"Serfdom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her twenty years of care and labour, she sent for her and, voicing in the tenderest terms her attachment and love, presented her with a stamped charter of her (Natalia's) freedom, [It will be remembered that this was in the days of serfdom] telling her at the same time that, whether she continued to serve in the household or not, she should always receive an annual pension Of 300 roubles. Natalia listened in silence to this. Then, taking the document in her hands and regarding it with a frown, she muttered something between ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... 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
... and grew, though slowly. Merchants bought social privileges for money; even law was grudgingly sold them, 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 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... in 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 ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... tract to another, neither leave those which they cultivated, and raised. They paid tribute to nobody else but the master of the land." This tends to show that there existed not an established obligation, a serfdom, but a voluntary contract, that the "tlalmaites" were not ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... life of Indians. The Iranians separated from the 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 had a valuable right and property in his holding. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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
... stealing directly, we can stop them from stealing indirectly. If natural law works evil to the community, we are to make statute law, which will act as supernatural law, and control the offensive principle. Unless we wish our social equality destroyed, and a system of practical serfdom to take its place, we must put a limit to the acts of greed, and so preserve the ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... 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 the same masters ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... 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 ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... 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 ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... the idea. The negro instinct in him recognized gentle blood by any of its signs,—the transparent animal life, the reticent eye, the mastered voice: he had better men than Lamar at home to learn it from. It is a trait of serfdom, the keen eye to measure the inherent rights of a man to be master. A negro or a Catholic Irishman does not need "Sartor Resartus" to help him to see through any clothes. Ben leaned, half-asleep, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... these warning facts. They foretell the coming whirlwind of disaster. We may be sure that, if these things are allowed to continue without opposition, long before the close of the twentieth century, our agricultural people will be reduced individually to the abject serfdom of a houseless, homeless day-laborer. At this time it is almost impossible for a majority of the sons and daughters of the farms of our Republic to obtain possession of enough land to enable them to follow in ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... are false and perjured, Lord Hastings," answered Montagu, "to obey them is not loyalty, but serfdom; and revolt is not disloyalty, but a freeman's duty. One day thou mayst know that truth, but too late." [It was in the midst of his own conspiracy against Richard of Gloucester that the head ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... following day should the much-talked-of mowing-festival take place. It was the hay-harvest which occasioned all this merriment. [Author's Note: It is true that serfdom is abolished, but the peasant is still not quite free; neither can he be so. For his house and land he must pay a tribute, and this consists in labor. His own work must give way to that of his lord. His wagon, which he has had prepared to bring home his ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... boy and girl should be guaranteed a solid intellectual and industrial education, making a permanent guarantee against pauperism and serfdom, a permanent guarantee that women shall not be enslaved by lust, but shall be enabled to rear an offspring of manly citizens. These are the most important things that a true nationalism should accomplish at present, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... many places showed an advancing tendency from the darkness, despotism and brutality of the Dark Ages, the "Robber Barons" began to disappear. Their slogan was, "He may seize who hath the power and he may hold who can." Serfdom also began slowly to recede. Popery and Priestcraft assumed the role of these Barons, changed the slogan from brute force (reserving that for emergencies) to "Divine Prerogative," "Infallibility" (later), and pagan mummeries in ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... they have brains 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 independence ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... see the consequences already in the British West Indies, where negro women generally prefer to live outside of legal marriage because as wives they find themselves subjected to practical serfdom. In Jamaica 75 per cent. of the births are illegitimate for this reason. When I visited Haiti, I was told to my great surprise that the homes and small farms were usually owned by the women. Expressing my admiration of this chivalrous recognition of women's right to the homestead, I was informed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... 