"Serfdom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of 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 seen a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... lies the chief strength of a nation, becomes visible in Chaucer's time. In the towns the tradesmen were rising to wealth and consideration. In the country the yeomanry—the laborers and farmers—were throwing off their serfdom, and emerging from the chrysalis of obscurity in which they had long been hidden. At Cressy and Poitiers the English archers disputed with the knighthood the honors of victory. While Chaucer was planning the "Canterbury Tales," introducing into his gallery of contemporary ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... 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 most holding to man is the woman ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... 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
... 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 ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... constantly moved toward such justice in distributing 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 the elimination ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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 ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... many a verse from the Gospel, unfavorable to the rich, but promising the kingdom of heaven to the poor, and that the last shall be first, had reached his ears. Doubtless many of the leaders glowed with lofty enthusiasm for the liberation of the poor people from unendurable serfdom and oppression; but when Marx, and men like him, left wife and children and risked their lives, they remembered only the past, and the injustice they had suffered, and were full of a fierce yearning ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... serfdom or to toil One race, one caste, one class, or any man: Give every honest man an honest chance; Protect alike the rich man and the poor; Let not the toiler live upon a crust While Croesus' bread is ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... Good," earl of Flanders, made a 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). ...
— 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.
... 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 ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... read and write were packed off to Moscow and hired out as butlers or waiters (while from the village on the other side of the river the boys all became bakers), and that had been the custom from the days of serfdom long ago when a certain Luka Ivanitch, a peasant from Zhukovo, now a legendary figure, who had been a waiter in one of the Moscow clubs, would take none but his fellow-villagers into his service, and ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... enough to 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... amends for their honour, the Ulstermen will kill the dry cattle. For the men of Ulster are 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 thou wilt accept this time?" [12]said macRoth[12] ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... 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 To a ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... the exception of serfdom, peonage, and political slavery, this subordination is confined to the negro race. Why is this so? Manifestly because they have shown themselves incapable, in their own land, of emerging from barbarism, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... whispered. "There is not one of them that is not a living lie. Can they help it? Think of the centuries of serfdom and superstition through which their blood has crawled. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... 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, fears ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... Two, Article Six," Erskyll objected. "There shall be no chattel slavery or serfdom anywhere in the Empire; no sapient being of any race whatsoever shall be the property ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... single class, the mediaeval Church opened the mystery of the Mass and the glory of the fruition of God to all believers, and, if she believed in three estates, nevertheless gathered the three in one around the common altar of the Redeemer. Serfdom might still remain, and find tolerance, in the economic working of society; but in the Church herself, assembled together for the intimate purposes of her own life, there ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... home in vehicles whose wheels were 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, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... going to make you say that I'm a beast. And so I am. I make a little use of Mahomet M. M.'s passion to achieve my throne instead of taking up at once with serfdom. But I do it without vouchsafing him even the first corner of a smile. The harshest treatment is all that he gets. Men such as Mahomet M. will live on harsh treatment for a while, looking forward to revenge when their time comes. But I shall soon have made sure of my throne, or shall have failed; ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... remarkable man to abjure his cynicism in the line of clothes. All women, high or low, are filled with delight on seeing a first proof of their power in one of these sudden metamorphoses. Such changes are an admission of serfdom. ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... industry takes to-day the repulsive form of wage labor," he says, "many owners of small properties keep holding on to them with the greatest sacrifices, for the sole purpose of avoiding falling into the serfdom and insecurity of wage labor. Only Socialism can put an end to small production, not of course by the forceful ejection of small owners, but by giving them an opportunity to work for the perfected large establishments with a shortened working day and ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... the time of serfdom—many years before Alexander II.'s liberation of the sixty million serfs in 1862. In those days the people were ruled by different kinds of lords. There were not a few who, remembering God, treated their slaves in a humane manner, and not as ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... long and disastrous wars. Monogamy has done more for the elevation of the female than any other custom of civilization. The rich could