believe with Henry Clay that "Before you can repress the tendencies to liberty, or the tendencies to absolute emancipation from every form of serfdom, you must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its joyous return; you must penetrate the human soul and eradicate there the love of liberty." Then, and not ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the twenty millions of men who will benefit by it." In truth the twenty millions of men got very little benefit indeed by the code. Montesquieu's own method might have taught her that not even absolute power can force the civil system of free labour into a society resting on serfdom. But it is not surprising that Catherine was no wiser than more democratic reformers who had drunk from the French springs. Or probably she had a lower estimate in her own heart of the value of her code for practical purposes ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... deeds to be wrought there by a regenerated Young Israel. But the journey was long. Towards the end he got into conversation with an old Russian peasant who, so far from sharing in the general political effervescence, made a long lament over the good old days of serfdom. 'Then, one had not to think—one ate and drank. Now, it is all toil ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... done before the 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, and introduced ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... tended but to be accentuated. But if the vertical cleavages by which the country was divided were deepened, those of a horizontal character, arising from social and economic privilege, were in this period largely done away. Serfdom was abolished; the knights as a political force disappeared; the free cities were reduced to four; and such distinctions of caste as survived rapidly declined in political importance. By an appreciable levelling of society the way was prepared for co-ordinated national ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... matter of little moment whether they took the form of a national rising against a government or a protectorate, a sanguinary struggle in the Forum against the dominance of a class, or an attack by chattels, not yet brutalised by serfdom but full of the traditions and spirit of freemen, against the cruelty and indifference of their owners. In one sense the servile movements were more universal, and perhaps better organised, than those of the men to whom, free birth gave a nominal superiority. A sympathy ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... 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 ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... it was a burden from which there was no escape. One result was, that, while slaves were often made coloni,—that is, tillers or tenants, sharing with the owner the profits of tillage,—and thus had their condition improved, many freeholders sank to the same grade, which was a kind of serfdom. When to the exhausting taxation by government, there were added the disposition of large proprietors to despoil the poorer class of landholders, and from time to time the predatory incursions of barbarians, the small supply of Roman legionaries is ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... free: it is hard to say, that they thought Pagans to have any human rights at all, even to life. Nor is it correct to represent ecclesiastical influences as the sole agency which overthrew slavery and serfdom. The desire of the kings to raise up the chartered cities as a bridle to the barons, was that which chiefly made rustic slavery untenable in its coarsest form; for a "villain" who escaped into the free cities could not be recovered. In later times, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... 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 ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... 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 of practical politics, they strove towards ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... has been well remarked, without the influence of the Church there would have been in the land but two classes—beasts of burden and beasts of prey—an enslaved serfdom, a ferocious aristocracy. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... honourable men and they would remain wholly without dry kine and milch-kine. They would bring their free women ye have captured to the querns and to the kneading-troughs and into bondage and [9]other[9] serfdom [10]besides.[10] [11]This would be a disgrace.[11] Loath I should be to leave after me this shame in Ulster, that slave-girls and bondmaids should be made of the daughters of kings and princes of Ulster." "Is there any offer at all ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... of deep religious feeling, and many who know him, esteem him to be a 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 of a civil war, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... all the old primitive barbarism are now to be found in the slums of great cities, and in the lowest groups of men, in the midst of civilized nations. Men impose labor on women in some such groups today. Through various grades of slavery, serfdom, villeinage, and through various organizations of castes and guilds, the industrial organization has been modified and developed up to the modern system. Some men have been found to denounce and deride the modern system—what ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... district. A Japanese writing alleges that these captives were subjects of the Crown who had been seized and enslaved by the savages. But that is inconsistent with all probabilities. The Yamato might sentence these people to serfdom among men of their own race, but they never would have condemned Japanese to such a position among the Yemishi. Evidently these "captives" were prisoners taken by the Yamato from the Koreans, the Sushen, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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 ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... single file and drop deep courtesies and make bows to the seated royalties, who, as a rule, do not even take the trouble to glance at those engaged in this servile tribute to small royalty. I suppose that the excuse for this is that it is an old custom. But so is serfdom! ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Russia, very weak, with a plentiful admixture of milk and accompaniment of biscuits glaces. Madame de Mourairef did the honours in an inexpressibly graceful manner; and I observed that there was a delightful intimacy between her and her maid Penelope, that quite upset my ideas of northern serfdom. I think they even once exchanged a wink, but of this I am not sure. There is nothing like experience to expand one's ideas, and I made up my mind to re-examine the whole of my notions of Muscovite vassalage. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... a picturesque, poor and generally ignorant class, although possessed of excellent natural elements and traits which must develop as time goes on. They form a strong, virile backbone to the country, but the conditions of their life are at present but little removed from serfdom, due to their general poverty as a class and to the monopolisation of the ownership of land by the upper classes. In this connection it is to be recollected that the natives of the civilised pre-Hispanic States ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... lest she should see them; but a rumor ran 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
... 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 ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... of his furs, which valuation the Company took good care to place so low as to obviate any probability of his release from debt. At a reasonable valuation of their furs, there was seldom a year that most, if not all, the Bay trappers might not have been freed from their serfdom. ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... expression to an obsolete idea; we have exposed, likewise, the inclination of the working-classes to trust to the protection, and, on every emergency, claim as a matter of right the aid of the wealthy, thus wilfully and deliberately returning to the condition of serfdom: we have now to trace the mediaeval mania in a department where, notwithstanding all this ominous conjunction of symptoms, its appearance is truly surprising—in the department of high art ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... even than that of Europe; but it is now proposed, by a single act, to introduce into our 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 the English in India, ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... be free. Love's 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
... 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
... the indentured slavery system worked almost criminally; for if the newcomer, ignorant of the law and the language, got wise to the fact that his boss was doing what was illegal under Canadian law, and attempted to jump his serfdom, he was liable—as one of them expressed it—"to be found missing." It would be reported that he had suicided. Among people who did not speak English, naturally, no details would be given. It seems almost ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... Transylvania, dreaded by them as much as Turk or Tartar. They burned and pillaged the lands and villages of the peaceful dwellers in the Saxon settlement; but at length they had become so numerous that the law took cognisance of their existence and reduced them to a state of serfdom, from which they were not relieved ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... tending to show that when civilization reaches a certain point, the master's self-interest leads to emancipation. In Russia, where there are seventy-five persons to the English square mile, it seemed to him that serfdom was still a good economic speculation. In western Europe, where there were one hundred and ten persons to the square mile, freedom, in all relations of master and servant, he considered more advantageous to all parties. Emancipation began in England in the fourteenth century, when that ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... occasionally roused to violent passion. Then, the intelligent middle class: the small landed proprietors of two generations. The old proprietor is ignorant and good-natured, of respectable family, but with coarse habits; hard, from long experience of serfdom, servile himself, but admirable in all other ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the Russian government, which upheld their rights over their peasantry, to whom they feared the French might award their freedom, for all those Polish noblemen, who talked unceasingly about freedom, kept their peasants in the most brutish serfdom. ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... 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 ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... they conquered the Turks offered two alternatives—serfdom or Turkdom; those who could not bring themselves to accept either of these had either to emigrate or take to brigandage and outlawry in the mountains. The Turks literally overlaid the European nationalities of the Balkan peninsula for five hundred years, and from their own point of view ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... patriots who in their way idealized both Russian orthodoxy and autocracy, and who were wrongly considered the champions of the existing order of things, showed themselves no less hostile. One of their most celebrated representatives, Khomyakov, sees in Russia "a land stigmatized" by serfdom, where all is injustice, lies, morbid ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... honest earnest man must stand and work: The woman also, otherwise she drops At once below the dignity of man, Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work; Who ever fears God, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... not 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; but the letter ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... are grieved at the action of the Canadian Pacific Railway in demanding of Mr. W. W. Smith, whom they dismissed for activity in the temperance cause, that he must not give any of his time to it when off duty, as such demand is un-British and strongly in the direction of serfdom. Many spirited people are ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... the question of good and evil for himself, and does not wait for mankind to solve the question by virtue of gradual development. Besides, evolution is a stick with two ends. Side by side with the gradual development of humanitarian ideas, there is the gradual growth of ideas of a different kind. Serfdom is past, and capitalism is growing. And with ideas of liberation at their height the majority, just as in the days of Baty, feeds, clothes, and defends the minority; and is left hungry, naked, and defenceless. The state of things ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... delay is so much gained. I have news to-day that the Czar is alarmingly ill. Should Heaven take him, it would be the dawn of a better era for Russia. His son is a man of very different mould. He has fallen into disgrace with his father for his liberal ideas, and he is known to think, as I do, that serfdom is ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... 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
... grasp within my hand The sign of serfdom and to get the habit Of marching like a mushroom down the Strand, A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... reverse in 1789 In conformity with the doctrine of the social contract, the principle is set up that every man is born free, and that his freedom has always been inalienable. If he formerly submitted to slavery or to serfdom, it was owing to his having had a knife at his throat; a contract of this sort is essentially null and void. So much the worse for those who have the benefit of it at the present day; they are holders of stolen property, and must restore it to the legitimate owners. Let no one object ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... from her seat. "It is she—it is Natasha! She used to tell me she had a sweetheart, a Polish hero, Bodlevski. And I think his name was Kasimir. She often got my permission to slip out to visit him; she said he worked for a lithographer, and always begged me to persuade mother to liberate her from serfdom, so that ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... failing from the south towards the north, but lifted, at almost every point, over the adjoining lands. This altitude and isolation is an historical as well as a physical peculiarity. When the Abbots of St. Gall, after having reduced the entire population of what is now two Cantons to serfdom, became more oppressive as their power increased, it was the mountain shepherds who, in the year 1403, struck the first blow for liberty. Once free, they kept their freedom, and established a rude democracy on the heights, similar in form and spirit to the league which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... environing the home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy, individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection. In social living outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt to compel children to do the will ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... commercial activities needed more labor. Finally, the common toiler acquired more commanding influence by overthrowing even the French knights with his long bow. This period laid the foundation for the almost complete disappearance of serfdom in the fifteenth century. France waited for the terrible Revolution of 1789 to free her serfs. England anticipated other great modern nations in producing a literature of universal appeal because her common people began to ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... first work of importance by Turgenev, A Sportsman's Sketches, dealt with the question of serfdom, and it wielded tremendous influence in bringing about its abolition. Almost every succeeding book of his, from Rudin through Fathers and Sons to Virgin Soil, presented vivid pictures of contemporary Russian society, with its problems, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... Serfdom, as it existed in England in the thirteenth century, can hardly be defined in strict legal terms. It can be described most correctly as a condition in which the villain tenant of the manor was bound to the locality ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... 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 ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... 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 tell him in the fullest and minutest ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... 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
... the Lord 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... of all the wide region of northern Andalusia, fertile irrigated plains, dry olive-land stretching up to the rocky waterless mountains where the mines are. In Azorin's crisp phrases and in the long ornate periods of the editor, the serfdom and the squalor and the heroic hope of these peasants and miners and artisans became vivid to me for the first time. Occasionally the compositor, a boy of about fifteen with a brown ink-smudged face, would poke his head in the door and shout: "It's true what ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... position of women bristles with anomalies. It is the outcome of long ages of semi-serfdom, when women toiled continuously to produce wealth, which, if they were married, they could enjoy only at the good pleasure of their lords,—ages when the work of most women was conditioned and subordinated by male dominance. Yet in those days the working ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... cultivation, and otherwise lives nearly independent. They are proud to be called Makololo, but the other term is often used in reproach, as betokening inferiority. This species of servitude may be termed serfdom, as it has to be rendered in consequence of subjection by force of arms, but it is necessarily very mild. It is so easy for any one who is unkindly treated to make his escape to other tribes, that the Makololo are compelled to treat ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Russia, for a moment. In Russia, as you all know, there has been one of the most 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 ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... condition of his furnishing an inventory of his goods, of his paying a tribute every year, and coming annually, for a fortnight, to lodge in a burg appertaining to the domain, in order to make act of serfdom. The goldsmith, to whom every one spoke of the obstinacy of the monks, saw plainly that the abbey would adhere inflexibly to this sentence, and was driven to the verge of despair. At one time he thought of setting fire to the four corners of ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... the 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 ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... lassie knew not what course to pursue. Her aunt, although kind, indulgent, and pitying her, (for in youth she had had experience of a blighted affection, and no woman-heart, that is not naturally sour, passes through such trial without becoming sweeter)—was bound in complete serfdom to her brother, and was quite unable to suggest any means or likelihood of release; so Barbara wrote a full account of her predicament to her lover. Not long afterward, so cleverly disguised by dress as to deceive even herself, Percival was again at Aberdeen—determined, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... of the great lords; but, as in many other institutions, the king's writ does not run unquestioned throughout the length and breadth of the land. In short, the whole system is a purely feudal one (though absolute serfdom or slavery is unknown), all the great lords holding nominally from the throne, but a number of them being practically independent, having the power of life and death, waging war against and making peace with their neighbours as the whim or their ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... 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 edge of the frame ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... bondage, and I know of no deliverance so sure, so complete, so abiding as that which comes by the teaching and spirit of Jesus. But, even if freedom from all these hateful bonds could come, and could be complete, without Him, there still remains a serfdom more degrading, a bondage more inexorable than any of these, for men are everywhere the bond-slaves of sin. Look out upon the world—upon your own part of it, even upon your own family or household—and see how evil ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... 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
... land, which was held by the villeins for their own use, on the condition of the cultivation of their lord's ground. Hence it will be seen that the condition of the peasantry in the eleventh century, while actually serfdom, with enforced labour, and no right of moving from the dominion of the lord under which they were born, was virtually better than the conditions of the agricultural population at the beginning of the nineteenth century (and some would say, even, at the present day) in ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... their dearly bought charter rights, now revealed as inborn liberties. 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. Nominally the peasant might own certain portions of the soil, but he could not enjoy unmolested the airs which blew over it nor the streams which ran through it nor the wild things ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... hand, in New England and New York the Negroes were merely house servants or farm hands, and were treated neither better nor worse than servants in general in those days. Between these two extremes, the system of slavery varied from a mild serfdom in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to an aristocratic caste ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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 often becomes ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... said Fulkerson. "That thing is going to attract attention. It's well written—you can take the pomposity out of it, here and there and it's novel. Our people like a bold strike, and it's going to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral grounds as the only solution of the labor problem. You see, in the first place, he goes for their sympathies by the way he portrays the actual relations of capital and labor; he shows how things ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... knelt to Another, considered to be impractical in business. But while the Growing went on, this god of their market-place was their true god, their familiar and spirit-control. They did not know that they were his helplessly obedient slaves, nor could they ever hope to realize their serfdom (as the first step toward becoming free men) until they should make the strange and hard discovery that ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... nor citizen. He had been, meanwhile, a bone of contention between the Provisional Governments of the States and the military power which controlled them. The so-called State Governments dragged him toward the whipping-post and the Black Codes and serfdom. They denied him his oath, fastened him to the land, compelled him to hire by the year, required the respectfulness of the old slave "Mahs'r" and "Missus," made his employer liable for his taxes, and allowed recoupment therefor; limited his avocations and restricted ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... imprisonment, oppression, slavery, compulsion, necessity, serfdom, superstition, constraint, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... it, however, is so bad that it cannot be made to afford a living and pay the tax, in fact a poll tax, not dependent on the size of the strip, but on the number of the souls. The population in Russia has always had a great tendency to migrate, and serfdom in past ages is said to have been instituted to enable the lord of the soil to be responsible for the taxes. "It would have been impossible to collect these from peasants free to roam from Archangel to the Caucasus, from St. Petersburg to Siberia." ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... fourteenth century, serfdom or servitude no longer existed except in "mortmain," of which we still ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... others, labored unweariedly to keep up the spirits of the people, and prepare them for the coming War of Liberation. Now for the first time the cities were invested with the right to regulate their own internal affairs. Now for the first time the peasants were delivered from the serfdom under which they had hitherto suffered. In short, the whole policy of the Government was determined by the resolution to inspire the people with a healthful, unconstrained, enthusiastic devotion to the national weal, and, as a means ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... dress some other popular tales illustrative of the manner of life and ideas of the mujiks, to whom the attention of the English public has of late been much directed, owing to the ukase of the present Tsar, by which they are emancipated from serfdom,—a measure likely to be productive of much weal or woe ...
— Emelian the Fool - a tale • Thomas J. Wise
... climate are alike favourable to the labours of a white peasantry: the slave 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 ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... on the supply of bread, be willing to keep and maintain an improvident population, to 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 ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less fertile in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... produced, and industry seeks foreign markets among the monied classes of other nations. In the East, in Africa, everywhere, in Egypt, Tonkin or the Congo, the European is thus bound to promote the growth of serfdom. And so he does. But soon he finds that everywhere there are similar competitors. All the nations evolve on the same lines, and wars, perpetual wars, break out for the right of precedence in the market. Wars for the possession of the East, wars for the empire of the sea, wars to impose duties on ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... the next governor undertook to settle these difficulties. He passed what is known as the "Labor Act," intended to meet the exigencies of the situation. This was a little better than slavery but it actually gave the Negroes a status ranging between serfdom and indentured service. They were still under rigid restrictions.[387] Thereafter an effort was made to prevent Negroes from assembling, especially at Christmas dances, which were considered dangerous to the peace of the colony. On one occasion in 1852 to put a stop to such a function a squad ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... fury surged in the yellow horse's heart once more at this new degradation, this badge of serfdom and infamy. His spirit rose high and menacing at the touch. He loathed this place, these people, all and everything which threatened his freedom. He would have done with them forever; he would see them no more. Let him away to the uttermost parts of ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... against all who should despoil its property by selling or liberating slaves belonging to the Church. The whole history of the Christian Church shows that it has never felt itself called upon to fight any sound institution, no matter what its character, so long as it favored the Church. Slavery and serfdom, war, piracy, child labor, have all been in turn sanctioned." (Chapman Cohen: ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... law that a serf was always a serf till manumitted, and whoever married a serf became a serf. Now, Bertulphe's father was Thancmar's serf, and Bertulphe, who had raised himself to wealth and great honor, was reduced to serfdom because his father was not manumitted. By the same law Bouchard, although a knight of royal blood became Thancmar's serf because he married Constance, the daughter of Bertulphe (provost of Bruges). The result of this ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... fundamental enactments concerned the land, namely, that no Catholic could own land, or lease it for more than thirty years, and even then on conditions which made profitable tenure practically impossible. This law created and sustained the serfdom I have described, and is the direct cause of the modern land problem. It remained unaltered in the smallest respect for seventy years, that is, until 1761, when a Catholic was permitted to lease for sixty-one years as much as fifty acres of bog not less than four feet deep. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... History.—The spirit of enterprise 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 dusky peasantry. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... burned at the door, in token that they were never to leave the house again. Pythagoras instituted at Crotona an annual festival for the distaff; Confucius, in China, did the same for the spindle; and these celebrated not the freedom, but the serfdom, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various |