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 ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... been married at the age of sixteen by the busy matchmakers, and her life was one of plain marital serfdom. Her material wants were supplied, but economic freedom had not been hers, for she was supposed to account to her husband for every sou. Marriage is often actual slavery, and it was such for Madame De Berney, until De Berney got on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... as the fourteenth century, serfdom or servitude no longer existed except in "mortmain," of which ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... plains and far horizon of Russia, so that the north threatened to be left without cultivators. Later, the harsh climatic conditions of the north were advanced as an argument against the abolition of serfdom, on the ground that this system alone secured to the landed proprietor a steady labor supply, and guaranteed to the peasant his maintenance during the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... outline, was the system of serfdom which prevailed until 1861. It was in theory, though not practically, unlike the institution of American slavery. The people, still living in their communes, still clung to the figment of their freedom, not really ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... 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 in this affair ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... accomplished, giving a spectre-like 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... his representative in Parliament the Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... relation were but a little improved, with what a different mind would the great mass of men go to their work in the morning, from the slave who toils amid rice fields in Georgia to the serf in Lithuanian forests. Nor would those far above the extremes of serfdom fail to reap a large part of the benefit. It cannot be argued that civilization renders men independent: it often fastens but more firmly the fetters of servitude—at least it binds them upon limbs ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... of 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 ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... means of material satisfaction takes care that only enough for bare subsistence falls to the great majority of those persons with equal rights, and therefore regards the equality of right to the pursuit of happiness hardly better than slavery or serfdom did. And are we better off as regards mental means of happiness—means of education? Is not the schoolmaster ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... nowadays less wise and more careless than ever. Only a return to almost barbaric ignorance and superstition would tolerate any complete monarchical authority in these present times of progress. It is only the long serfdom of Russia that hinders the triumph ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... 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
... the latest and probably the most complete system of mastery ever perfected. The slave was held only in physical bondage. Behind serfdom there was land ownership and a religious sanction. "Divine right" and "God's anointed," were terms used to bulwark the position of the owning class, who made an effort to dominate the consciences as well as the bodies of their serfs. ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... 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 ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... making love. I had not lost it; I had thought that here it was simply a useless art. When first I saw you I loved you as a boy loves. I ran hither and thither at your slightest bidding; I was the veriest slave, and I was happy in my serfdom. You could have asked me any task, and I should have accomplished it. You were in my thoughts day and night; not only because I loved you, but because you had cast a veil about you. And of all enchanting mysteries the most holding to man is the woman in the mask. You still wear a mask, ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... 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 for the Habsburgs but for the subjected nationalities, and that ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 swear ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 of Russia. ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... 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 ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... THE CRUSADES: The Crusades came to an end about 1271. "The ulterior results of the crusades," concludes Cox in Encyclopedia Britannica, "were the breaking up of the feudal system, the abolition of serfdom, the supremacy of a common law over the independent jurisdiction of chiefs who claimed the right of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... aspect of the divine Idea for a 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 was 'neither bond ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... 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 she ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... 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 disunion in families, monopoly in land, and peculation ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... survived 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
... something like a stab at his heart. He remembered that in a conversation with Signora Roselli and her daughter about serfdom, which, in his own words, aroused his deepest indignation, he had repeatedly assured them that never on any account would he sell his peasants, as he regarded such a sale as an ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... possession of the island, were but feeble representatives of those who, under Caractacus and Boadicea, did not shrink from combat with the legions of Caesar. Uninured to arms, and accustomed to obedience, they looked for a fresh master, and sunk into servitude and serfdom, from which they never emerged. Yet under the Romans they had thriven and increased in material wealth; the island abounded in numerous flocks and herds; and agriculture, which was encouraged by the Romans, flourished. This wealth was by one of the ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... 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.