only afford to practice polygamy, and should the poor imitate the example it would necessarily subject the wives to a state of serfdom. In the economy of nature it is designed that the male should be the protector of the female, and that by his exertions the provision of food and raiment should be secured. In polygamous nations the female has not attained that social state that she has reached in countries ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... of the 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 ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... I fear you will not gain much information, as you have been at the Cape before. In a former conversation with Mr Wilmot I have pointed out the manner in which the Cape was first settled, and how the settlers had gradually reduced the original possessors of the land to a state of serfdom; I ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 desire the emancipation ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... simply described without confusion and without that insincerity always attendant upon mental confusion, the life that was before him. That the actual social situation has greatly changed since his day there is no need to say. But in spite of these changes, in spite of the abolition of legal serfdom, and the spread of democracy, with the extension of science and of general education (in books, newspapers, travel, and general intercourse as well as in schools), there remains enough of a cleavage of society into a learned and an ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... roving eye, does not mean control: it means a crushed spirit, hypocrisy, or brooding anarchy. The mother or teacher who obtains obedience by clapping her hands, pointing her finger, distorting her face, is copying in her own home the attitudes of caste in India, of serfdom in Russia, the discipline of the prison the world over, a modern reminder of the power of life and death ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... or possible is a liberation from the standpoint of the theory that declares man to be the supreme being of mankind. In Germany emancipation from the Middle Ages can only be effected by means of emancipation from the results of a partial freedom from the Middle Ages. In Germany no brand of serfdom can be extirpated without extirpating every kind of serfdom. Fundamental Germany cannot be revolutionized without a revolution in its basis. The emancipation of Germans is the emancipation of mankind. The head of this emancipation is philosophy; its heart is the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... 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
... assertion, it is a 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
... reflection comes; and with it comes a touch of 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. When it is the maid's day out, Jack insists on helping ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... "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 have got to go from bad to worse, and then ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of struggling men and women." He recognizes that the next great step in the development of democracy which the war must bring about—is the emancipation of labour; to use his own phrase, the redemption of masses of men and women from "economic serfdom." "The old party slogans," he declares, "will mean ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 they say, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... 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: "Christianity, Slavery, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... 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
... ideal country by officials of all ranks! Literature was in the service of the censorship; military drill was all that was taught at the universities; the troops were trained like a ballet, and the peasants paid the taxes and were mute under the lash of serfdom. Patriotism meant the wringing of bribes from the quick and the dead. Those who did not take bribes were looked upon as rebels because they disturbed the general harmony. The birch copses were extirpated in support ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... inconsistently: but they saw it, and to their faith in that great truth we owe all that has made England really noble among the nations. Of the fruits of that faith every venerable building around us should remind us. To that faith in the laity, we owe the abolition of serfdom, the freedom of our institutions, the laws which provide equal justice between man and man; to that faith in the clergy, and especially in the monastic orders, we owe the endowment of our schools and universities, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... 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 matter should serve ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... 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 harmonises beautifully ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... Indians of Hindostan and became agriculturists. They adopted a new religion and new mores. Men who were afraid of powerful enemies have taken to living in trees, lake dwellings, caves, and joint houses. Mediaeval serfdom was due to the need of force to keep the peasant on his holding, when the holding was really a burden to him in view of the dues which he must pay. He would have run away if he had not been kept by force. In the later Middle Ages the villain ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Maccabean 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 ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... doctrines were pushed to their legitimate consequences in cruel wrong inflicted upon an innocent people, and the Anglo-Saxon thanes and nobles who survived the first years of conquest were reduced to serfdom or beggary; but there were exceptions. William doubtless intended at first to govern justly, and strove to unite the two nations—English and Norman; therefore, when the occasion offered, he bade his knights and barons who aspired to an English estate marry the widows or ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... besides paying a fixed yearly sum to Government. Much of 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, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... waxed-ends provided on the spot, and eating out of the same bowl as 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
... Serfdom, to a limited extent, exists in the Caucasus, more particularly in the western part. It is, however, a comparatively mild form of bondage, the only real slaves in the mountains being the captives taken in war who are compelled to do most ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... 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 that "If the sale cannot be abolished ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... word, 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 coffee." Merezhkovsky ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... 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
... coach between Gloucester and Cheltenham; but from Queen Anne's day till 1906 it was regarded as extinct, until once more it was discovered, and discovered in its true place among the ants, on whose gestures and behaviour towards it, whether as indicating worship or serfdom, Sir Charles dilated with such rhetoric of description that the beetle assumed dimensions in the mind disappointing when it was viewed ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... physical force, had become the acknowledged basis of political power and private right; and the richer members of the community were rapidly reducing the poorer freemen—many of whom were the descendants of an earlier race or of conquered tribes—to a state of serfdom. The system (if such a word can be applied at all) was in fact a bad form of feudalism without its advantages. There was no central overlord (like those in other countries who gradually developed into the sovereigns ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... the poison of slavery, but sank under it into ignorance and poverty. They were contented because their skins were white, and because they were thereby part of an aristocracy to whom labor was a badge of serfdom. The larger portion of this middle class, however, were thrifty and industrious enough. Including as they did in their ranks the hunters and pioneers, the traders and merchants, all the freemen in fact who toiled and worked, ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... consent to grasp within my hand The sign of serfdom and to get the habit Of marching like a mushroom down the Strand, A mushroom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... using bows and arrows. We learned that these Pichanguerras had run away from the rubber country in the lower valleys; that they found it uncomfortably cold at this altitude, 4500 feet, but preferred freedom in the higher valleys to serfdom ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... to be bountiful benefactors of the convent. One of them, Malise, in 1258, presented it with certain of his slaves (nativi)—namely, Gilmory, Gillendes, and John Starnes, the son of Thomas and grandson of Thore. Absolute serfdom was then a Scottish institution, comprising part of the labouring class, who were bought and sold with the land to which they were attached; and gifts of nativi by their masters to the religious establishments of ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... be more easily accomplished. Instead, they spread the optimism of men possessed of inextinguishable faith. The blackest days were gone. Rifts were breaking in the clouds. Intelligence was creeping through, like rays of sunshine. The end of Alaska's serfdom was near at hand. So they preached, and knew they were preaching truth, for what remained of Alaska's men after years of hopelessness and distress were fighting men. And the women who had remained with them were the mothers and wives of a new ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 weeding out of capable and high-minded teachers ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... 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
... well as from the insults and blows of his officers. Many of 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 ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... first appearance of private property—of slavery and land ownership—there have been class struggles. Slave and slave-owner, serf and baron, wage-slave and capitalist—so the classes have struggled. And what has been the issue, thus far? Chattel slavery gave way to serfdom, in which the oppression was lighter and the oppressed gained some measure of human recognition. Serfdom, in its turn, gave way to the wages system, in which, despite many evils, the oppressed class lives upon a far higher plane than the slave and ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... oppression, slavery, compulsion, necessity, serfdom, superstition, constraint, obligation, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... first Russian 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, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... at the "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 your tables, ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... 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 of serfdom could only be detected in one or two of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... soil; but each has his own land under 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 them, to a great extent, rather as ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... 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 boy to rise in the Middle Ages, except in the church. He attracts ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... informal council 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 interests lead them, and even on occasion rising ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... floating about of the population when the contracts of this year expire. It is to be expected, however, that the Freedmen's Bureau will be able to remedy evils of that kind. Other emancipatory movements, for instance the abolition of serfdom in Russia, have resulted in little or no vagrancy; but it must not be forgotten that the emancipated serfs were speedily endowed with the ownership of land, which gave them a permanent moral and material ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion, and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of impetuous eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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 the lowly possessed under medieval feudalism. ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... the atavistic 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 ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... case of every other great trade union the war has exacted profound and vital concessions. The British working men, for example, have abandoned scores of protective restrictions upon women's labour, upon unskilled labour, for which they have fought for generations; they have submitted to a virtual serfdom that the nation's needs might be supplied; the medical profession has sent almost too large a proportion of its members to the front; the scientific men, the writers, have been begging to be used in any capacity at any price or none; the Ministry ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... beginning of the term his father had told him that if he could make a good show in the Perry Exhibition there need not be any more grumbling about his tip. Gus came back to St. Amory's hysterically anxious to cut out all competitors for the Perry, but the shackles of his old serfdom were still about him. When he showed signs of being restive to the old claims, and recommended Cotton to do his own classics and mathematics, Cotton coolly and calmly demanded repayment of sundry loans contracted of old. Todd had not ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... the Pacific archipelagoes. In short, we do not know one single human race or one single nation which has not had its period of village communities. This fact alone disposes of the theory according to which the village community in Europe would have been a servile growth. It is anterior to serfdom, and even servile submission was powerless to break it. It was a universal phase of evolution, a natural outcome of the clan organization, with all those stems, at least, which have played, or play still, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... been the result, for the mass of humanity, of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individual standpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist and employer than not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the last vestige of the serfdom of man to man disappeared from earth. Human slavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means of subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer to employed, by rich to poor, was distributed ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... 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, ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... for these new conceptions to become thoroughly disseminated. A down-trodden people enchained by the theory of the "divine right of kings" to autocratic rule, had to break the fetters one by one and gradually emerge from a state of practical serfdom to one of enlightened emancipation. There were many setbacks, and progress was ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... modern ideas, these prohibitions of certain food and of certain company at food, and of sea voyages, are fading like ghosts at dawn. An actual incident of a few years ago reveals the prevailing conflict of opinion, especially with regard to the serfdom which ties down ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... we have said, the condition of many Roman plebeians. To rebuild their houses and restock their farms they borrowed; the patricians were their creditors; and the law, instead of protecting the small holders, like the law of the Hebrews, delivered them over into serfdom or slavery. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... about. The popular answer is of a very ready kind, and it passes quite satisfactorily. This answer is that the first great step towards free labour, the transformation of personal slavery into serfdom, was the result of the spiritual change which was wrought in men's minds by the teaching of the Church. It is unquestionable that the influence of the Church tended to mitigate the evils of slavery, to humanise ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... 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 to publish the first series of the 'Spirit ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 would have been ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its direction, goes 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 he was a functionary of that government ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... for all the peoples and for all the nationalities who live under the Hungarian crown." Before he left Zagreb he transformed the feudal Croatian Diet into an elective assembly. This new Parliament cancelled the institution of serfdom and proclaimed that one of their objects was to have the Habsburg monarchy a federation, on the model of Switzerland. One would suppose that it was clear to everyone that Jella[vc]i['c] was not fighting ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... and 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 ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... 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 so increased that the carelessly cultivated fields no longer supplied ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Humanity, the bruised and lone,— The oppressed and burdened ones of every clime Shall claim thee theirs, and bless thee thro' all time, And "are, and shall be free!" from shore to shore Speed grandly on till serfdom is no more, And gentle brotherhood our sorrowing race Link man to man ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... these here, now, pink cheeks? What? Look at 'em! And her little Dutchy nose! Isn't it cute? Oh, Dutchy! And right here in me vest pocket is the golden band wherewith I am to be chained to the floor, the domestic hearth. And right there on her finger is my badge of prospective serfdom." Then, in a loud aside to me, "In six months I'll be beating her. Come now, Zuleika. We have to go through with this. You have to ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... not merely 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 ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature and the ordination of Providence in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... injustice. Even in the family, where we should naturally look for the truest conditions, woman has always been robbed of the fruits of her own toil. The influence the Catholic Church has had on religious free thought, that monarchies have had on political free thought, that serfdom has had upon free labor, have all been cumulative in the family upon woman. Taught that father and husband stood to her in the place of God, she has been denied liberty of conscience, and held in obedience to masculine will. Taught that the fruits of her industry ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... their wages the wealth which they have 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 ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... 