... tracts, if he had saved a bit of his wages like any normal human being, he might have bought this little business and got a start in life. But alas, such hopes were not for Jimmie! He must remain in the condition which the President of his country described as "industrial serfdom"; he must continue to work for some other man's profit, to be at the mercy of some ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... The proposition to educate him and elevate his condition is every-where met with contempt and scorn. They acknowledge that slavery, as it once existed, is overthrown; but the continued inferiority and subordination of the colored race, under some form of vassalage or serfdom, is regarded by them as certain. Sir, they have no thought of any thing else; and if the ballot shall be withheld from the freedmen after the withdrawal of military power, the most revolting forms of oppression and outrage will be practiced, resulting, at last, in that very ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... suicide by the exasperating and deteriorating 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! ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... that I know no captivity so sorrowful as that of an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the finest gifts—of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 of the Times.' These were ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... would allow him to remain in his house, on 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 ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... ignorant, superstitious, and criminal class of Negroes is increasing, it is because the ruling class of white men have been limiting his education, disfranchising him, and in other ways trying to doom him to serfdom. The great race riot in Atlanta was simply the culmination of the ten months' campaigning of race hatred. Men who are now writing resolutions and sound and sane editorials, were then rivaling each other in their abuse of the Negro. The nominee for governor seemingly, was to be given ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... offer us such an insult? For the tax-paying Cornish prince to presume to court Ireland's princess! Ah, woe is me! I it was who for myself did shape this shame! with death-dealing sword should I have stabbed him; weakly it escaped me:— now serfdom I have shaped me. Curse him, the villain! Curse on his head! Vengeance! ...
— Tristan and Isolda - Opera in Three Acts • Richard Wagner
... 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 nothing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... enough to defend itself with open success, although the slower and less showy success of growth did not fail it. The instrument of attack in the hands of the barons was the ordinary feudal privilege, the logical carrying out of serfdom; but this attack took place two reigns later. We shall come to that further on. The attack on the lower tribe which was now growing into importance was in this reign made by the king; ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... courts tended to become centres 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 ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... well-lighted chamber, furnished simply with tables and chairs for the use of the innumerable women and girls invariably attached to the service of those noble ladies who knew so well how to maintain their rank in that blessed time of serfdom. At this hour the workroom was empty. Some of the women were washing, others ironing, some cleaning and turning upside down everything in the private apartment the countess had just left. The young peasant girl, with her needle uplifted, ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... of slavery or serfdom was no longer legitimate, though it was loudly proclaimed by the agitators, the trade-union editors, and the parlor reformers. For, say what they would, labor could resign or strike at will; the laborer had his ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... in the sandy moors east of the Scheldt (Toxandria), and when, at the beginning of the fifth century, Stilicon recalled the legions in order to defend Italy against the Goths, the German tribes, finding themselves unopposed, invaded the country of the Scheldt and the Lys, reducing into serfdom the old inhabitants who had escaped massacre. The Rhine ceased henceforth to be the Empire's frontier. The latter ran now along the great highway from Tongres to Arras. Before their second line of defences the Romans, under AEtius, put up a last ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... This name became the patronymic of the burgher family which each established as soon as he obtained his freedom. Sellers of linen thread were called in Flanders, "mulquiniers"; and that no doubt was the trade of the particular ancestor of the old valet who passed from a state of serfdom to one of burgher dignity, until some unknown misfortune had again reduced his present descendant to the condition of a serf, with the addition of wages. The whole history of Flanders and its linen-trade was epitomized in this old man, often called, by way of euphony, Mulquinier. He was not without ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... appreciate the generosity of the men of Toledo, and feel grateful for the implied recognition of their citizenship, yet they manifestly have no centennial to celebrate, as the government still holds them in a condition of political serfdom, denying them the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... 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
... take you long to understand that henceforth I can dream of very little personal ambition and future wrapped up in myself. In political relations serfdom may have an end, but the dominion of one soul over another in the region of spirit, is not that indestructible?...You, my dear, honored friend, will assuredly not answer this question ...
— 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
... answered the Jews by the deep saying: 'He that committeth sin is the servant of sin.' A man fancies himself showing off his freedom by throwing off the restraints of morality or law, and by 'doing as he likes,' but he is really showing his servitude. Self-will looks like liberty, but it is serfdom. The libertine is a slave. That slavery under sin takes two forms. The man who sins is a slave to the power of sin. Will and conscience are meant to guide and impel us, and we never sin without first coercing or silencing them and subjecting them to the upstart tyranny of desires and senses ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... European Middle Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change gradually broke up the system in this country and left the old-time villein a free but often a landless and property less man. The transition from serfdom to the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional position of service to the community to a blind and ...
— Progress and History • Various
... hunting, 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 on a rubber estate. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... 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; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... it 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
... followed by more imposing additions. The repeated strategic devastations of the Rhenish Palatinate during the French and Spanish wars reduced the peasantry to beggary, and the medieval social stratification of Germany reduced them to virtual serfdom, from which America offered emancipation. Queen Anne invited the harassed peasants of this region to come to England, whence they could be transferred to America. Over thirty thousand took advantage of the opportunity in ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... 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 counterparts of ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... Britain a serfdom and you the Czar, you could not compel me to this step. I will write to Mr. Wynne. Give yourself no further trouble on ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... set free, displaying for years, perhaps for generations, the vices of cowardice, deceit, and cruelty engendered by slavery. Chains leave ugly scars on the flesh, but deeper scars by far on the soul. Even where the exercise of oppression has stopped short of actual serfdom,—where a race has been merely excluded from some natural rights, and burdened with some unrighteous restrictions,—the same result, in a mitigated degree, may be traced in moral degradation, surviving the injustice itself and almost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... 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. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... prisoner of war. He has not willed his own bondage; while you, my grocer, and butcher, and baker— ay, and you, my fine city merchant, who fondly fancy yourself a freeman—ye are voluntary in your serfdom; ye are loyal to a political juggle that annually robs ye of half your year's industry; that annually requires some hundred thousands of your class to be sloughed off into exile, lest your whole body should gangrene and die. And all this without even ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... 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; ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the dramatis personae. But the slow progress of the masses, in whom 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 portraits more ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... prodigious a transformation of one of the fundamental conditions of society was brought 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, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... themselves, while 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 ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Petersburg has probably cramped the growth of Russian power. Even Poland has only given her a desert, a kingdom scantily cultivated, scantily peopled, discontented serfdom and a broken frontier. Yet all may be for the best. Moscow, as the head of the Empire, might have made her too powerful, and Europe might have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... 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 of ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... rights; that Justice, as distinguished from egalitarian equity, does not prescribe that she should be admitted to the suffrage; and that her status is not, as is dishonestly alleged, a status of serfdom or slavery. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... since as the "poor whites" of the South, the weaker brothers who could not resist 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
... the fall of Rome and the rise of the new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in Gaul. When the light dawns, a step has been gained. Slavery has been generally succeeded by serfdom. But serfdom is hard. The peasantry of feudal Normandy conspire against their cruel lords, hold secret meetings, the ominous name commune is heard. But the conspiracy is discovered and suppressed with the fiendish ferocity with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... 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 the curse ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... came the hurried run over from Ireland, the application for service, as a driver, the week of suspense, the joy of success, the brilliant scene of enlistment before the Lord Mayor, and the abrupt change one raw January morning from the ease and freedom of civilian life, to the rigours and serfdom of a soldier's. There followed a month of constant hard work, riding-drill, gun-drill, stable work, and every sort of manual labour, until the last details of the mobilization were complete, uniforms and kit received, the guns packed and despatched; and all that remained was to ride ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... became regent in 1784 during the insanity of his father, who died in 1808; his reign is noted for the abolishment of feudal serfdom and the prohibition of the slave-trade in Danish colonies, and the granting of a liberal constitution in 1831; while his participation in the maritime confederation between Russia, Sweden, and Prussia led to the destruction of the Danish fleet ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... equality before the law without distinction of race or creed. This condition can not be granted to others, or enjoyed by ourselves, except by the application of the principle of broadest tolerance. Bigotry is only another name for slavery. It reduces to serfdom not only those against whom it is directed, but also those who seek to apply it. An enlarged freedom can only be secured by the application of the golden rule. No other utterance ever presented such a practical ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge
... in large-scale 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 ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... 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 ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... nest you can beat back every Teule in Anahuac, as in bygone years the false Tlascalans beat back the Aztecs. Then the Tlascalans were free, now they are a race of serfs. Say, will you share their serfdom? My people, my people, think not that I plead for myself, or even for the husband who is more dear to me than aught save honour. Do you indeed dream that we will suffer you to hand us living to these dogs of Tlascalans, whom Malinche insults you by sending ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 children than slaves. Some ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... 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 of their ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... required, and a portion of your substance and the fruit of your toil—and we will in exchange give you our fortified castles as a refuge from the Northmen. Such was the offer. It was a choice between vassalage, serfdom, or ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... 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. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... man 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 ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... their dignity, their true and seemly dignity. I have seen it myself, I can testify to it; I have seen it and marvelled at it; I have seen it in spite of the degraded sins and poverty-stricken appearance of our peasantry. They are not servile; and, even after two centuries of serfdom, they are free in manner and bearing,—yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious. 'You are rich and noble, you are clever and talented, well be so, God bless you. I respect you, but I know that I too am a ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... serfdom of the Irish tenant leads to misery. But the subject is one which would require a volume. No one can understand the depth of Irish misery who has not lived in Ireland, and taken pains to become acquainted with the habits and ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... present unanimity of the population in resisting such immense odds, and the enthusiasm of their every expression in favor of the present government, puts the matter beyond a doubt. The Roman people claims once more to have a national existence. It declines further serfdom to an ecclesiastical court. It claims liberty of conscience, of action, and of thought. Should it fall from its present position, it will not be from, internal dissent, but from ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... into hired property; and this, with time, was burdened with ever more obligations. Once landed in this state of dependence, it was not long before the peasant lost his personal freedom also. In this way dependence and serfdom spread ever more. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... serfdom, too," said Pavel, giving him another book. Yefim took it, turned it in his hands, and putting ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... human destiny, with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past, based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters. Magna Charta was forced from a weak monarch by a conspiracy of nobles, acting from purely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... power to choose and to dismiss their ministers. That the tithes should be regulated in accordance with scriptural injunctions, and devoted to the maintenance of ministers and to the relief of the poor and distressed, "as we are commanded in the Holy Scriptures." That serfdom should be abolished, "since Christ redeemed us all with His precious blood, the shepherd as well as the noble, the lowest as well as the highest, none being excepted." That the claims of the rich to the game, to the fish in the running ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... 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
... bearcat 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 ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... the communist or nihilist war of Russia of thirty years ago. The country has hardly recovered from it yet. Had it not been for the loyalty of the large population of those families emancipated in 1861 by the Tsar Alexander II. from serfdom, not only the imperial family, but all the members of the nobility, and the whole class of wealthy Russians would probably have been put to death by ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... 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 ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... examples," Holland said, reseating himself. "For instance, the medieval feudalistic class who dominated the ignorant and highly superstitious serfdom soon found it expedient to add to their titles by grace of God, as though it was God's wish that they be count or baron, prince or king. What serf would dare attempt the overthrow of his lord, in ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... match,—a strife between greyhound and mastiff, a contest at heavy draught between a thoroughbred and a Flanders mare. Mrs. Etoile knows this as well as you and I can possibly know it. She is perfectly aware of her serfdom. She is poignantly conscious of the degrading character of her servitude, and that it is not possible to gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles; and yet she will continue to wage the unequal strife, to wear the unhandsome fetters, simply ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the monopoly of the human heart which is known as marriage . . . 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.' ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... 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 waved at ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... 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 ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... craft of arms 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 ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... will be a 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 interest in the soil upon which they lived. A similar ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... 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 ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... who is at bottom an illiterate peasant with the old roots of serfdom still clinging to him, has seldom any bowels for his neighbor and none at all for his employer. "God Himself commands us to despoil such gentry," is one of his sayings. He is in a hurry to enrich himself, and he cares about nothing else. Nor can he realize ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... set itself in earnest to the work of legislation. In one night, the ever memorable 4th of August, it decreed the total abolition of feudalism. In one night it abolished tithes to the church, provincial privileges, feudal rights, serfdom, the law of primogeniture, seigniorial dues, and the gabelle, or tax on salt. Mirabeau was not present, being absent on his pleasures. These, however, seldom interfered with his labors, which were herculean, from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... the early years of the reign of Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form. Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were allowed to live in idleness. Every man was regimented somewhere; and although the peasantry, when at full age, were allowed, under restrictions, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... 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 she dragged him down ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner |