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 ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... but to a Russian she typifies revolt, freedom, a refusal 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 Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... (—"for") venigi. sensation : sensacio, sense : sento, senco. sensitive : sentema. sensual : volupta. sentence : frazo, jugxo, verdikto. sentiment : sento, opinio. sentimental : sentimentala. separate : apart'a, -igi, disigi, malkunigi. serfdom : servuto. sergeant : sergxento. series : serio. serious : serioza. serve : servi, (—"for") tauxgi. service : servo, mangxilaro, Diservo. serviette : busxtuko, set : meti, (—"on edge") agaci. sew : kudri, stebi. sewing machine : stebilo. sex : sekso. shade ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil 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 yet use. It is all well enough for us of another generation ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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 ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... circumstances—being free born, and having, but a month before, been the pride and ornament of a respectable though lowly family. Once let her liberty be restored, and the scarcely perceptible taint of a few weeks' serfdom be removed from her, and she would be, in all social respects, fully the equal of the poor, trembling maid of Ostia, to whom, a few years before, the patrician had not ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... uncle. Were Britain a serfdom and you the Czar, you could not compel me to this step. I will write to Mr. Wynne. Give yourself no ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the 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
... 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 clouds at one time, and at another ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... Enthronement of Liberty, had been hurled from its recently constructed base, and formed the roadside seat of five or six of the raggedest starvelings to be found in the world. An inscription on Alexander's statue states that it was raised to commemorate his emancipation of the peasants from serfdom. The Bolsheviks had not time to write their inscription; but it did not matter—the empty houses and deserted streets were quite enough. By means of much elbow labour they had smoothed out the inscription on the statue ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... power. Now he was drearily weak, an 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, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... creed were destined to regenerate Europe. See, they said in effect, Western Europe oscillates between papal control and free thought; its industries, with their laissez faire methods, raise the few to enormous wealth and crush the many into a new serfdom worse than the old. For all these evils Russia has a cure; her autocracy saves her from the profitless wrangling of Parliaments; her national Church sums up the beliefs and traditions of nobles and peasants; and at the base of her social system she possesses in ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... family love as is the wolf I mentioned, we would be able to live our lives more completely, and, on the other hand, we would die in greater numbers. The love of man and woman for each other and their children lifts humanity out of its serfdom, but it also places limitations. You ought to know more about that than I, however," he laughed. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... the European nations, and although she has absorbed other territory possessed by races even more venerable than herself, her advance in art, letters and music is comparatively recent. When Scarlatti, Handel, and Bach were at their height, Russia, outside of court circles, was still in a state of serfdom. Tolstoi was born as late as 1828, Turgenieff in 1818 and Pushkin, the half-negro poet-humorist, was born in 1799. Contemporary with these writers was Mikhail Ivanovitch Glinka—the first of the great modern composers of Russia. Still later we come to Wassili Vereschagin, ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... 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
... Prussia by Stein. Called by the King to be virtually a civic dictator, this great statesman carried out the most drastic reforms. In October, 1807, there appeared at Memel the decrees of emancipation which declared the abolition of serfdom with all its compulsory and menial services. The old feudal society was further invigorated by the admission of all classes to the holding of land or to any employment, while trade monopolies were similarly swept away. Municipal self-government gave new zest ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... of the would-be historians of this period. On page 509 he writes: "A historian ought not to suppress uncomfortable facts, and it is undeniable that the treatment of the Negroes forms a blot on America's fair name. In parts of the South they are kept in a state of practical serfdom; in all cities they are herded into unsanitary districts; they are denied equal opportunities for advancement; and not infrequently they are maltreated and murdered by brutal mobs. It is true that individual Negroes, by fiendish assaults on white women, now and then rouse men to frenzy, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... merely filling their prisons with us and scalping us with their savages! They are slowly but surely marking our people, body and face and mind, with the cursed imprint of slavery. They're stamping a nation's very features with the hopeless lineaments of serfdom. It is the ineradicable scars of former slavery that make the New Englander whine through his nose. We of the fighting line bear no such marks, but the peaceful people are beginning to—they who can do nothing except endure ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of the New Testament inconsistent with the permanent existence of slavery, but the history of Christianity affords perpetual illustrations of its tendency to destroy it. Even during the Dark Ages, even in its most corrupted form, Christianity wrought for the practical extinction of serfdom. Mr. Newman says that it was Christians, not men, that the church sought to enfranchise; it little matters; she sought to abolish all villanage. He says that even Mahometans do not like to enslave Mahometans; I ask, can he find immense bodies of Mahometans ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... these 'yanaconas' were known as 'Indios Originarios', and generally were descendants of Indians conquered in war; they, too, were in a condition of serfdom. They lived in the house of the 'encomendero', and could not be sold, and the 'encomendero' was (in theory) obliged not only to feed and clothe them, but to instruct them in religious truths. In order to see that these conditions were ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... any citizen or section of citizens believe their own country wrong and the opposing nation wronged, they dare not say so, or if they do they run great risk of being punished for treason. Men and women though no longer bought and sold in the market place are subjected to subtler forms of serfdom. In most European countries they are obliged to fight whether they will or not, and irrespective of their private convictions about the dispute; even though, as is the case in some European countries, they may be citizens from compulsion rather than ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... 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 serfs, but ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... 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 ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... neither slave nor freeman; neither property 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 ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... towns where new 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 throw off their ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... condition of his people. 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 to ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... army's invasion of the North to thrash the Yankees, and pardon them in Faneuil Hall. The South freed, was to open her markets to the world. Her wealth was to be untold, while grass would grow on the sidewalks of Northern cities. Every poor white who shouldered a gun was to be elevated out of serfdom, be given forty acres of land, a "nigger" and a mule. Enthused by these glowing promises, the Southern poor white shouldered his gun and waded in: and no one reviewing the history of that immortal struggle would for a moment question the bravery of the Southern soldiers. They fought like ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... thirteenth century the Christian chivalry of the time was spending itself in the task of converting the heathen of what is now Prussia; and it was well on into the nineteenth century before serfdom was entirely abolished in this region. It is the newness and rawness of the population, in the streets of the great German and Prussian capital which surprise and puzzle the American, almost more than the cleanliness ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Sardinia to teach him the rudiments of civilization, and even then he died a barbarian at heart, as he had always lived, leaving a conquered monarchy to his son, who tried to appease the world by abolishing serfdom, although he probably never would have done so had not the teachings of Batavsky and others taken root in the hearts of the Russian people, creating a diversion in favor of political liberty, which he thought to smother while ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... 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 transmuting ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... remainder of the church-income was to be set aside so as to render it unnecessary to tax the poor in war-times. On this point Luther held that the tithes belong to the government, and to turn them over to any one else would be simple robbery. Article III demanded the abolition of serfdom, however, as a test whether the Christianity of the lords was genuine. The peasants implied that their political liberty had been secured by Christ, and that the lords were withholding it from them. This argument Luther ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... peasantry had not been molested, and an oppressive system of feudal exactions forced upon men who once were free and owners of the soil they tilled, the slavery of women could hardly have occurred. It is now nearly seventy years since the first decree that eventually resulted in the abolition of serfdom in Prussia was promulgated, and time is rapidly effacing many of the social evils which that institution entailed. But this is not the case with Russia, where emancipation was only declared ten years ago, and is not completed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Russia; an educational system rotten with 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
... conditions under which they had to labor. The moment that they overstepped the slightest bounds of law, in rushed the authorities with summary punishment. The prisons of the period were full of mechanics whom serfdom or poverty had stung on to commit some crime or other. However trifling the offence, or whatever the justifiable provocation, the law made no trades-union memorialized Congress to limit the hours of labor of those employed on the public works to ten hours a day. The pathos of this petition! So unceasingly ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... the German settlers in 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
... remains in the use of the word Man (which formerly had the same sense as lede). We still speak of "a general and his men," and use the expression "our men." But, happily for the masses of mankind, few vestiges of serfdom and slavery, and those in a mitigated ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... 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 unbelievable that in a country wrestling with the whole ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... found a 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
... 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 system in Maryland ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... came not to colonize, not to trade or cultivate the soil, so much as to extract from the natives a tribute of gold and silver. The Indians, instead of being protected and civilized, were only too often reduced to serfdom and confined to a laborious routine for which they had neither the aptitude nor the strength; while the government at home was too distant to interfere effectively in their behalf. Driven by cruel taskmasters they died by thousands from exhaustion and ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... 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 ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the reforms of the Fifties and Sixties. Serfdom was abolished, class distinctions were largely broken up, local self-government was initiated. So many reforms were introduced in the departments of Justice, of Instruction, of Credit and Commerce, that the ground was prepared for a totally new Russia. A vigorous blossoming of Russian literature ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... have hope. You have a great people, uneducated and unspoiled. They are physically strong, and they have been trained by centuries of serfdom to discipline and hardships. Also, there is fire smouldering somewhere. You must remember that Russia is the stepdaughter of the East. The people are northern in the truest sense, but they have a little of Eastern superstition. A ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Servituty are pieces of land which, on the abolition of serfdom, the landowners had to cede to the peasants formerly their serfs. The settlement was left to the discretion of the owners, and much bargaining and discontent on both sides resulted therefrom; the peasants had to pay percentage either in ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... nobility to 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
... storm, acceded to the rebel demands until he could get his forces together, when he ignored his promises in a right royal manner in the same year. One of these concessions was the abolition of slavery and the novel use of wages for farm work. By his failure to keep this promise, serfdom continued in England four hundred ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... 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; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... shadows of 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 they call the capitalist ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... need not pause to inquire. It is certain, however, that no grand act of emancipation ever took place in China like that which cost Lincoln his life, or that for which the good Czar Alexander II. had to pay the same forfeit. Russia is to-day eating the bitter fruits of ages of serfdom; and the greatest peril ever encountered by the United States was a war ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... 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 ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... debris arose the modern idioms of France, Italy, and Spain, to which were added in Northern Europe the new forms of Teutonic speech. The fine and useful arts took a new departure; slavery was mitigated into serfdom; industry and commerce became powers in the world as they had never been before; the narrow municipal polity of the old world was in time succeeded by the broader national institutions based on various forms of representation. Gunpowder, America, and the art of printing were discovered, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... the lying statement, which falsifies the historical facts, that the Christian religion has raised the condition of woman, the Christian Church offers to woman nothing but serfdom. And it is the first duty of those women who combat for right and liberty to unite in the fight against religious obscurity, against the powers of darkness and the suppression resting on the Church, that revolution ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... of his skin. Maybe it is because he sees the people of his own race who have not had his advantages (if a negro may ever be said to have received an advantage) being crowded into an ignominious spiritual serfdom equally as bad as the physical serfdom from which they were so recently freed. Maybe it is because of these things that Mr. Du ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... upon the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by the hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter, this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin. The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Church have bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or sober. If ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... peasantry was not without its useful effect. From that time serfdom died rapidly. Wages continued to rise. A century after the Black Death, a laborer's work in England "commanded twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could have been obtained for the wages paid under ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 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, and always produced ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... 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 ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... speak. In the matter of property, the 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 ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 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 ...
— 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
... arms apart with a wide gesture. She brings them forward slowly and we observe with horror that they have practically forgotten how to move at all! They are crushed, these hands, crushed and bleeding after their long serfdom; they are not hands at all but claws, broken, twisted piteous claws! The expression of frightened, almost uncomprehending, joy with which Isadora concludes the march is another stroke ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... impressed with any sense of its criminality. And there is yet among the Southern people an utter absence of national feeling.... While accepting the abolition of slavery, they think that some species of serfdom, peonage, or other form of compulsory labour is not slavery, and may be introduced without a violation of their pledge." Schurz, therefore, recommended negro suffrage as ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander |
