"Feudalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... social manifestations, so pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate between advance and retrogression—this Goliardic poetry stands alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited, interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism; because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it implies no metaphysical determination; because it is pagan in the sense of being natural; because it is devoid of allegory, and, finally, because it ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... system. It is not evil plight which is most detested and feared by peoples; they have more than once borne, faced, and almost wooed it, and there are woful epochs, the memory of which has remained dear. It is in the political character of feudalism, in the nature and shape of its power, that we find lurking that element of popular aversion which, in France at least, it has never ceased ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... subjects who were the most ready to obey his orders were some of the old Huguenot noble families, such as the members of the houses of Bouillon, Coligny, Rohan, Tremouille, Sully, and La Force. These great vassals, whom a turbulent feudalism had probably in the first instance induced to embrace Protestantism, were now found ready to change their profession of religion in servile obedience to ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... had ever known, one that was followed by two and a half centuries of peace, needs to complete it a recital of two important events, one being the founding of Yedo, the great eastern capital, the other the organization of the system of feudalism. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... that makes one sure that this trend toward local autonomy is a reality and not merely one of those meaningless shiftings of power which confuse the observer, is that it is in accord with Chinese temperament, tradition and circumstance. Feudalism is past and gone two thousand years ago, and at no period since has China possessed a working centralized government. The absolute empires which have come and gone in the last two millenniums existed by virtue of non-interference and a religious aura. The latter can never be restored; ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... I., his son Takeloti I., and his grandson, Osorkon II., for an interval of fifty years chiefly resided, abstaining from politics, so that the country enjoyed an interval of profound peace. But the old cause brought about the fall of this dynasty also. Military feudalism again developed and Egypt split up into many petty states. The sceptre at length passed to another dynasty, this time of Tanite origin. Petubastis was the first of the line, but the power was really in the hands of the priests, one of whom, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... elsewhere. A slight contemplation of this reveals its resemblance to the Romantic movement in Germany, of which the brothers Schlegel were apostles, in the latter part of the last century. The movements are alike in this: that they both sought inspiration in mediaevalism, in feudalism, in the symbols of a Christianity that ran to mysticism, in the quaint, strictly pre-Raphael art which was supposed to be the result of a simple faith. In the one case, the artless and childlike remains ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... they could never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, by political speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to be useful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, and strengthening the hands of modern feudalism. They are beginning already to see that, under the process whereby men of easy virtue obtain offices from the general government, as the reward of treachery to free principles, the strength and vitality of the party are rapidly declining. To them, at least, democracy means something more than ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower. There alone, in the silence as of a city of the dead, I would lean out of the little window cut in the thick wall and contemplate the green verdure lying below me, and I tried to imagine that I saw coming along the paths, given over to the flight of birds, ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... posterity. It marks one of the most memorable epochs in the annals of mankind. It stretches across history like a great mountain range, separating ancient France from the France of modern times. On the further slope are Catholicism and feudalism in their various stages of splendor and decay—the France of crusade and chivalry, of St. Louis and Bayard. On the hither side are freethought, industry, and centralization—the France ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the government of a planet like Marduk would have to be something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the Sword-Worlds. Maybe this Goldberg-ocracy of theirs had been forced upon them by the sheer complexity of the population and ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... bearings have a tongue. The whole history of the second half of the Middle Ages is written in armorial bearings,—the first half is in the symbolism of the Roman churches. They are the hieroglyphics of feudalism, succeeding those of theocracy. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... would make a mistake if you supposed that the people of the eleventh century objected to this form of government. They supported Feudalism because it was a very practical and necessary institution. Their Lord and Master usually lived in a big stone house erected on the top of a steep rock or built between deep moats, but within sight of his subjects. In case of danger the subjects found shelter behind the walls of the baronial ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... of the population; and he has there advantages which the people of this country have not yet gained, because we are but gradually making our way out of the darkness and the errors and the tyrannies of past ages. But in America he finds the land not cursed with feudalism; it is free to every man to buy and sell, and possess and transmit. He finds in the town in which he lives that the noblest buildings are the school-houses to which his children are freely admitted. And among those ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... father. 'The relations of the sexes should be as free as friendship,' he had taught. 'If a man and a woman love each other, it is nobody's business but their own. Neither the Law nor Society can, with any show of justice, interfere. That they do interfere, is a survival of feudalism, a survival of the system under which the individual, the subject, had no liberty, no rights. If a man and a woman love each other, they should be as free to determine for themselves the character, ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... islands it is impossible to determine. There is evidence, however, that the practice was not only in vogue, but firmly established as an adjunct of power, as early as the days of the Saxon kings. It was, in fact, coeval with feudalism, of which it may be described as a side-issue incidental to a maritime situation; for though it is impossible to point to any species of fee, as understood of the tenure of land, under which the holder was liable to render service at sea, yet it must not be forgotten that the great ports of ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... banner, elliptical for seigneur or chevalier banneret, Med. Lat. banneretus), in feudalism, the name given to those nobles who had the right to lead their vassals to battle under their own banner. Ultimately bannerets obtained a place in the feudal hierarchy between [v.03 p.0354] barons and knights bachelors, which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... militarists and commercials. It means the perception that only through eternal vigilance can freedom be maintained. Yet it is the only true Democracy; and the logic of its arrival is assured to us by the historical necessity that progress in all countries must pass through the preliminary stages of feudalism and commercialism on its way to realize the ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... begins, as far as England is practically concerned, with the Norman Conquest. It was then the Norsemen, blue-eyed, fair-haired, the finest blood in Europe, planted themselves in Norfolk and Suffolk, and brought with them feudalism and civilization. It was in 787 that, according to the Saxon Chronicle, they first reached England; but it was not till William the Conqueror made the land his own that they settled as English lords, and divided between them the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... she was going to say; the fogs, the smoke, or whist with sixpenny stakes?—"I should never get on," she said, "with the aristocracy! I am a fierce democrat—I am not ashamed of it. I hold opinions which would make my ancestors turn in their graves. I was born in the lap of feudalism. I am a daughter of the crusaders. But I am a revolutionist! I have a passion for freedom—my idea of happiness is to die on a great barricade! It's to your great country I should like to go. I should like to see the wonderful spectacle ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... instrument to strengthen the aristocracy. Society resettled after the storm, the noble retained his armies, the demagogue had lost his mobs! Although through England were scattered the principles which were ultimately to destroy feudalism, to humble the fierce barons into silken lords, to reform the Church, to ripen into a commonwealth through the representative system,—the principles were but in the germ; and when Hilyard mingled with the traders or the artisans of London, and sought to form a party which might comprehend something ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... region. People were forbidden to inhabit the countries without the consent of the Company. The Company was empowered to make war for the benefit of trade. The charter meant, in a word, the establishment of pure feudalism over a vast region in America. But in the light of the Company's record it may be questioned whether feudalism was not, after all, the best system for dealing with the Indian races. For two centuries under the Company's rule the Indians were ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... far more fearless assertion of equality, and a far more democratic feeling permeating society than, for instance, in the United States. Sweden, on the other hand, is essentially an aristocratic country, with a landed nobility and many other remnants of feudalism in her political and social institutions. Two countries so different in character can never be good yoke-fellows. They can never develop at an even pace, and the fact of kinship scarcely helps matters where the temperaments and the conditions are so widely dissimilar. Brothers ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... nation were suffering from a grave complaint. Their civilization had been made almost bankrupt owing to unresisted foreign aggression and to the native inability to cope with the mass of accumulated wrongs which a superimposed and exhausted feudalism—the Manchu system—had brought about. Yuan Shih-kai knew that the Boxers had been theoretically correct in selecting as they first did the watchword which they had first placed on their banners—"blot out the Manchus and all foreign things." Both had sapped the old civilization ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... country, by the influx of active and opulent prosperity. The brave mountaineer might exult at the sight of the Jacobite banner, and follow it boldly over hill and dale. But the Englishman was no longer the man of feudalism. The wars of the Roses could be renewed no more. He was no longer the fierce retainer of the baron, or the armed vassal of the king. He had rights and possessions of his own, and he valued both too much to cast them away in civil conflict, for claims which had become emaciated by the lapse of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Bolson, putting themselves at the head of it—late in the afternoon, it is true, when the mob, disappointed in their hopes of loot, made a stand in the narrow streets to the cries of 'Viva la Libertad! Down with Feudalism!' (I wonder what they imagine feudalism to be?) 'Down with the Goths and Paralytics.' I suppose the Senores Gamacho and Fuentes knew what they were doing. They are prudent gentlemen. In the Assembly they called themselves Moderates, and opposed every energetic measure ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... women ought not to vote," said Lincoln. "That's another relic of feudalism. I think that the women you and I know are as well qualified to vote as ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... presided over by Austria, the emperors were the chiefs only of this ancient feudalism of kings, dukes, and electors. The house of Austria was more powerful through itself and its vast possessions than through the imperial dignity. The two crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, the Tyrol, Italy, and the Low Countries, gave it an ascendency, which the genius of Richelieu had been able to ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... for they were not creative. He has exercised his genius in the creation of no character in which religious sentiment or religious passion is dominant. He could not, of course,—he, the poet of feudalism,—overlook religion as an element of the social organization of Europe, but he did not seize Christian ideas in their essence, or look at the human soul in its direct relations with God. And just think ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... venerable, but almost mysterious; towers were at that time to be found in the mouldering lines of its earliest defences, which belonged to the age of Charlemagne, or one still earlier; battlements adapted to a mode of warfare anterior even to that of feudalism or romance. The customs, usages, and local privileges of Frankfort, and the rural districts adjacent, were of a corresponding character. Festivals were annually celebrated at a short distance from the walls, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... crowning themselves kings. And over the entire body of Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and sobriety and industry, its ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... development will apply, it is to human progress. There are certain stages through which society must pass in its onward march from barbarism to civilization. Now one of these stages has always been some form or other of despotism, such as feudalism or servitude, or a despotic paternal government; and we have every reason to believe that it is not possible for humanity to leap over this transition epoch, and pass at once from pure savagery to free civilization. The Dutch system attempts to supply this missing link, and to bring ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... own generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Germans, for they were little more even then, fell apart again. Another family like that of Pepin arose under Robert the Strong, and under Hugue Capet (987) acquired the title of Kings of France. The monarchy grew out of the weakening of feudalism, and feudalism had been the gradual setting, in law and custom, of a way of living together, of these detached tribes and clans, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... from Mexico, belonging to the Dowager Marquesa de Vivanco, where we breakfasted with a large party. It is a fine solid mass of building, and as you enter the courtyard, through a deep archway, the great outhouses, stables, and especially the granary, look like remains of feudalism, they are on so large and magnificent a scale. It is an immense and valuable property, producing both maize and maguey, and the hospitality of the family, who are amongst our earliest friends here, is upon as large a scale as everything that belongs to them. We had a splendid ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... by Presidents Harrison and Cleveland until the operations of the reform embrace the greater part of the service, including fully 85,000 appointments. It is not probable that the nation will ever again return to the feudalism of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the ornamental jobs, those that are relics of feudalism and snobbery, women should supplant men is not surprising. To wear gold lace and touch your hat and whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a mechanical one, is no difficult task. It never was absolutely necessary that a butler ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... legislation; for ever since those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from one of the three great ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. Having no other source of wealth than the produce of the soil, men depended on the landlord for the means of escaping starvation; and thus his power became paramount over the liberty of the subject and the authority of the State. Every ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Church triumphed under Constantine and became associated with governments and armies. The hostility was still further qualified when many tribes of warlike barbarians embraced the faith, and the military obligation which was an essential element of feudalism acted in the same direction. But, above all, the rise and conquests of Mohammedanism awoke the military energies of Christendom and determined the direction it should take. In the Crusades the two great streams of military enthusiasm and of religious enthusiasm ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... from distrust of the law, which they have never understood, and of which even to this day they have but a scanty knowledge. No province of France has preserved more old traditions or longer endured the abuses of feudalism. Nowhere else, perhaps, has the title of the lord of the manor been handed down, as hitherto with us, to the owners of certain estates; and nowhere is it so easy to frighten the people with reports of some absurd and impossible political event. At the time of which ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... ends of aggrandizement at the expense of another class. The industrial revolution followed, as he foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific method. But it is taking the revolution many centuries to produce a new mind. Feudalism was doomed by the applications of the new science, for they transferred power from the landed nobility to the manufacturing centers. But capitalism rather than a social humanism took its place. Production and commerce were carried ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... its close by the revival of classical learning. The history of free thought in it is complicated, by being to some extent the struggle of deeds as well as of ideas, a social as well as a religious struggle. It was the period which witnessed both the dissolution of feudalism and the theocratic centralization in the popedom; and while reason struggled on the one side against the dogmatic system, it struggled on the other to assert the rights of the state against the church, and to ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... century, the advantages of a good system of high-roads began to be perceived by the government, the convenient idea came into the heads of the more ingenious among the Intendants of imposing, for the construction of the roads, a royal or public corvee analogous to that of private feudalism. Few more mischievous imposts could ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... presence move among them unchallenged. Perhaps they are sorry for him; but I think they are never rude. I am speaking, of course, of Old Japan, of the Japan that is all in evidence, if one lands, as I did, in the south, avoids Osaka, and postpones Yokohama and Tokio. It is still the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do not believe; which, in its essence, in Japan as in Europe, was harsh, unjust, and cruel; but which had the art of fostering, or at least of not ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... feudalism of the 19th century. A handful of men have invented distant, seductive loans, have introduced national debts in countries happily ignorant of them, have advanced money to unsophisticated Powers on ruinous ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Mr. Forest, "at the slow growth of modern civilization—the ages which have been consumed in reaching our present altitude, and see how we have outgrown slavery, feudalism, and religious persecutions, I cannot despair of the future of ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... upon the tomb, and leaned over as if in prayer. Above the tomb, for the first time, flew the flag of another country than our own, the Stars and Stripes, and on either side, the British Jack and the French Tricolor. This is a combination of the Democracies of the world against feudalism and autocracy. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... throw a new light upon the mistake made by the American heretics of the Middle Period. In so far as their assertion of American intellectual independence was negative, it should not have been a protest against "feudalism," social classification, social and individual discipline, approved technical methods, or any of those social forms and intellectual standards which so many Americans vaguely believed to be exclusively European. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... because the resolution of one person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social organisation, was not any more a system under which their energies could have scope to move. Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen; and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... know that Richard Lloyd, the shoemaker, was not only studious and intelligent, but was independent beyond his class. A kind of benevolent feudalism still existed in the district, and villagers at election time fell naturally into the groove required by the rich landowners and gentlefolk of the neighborhood. Once at an election three or four of the cottagers voted Liberal instead of ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... and built entirely of brick, being probably the largest English structure of that material constructed since the Roman epoch. Only the shell of the castle remains, an interesting and picturesque specimen of the half fortress, half mansion of the latter days of feudalism. The main gateway on the southern front has flanking towers over eighty feet high, surmounted by watch-turrets from which the sea is visible. The walls are magnificently overgrown with ivy, contrasting beautifully with the red brick. Great trunks of ivy grow up from ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... of crowds may be divided, then, into two very distinct classes. On the one hand we have great permanent beliefs, which endure for several centuries, and on which an entire civilisation may rest. Such, for instance, in the past were feudalism, Christianity, and Protestantism; and such, in our own time, are the nationalist principle and contemporary democratic and social ideas. In the second place, there are the transitory, changing opinions, the outcome, as a rule, of general conceptions, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... THE MEDIEVAL NEIGHBORHOOD.—During the latter half of the medieval period, and during the earlier part of the modern period, a number of factors combined to break down this early type of neighborhood. The Crusades, the decay of feudalism, and the Renaissance disrupted the stable, isolated, and self-sufficing life of the medieval neighborhood. The discovery of America and the growth of towns and cities stimulated trade and travel. People moved about more, strangers came into the community, family contacts ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... nation did not constitute a problem for the medievals may be attributable to two reasons: (1) the medieval theory of life accentuated a hierarchical order of existence—a theory that found expression in feudalism, in Church organization, and in guild and craft life; in pursuance of this theory, the Jews were accorded a recognized and distinct status; (2) furthermore, the Jews were an economic necessity in the times when a ban was ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... was taken in company with the American missionary (once a marine in Perry's squadron, who later invented the jin-riki-sha), to see a hill-temple and to study the wayside shrines around Yokohama. Seven weeks' stay in the city of Yedo—then rising out of the debris of feudalism to become the Imperial capital, T[o]ki[o], enabled me to see some things now so utterly vanished, that by some persons their previous existence is questioned. One of the most interesting characters I met personally ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... revolutionize or annex Cuba or some Central American State. The soldier figured largely in the Southern imagination. But the North inclined strongly to the ways of peace. That is the natural temper of an industrial democracy. It is the note of a civilization advanced beyond slavery and feudalism. And of the moral leaders of the North, some of the foremost had been strong champions of peace. Channing had pleaded for it as eloquently as he pleaded for freedom. Intemperance, slavery, and war had been ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... codex,—of the figures, some far off and veiled, others near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;—and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... famous castle among the heathery Highlands. There he proclaims the most uncompromising Americanism in a speech that grows more broadly Scotch with every week of his emancipation from the influence of the clipped, commercial accent of New York, and casts contempt on feudalism by playing the part of lord of the manor to such a perfection of high-handed beneficence that the people of the glen are all become his clansmen, and his gentle lady would be the patron saint of the district—if the republican theology ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... in its best ages, mitigating the sorrows of the poor, raising the humble from degradation, opposing slavery and war, educating the ignorant, scattering the Word of God, heading off the dreadful tyranny of feudalism, elevating the learned to offices of trust, shielding the pious from the rapacity of barons, recognizing man as man, proclaiming Christian equalities, holding out the hopes of a future life to the penitent believer, and proclaiming ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... appears in consciousness to have no connection with them. He applies his doctrine in particular to two revolutions, one in the past, the other in the future. The revolution in the past is that of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, which finds its expression, according to him, particularly in the French Revolution. The one in the future is the revolution of the wage- earners, or proletariat, against the bourgeoisie, which is to establish the Socialist Commonwealth. The whole movement ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... of the Middle Ages is an expression of the spirit of feudalism and of the genius of the Church. From the union of feudalism and Christianity arose the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, the homage to woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those of amorous metaphysics, were rendered through allegory into art. Against these high conceptions, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Feudalism was dying! Divine right, monarchy, aristocracy, oppression, despotism, tyranny—these and all other devils of the old world order were bound for the limbo which awaits outworn, discredited social institutions. The Declaration of Independence officially proclaimed the new order,—challenging ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... appealed to the ancient spirit of the South which had risen before in the cause of liberty. Feudalism and the oppression of the peasants would return under the rule of the Bourbons, he assured them. They began to look upon the abdicated Emperor as the Angel of Deliverance. The people of Lyons were equally enthusiastic, winning warmer words than generally fell from the lips of Napoleon. ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... of his discourse, and by adroit digressions he applied the doctrine of his system to feudalism. The poetry—religious and profane—and the abrupt eloquence of that period had a grand opening in this vast theory, wherein the Doctor had amalgamated all the philosophical systems of the ancients, and from which he brought them out again classified, transfigured, ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... observes, has been a fossil—it should be a plant; statute law should express, not impede, the mind of mankind. In tracing the course of human political institutions, he finds feudalism succeeding monarchy, and this again followed by trade, the good and evil of which is that it would put everything in the market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself. By this means it has done its ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Among those hills, the outline of which I could now but faintly see, were the lakes and salmon rivers in the heart of the great forests which make our Canadian wild life so fascinating. We were being torn from that life and sent headlong into the seething militarism of a decadent European feudalism. I was leaning on the rail looking at the track of moonlight, when a young lad came up to me and said, "Excuse me, Sir, but may I talk to you for a while? It is such a weird sight that it has got on my nerves." He was a young boy of seventeen who had come ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... call it, is an imperfect system. But it is the only system that has banished famine. Under communism and feudalism there was hunger. Under capitalism the world has been able to feed twice as many mouths as could ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... for the last time on the great soldier with 900,000 men against his 128,000 arrogated the right to outlaw and brand him as the disturber of public peace. I have already said this was their ostensible plea, but the real reason was his determination to exterminate feudalism and establish democratic institutions as soon as he could bring the different factions into harmony. He failed, but the colossal cost of his failure in men and money is unthinkable. His subjugation left Great Britain alone with a debt, ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Prince, he deals with the action and conduct of the people. With his passion for personal and contemporary incarnation he finds in the Swiss of his day the Romans of Republican Rome, and reiterates the comparison in detail. Feudalism, mercenaries, political associations embodied in Arts and Guilds, the Temporal power of the Church, all these are put away, and in their stead he announces the new and daring gospel that for organic unity ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... In the twelfth century, when the power of the royal government was similarly diminished through the weakness of Stephen and the confusions of the civil war, it was a certain class of men, the great nobles, that fell heir to the lost strength of government. This was because of the development of feudalism during the intervening time. The greater landholders had come to exercise over those who held land from them certain powers which in modern times belong to the officers of government only. A landlord could ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... that well-spring of poetry and art which arose in Italy, to feed and fertilise the world when it was half dead and wholly barren under the tyrannies of the Church and the lusts of Feudalism; it would always seem, I say, as though that water of life had so saturated the Italian soil, that the lowliest hut upon its hills and plains will ever nourish and put forth some ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... groaned for centuries under the burden of a decayed feudalism and an absolute monarchy. The last vestige of constitutional forms had disappeared. The representatives of the estates had not been convened since the meeting of the States-General in 1614. The widespread and ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... August the 4th, and on the motion of the Viscount de Noailles, brother-in-law of La Fayette, the Assembly abolished all titles of rank, all the abusive privileges of feudalism, the tythes and casuals of the clergy, all provincial privileges, and, in fine, the feudal regimen generally. To the suppression of tythes, the Abbe Sieyes was vehemently opposed; but his learned and logical arguments were unheeded, and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Arthur Young, had at different epochs observed the symptoms of social disease and prognosticated the nature of its progress. The France of that day has been likened to a pyramid with the sovereign for its apex, with the nobility, a remnant of antique feudalism, for its next tier, with the wealthy and influential Church for the next, and below these the vast unrecognized bulk of the pyramid, the unprivileged masses who were the people of France. In the hands of the few who had the happiness to be "born," or who ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... exact condition. So long as he has money enough in his pocket to pay his labourers and buy a little stock, my father, like every British farmer, is content. The fact is, he is a serf as much as his men, and until we get rid of feudalism he will ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Feudalism had been gradually stifling old English freedom, and the King saw himself confronted with a feudal baronage, nobles claiming hereditary, military, and judicial power independent of the King, such as degraded ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... The styles of all ages and all countries have been recklessly imitated. The homes of the millionaires are disguised as churches, as mosques, as medieval castles. Here you may find a stronghold of feudalism cheek by jowl with the quiet mansion of a colonial gentleman. There Touraine jostles Constantinople; and the climax is reached by Mr Schwab, who has decreed for himself a lofty pleasure-dome, which is said to resemble Chambord, and which takes its place in ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... subsisting largely upon agriculture. The ruling classes, therefore, instead of owning many personal slaves, make a practice of subjugating the agricultural groups in such a way as to constitute a kind of feudalism. As land is free the enslaved groups can be made to serve the free class only ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... that the fittest engine to redeem England from the mischiefs and mistakes of oligarchical feudalism was to be found in the imposing machinery and deception of the Roman Church; overlooking the great truth that it was not the Romish Church, but the genius of Christianity, working its vast but silent change, which was ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... indistinct period before the beginning of history. The date is reassuring; for I think cautious writers are silent on the General's exploits. But the stone is connected with one of those remarkable tenures of land which linger on into the modern world from Feudalism. Whenever the reigning sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a flourish according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily for a respectable family, crowned heads have no great business in the Pentland ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out of the aristocratic and oligarchical government of the Hanoverian period, just as that system had been a step from the kingly power of the Tudors and the Stuarts, which, in turn, had arisen upon the ruins of feudalism and military monarchical power. It is this gradual growth, this "gently broadening down from precedent to precedent," which makes the British constitution of to-day the more or less perfected result of centuries of experience and struggle. But that result has only been made possible ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... of the line of demi-gods; which assign to a population bronzed beneath the suns of the West, the blue-eyed Minerva and the yellow-haired Achilles (physical characteristics of the North); which introduce, amongst a pastoral people, warlike aristocracies and limited monarchies, the feudalism of the classic time,—even these might serve you to trace back the primeval settlements of the Hellenes to the same region whence, in later times, the Norman warriors broke on the dull and savage hordes of the Celt, and became ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Contributions to romantic literature such as Macpherson's "Ossian," Collins' "Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," and Gray's translations form the Welsh and the Norse, relate to periods which antedate that era of Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the feudal system, so the capitalist system could not long survive the invention of dynamite. Not that we are dynamitards: indeed the absurdity of the inference shows how innocent we were of any practical acquaintance with explosives; but we thought that the statement about gunpowder and feudalism was historically true, and that it would do the capitalists good to remind them of it. Suddenly, however, the Federation made a very startling practical application of the Class War doctrine. They did not blow anybody up; but in the general election of 1885 they ran ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... mastery in those matters in a kind of guild, father to son, through old-established families of flute- [216] players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lises (to borrow an expression from French feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper functions of gentlemen—schole, leisure, in the two senses of the word, which in truth involve one another—their whole time free, to be told out ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... in the telling, and interest enough in the plot to silence our criticisms while we read. Caleb Williams is a capital story; it is also a living and humane book, which conveys with rare power and reasoned emotion the revolt of a generous mind against the oppressions of feudalism and the stupidities of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... which adds daily to man's power to create wealth and enables the world to sustain an increasing population in an increasing degree of comfort. True monopoly means stagnation, oppression, and what has been called a new feudalism, while consolidation without monopoly means progress, freedom, and a constant approach to industrial democracy. One of the essential means of securing this latter result is the retention of so much protection as is needed to keep American ingenuity ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... represented most completely the finished feudal system, and who took it most to heart. His law, his romance, and his religion, his self-command, and his terrible fury were all a part of this innate feudalism, and exercised within its limits; and we must suppose that he thoroughly felt his responsibility as the chief of his feudatories, while at the same time he had no idea of his having any responsibilities towards the lower part of his subjects. ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... were slaves. Charlemagne made Alcuin the present of an estate on which there were twenty thousand slaves. Especially in times of scarcity, as in 805 and 806, their lot was a miserable one. At such times, they fled in crowds to the monasteries. The social state was that of feudalism "in all but the development of that independence in the greater lords, which was delayed by the strength of Karl, but fostered, at the same time, by his wars and his policy towards ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... seems to have been the criterion for legal coming of age. The Romans, with their heavy weapons, held the son in tutelage until the age of fifteen. The Germans, with their use of light darts, gave their sons power of self-control at the age of twelve. In the heyday of feudalism "a knight's son became of age when he could swing his father's sword" and "a yeoman's son when he could swing his father's battle-axe," and by that process the fathers were released from liability to punishment ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... II. The Geography of England in Relation to its History III. Roman Britain; A Civilization which did not civilize IV. The Coming of the Saxons[1]; the Coming of the Normans V. The Norman Sovereigns[1] VI. The Angevins, or Plantagenets; Rise of the English Nation[1] VII. The Self-Destruction of Feudalism VIII. Absolutism of the Crown; the Reformation; the New Learning[1] IX. The Stuart Period; the Divine Right of Kings versus the Divine Right of the People X. India gained; America lost—Parliamentary Reform—Government by the People A General ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... were silently arguing for the life he had found among strangers, and her victory would have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson's civilization was two years old—a thin veneer over a century of feudalism—and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness to resent injury and injustice. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... would really have pleased him better than to have seen me brought to book by Sir E.C., since in my defence he would have had an opportunity of appealing to the passions of the local people, who were all Radicals, and of incensing them still further against the principles of feudalism. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... agitated, and often furious. One of the red-hot demagogues got up in the assembly, and advised "mangling, maiming, or burning the books: they were only fit for cartridges, wadding, or fuel: they were replete with marks of feudalism and royalty—for they had arms or embellishments on them, which denoted them to belong to Aristocrats." This speech made some impression: his comrades were for carrying the motion immediately into execution, by sword and faggot.... ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Commedia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is the view of Carlyle about some familiar personality like Johnson ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... describe as 'social legislation' was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in theory or wrapped in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood and its responsibilities. Central Europe languished for centuries, under a sham Empire, in the unprogressive anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal system', it has been said,[65] 'was nothing more nor less than the attempt of a society which had failed to organize itself as a State, to make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the bitter experience which Germany went through ...
— Progress and History • Various
... ceremonies when a visitor called upon him, we would call him insane; yet, that is precisely what we do with regard to the transfer of real estate, observing still the tortuous roundabout methods of conveying, resorted to in those days for the purpose of evading the oppressions of feudalism. Nay, the analogy is so strong, that in our Law Courts, and Deeds we still use the same barbarous Norman French jargon in which the parley was in those ancient days held at the gate of the baronial residence. (Hear, and applause.) It is perhaps presumptuous of a person who ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... part of our forefathers that men who had freedom in worship carried also the capacity for self-government. The occasion of the French Revolution was the purchase of a diamond necklace for Queen Marie Antoinette at a time when the treasury was exhausted; the cause of the revolution was feudalism. Not otherwise, the occasion of the great conflict that is now shaking our earth was the assassination of an Austrian boy and girl, but the cause is embedded in ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... awaiting the white man's plow, it was impossible to introduce in its entirety and over the whole area the system of lords and tenants that existed across the sea. So it happened that almost every kind of experiment in land tenure, from communism to feudalism, was tried. In the early days of the Jamestown colony, the land, though owned by the London Company, was tilled in common by the settlers. No man had a separate plot of his own. The motto of the community was: "Labor and share alike." All were supposed to work in the fields and receive an equal share ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... than with the older lords. A few non-royal princes, such as Armagnac, or Saint-Pol, or Brittany, remain and will go down with the others; the "new men" of the day, the bastard Dunois or the Constables Du Guesclin and Clisson, grow to greater prominence; it is clear that the old feudalism is giving place to a newer order, in which the aristocracy, from the King's brothers downwards, will group themselves around the throne, and begin the process which reaches its unhappy perfection ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... fishes, called shachi-hoko, are huge metal figures, like dolphins, from four to twelve feet high, which were set on the pinnacles of the old castle towers in the days of feudalism. That from Nagoya, exhibited at the Vienna Exposition, had scales of ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... acknowledgment of the claims of woman, the loyalty to the leader chosen by themselves, loyalty to their friends (the idea of fellowship),—these features should all be well-noted, because from them arose the feudalism of the middle ages. What Caesar and Tacitus tell us of the education of the Germans expresses only the emancipation of individuality, which in its immediate crudeness had no other form in which to manifest itself than wars ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... surprise the astute Patrick Henry Hanway; it had been foreseen, and he met it with prompt money. He had made his alliances with divers railway corporations and other big companies, and set in to overturn that feudalism in politics which had theretofore been dominant. The aristocrats felt the attack upon their caste; they came forth for that issue ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... old. The one nature found itself in a new world, and set itself to discover the new ways for the new duties that were given it. The other nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the structure of the feudalism which had been corrupt in its own day, and which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of the progressing race. The one nature magnified labor, the other nature depreciated and despised it. The one honored the laborer, and the other scorned him. The ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... for, and we should soon hear the last of these noisy, ranting idiots who are eternally waving flags like lunatics and mouthing absurd phrases about imperialism and patriotism, national destiny, and rubbish of that sort. Our duty is to humanity, and not to any decayed symbols of feudalism. The talk of patriotism and imperialism is a gigantic fraud, and the tyranny of it makes our names hated throughout the world. We have no right to enforce our sway upon the peace-loving farmers and the ignorant ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... as the "First Emperor," Shih Huang Ti. He acquired control over the whole Empire, after a series of wars, in 221 B.C., and died in 210 B.C. Apart from his conquests, he is remarkable for three achievements: the building of the Great Wall against the Huns, the destruction of feudalism, and the burning of the books. The destruction of feudalism, it must be confessed, had to be repeated by many subsequent rulers; for a long time, feudalism tended to grow up again whenever the Central Government was in weak hands. ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... towns, mostly offspring of feudalism, begun under castle walls and continued after walls and castle had crumbled, as their area enlarged, with some improvement, perhaps, in the suburban parts, still retained this patch of mediaevalism, until obliterated by war, or fire, or later by modern progress. Look at Edinburgh, for example. ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... Feudalism, absence of in America Food, joint ownership in Foster, J. W. Frontenac, L. de B. Funeral ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... Dissenters, or Tones—at the moment of passing the threshold they were transformed into Trojans. Other things fell from them like a mantle, and in their serious devotion to traditional Conservatism they were examples of the true spirit of Feudalism. Beldam, the butler, had long ago graduated as Professor in the system. Coming as page-boy in earlier years, he had acquired the by no means easy art of Trojan diplomacy. It was now his duty to overhaul, as it were, every servant that passed the gates; an overhauling, ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... translator was a Castilian or a Portuguese. On these points judgment must be suspended. There can, however, be no hesitation in accepting Cervantes' verdict on Amadis de Gaula as the "best of all the books of this kind that have ever been written.'' It is the prose epic of feudalism, and its romantic spirit, its high ideals, its fantastic gallantry, its ingenious adventures, its mechanism of symbolic wonders, and its flowing style have entranced readers of such various types as Francis I. and Charles ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in comparison with the poor immigrants they employ,—what is thought in thy clear light of those who expect in exchange for a few shillings spent in presents or medicines, a few kind words, a little casual thought or care, such a mighty payment of gratitude? Gratitude! Under the weight of old feudalism their minds were padlocked by habit against the light; they might be grateful then, for they thought their lords were as gods, of another frame and spirit than theirs, and that they had no right to have the same hopes and wants, scarcely to suffer from the same maladies, with ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... and think of it sentimentally, as it's pictured in the stories and songs—a sort of Christmas-tree Germany. They don't know about the Germany that's grown up—the Germany of iron and coal kings, that combines all the cruelty of feudalism with modern efficiency and science—the Beast with ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... proposed series will be devoted is that of "France in the New World,"—the attempt of Feudalism, Monarchy, and Rome to master a continent where, at this hour, half a million of bayonets are vindicating the ascendency of a regulated freedom;—Feudalism still strong in life, though enveloped and overborne by new-born Centralization; Monarchy in the flush of triumphant ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... crystallization, is a solution. There was a solvent period between the unknown Orient and the greatness of Greece, between the Classic and the Middle Ages,—and now humanity is again solvent, in the transition from the traditions which issued out of feudalism to the novelty of democratic crystallization. But as the youth of all animals is prolonged in proportion to their dignity in the scale of being, so is it with the children of history. Destiny is the longest-lived of all things. We are not going to accomplish it all at once. We have got to fight for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... its positive stage at quite an early period, chemistry and biology only in recent times, while, in the highest and most complicated science, the metaphysical (negative, liberal, democratic, revolutionary) mode of thought is still battling with the feudalism of the theological mode. To make sociology positive is the mission of the second half of Comte's work, and to this goal his philosophical activity had been directed from the beginning. Comte rates the efforts of political economy very low, with ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and the nouveaux riches he had scant respect, holding that both the aristocracy and the plutocracy had used their political power for selfish ends. Old feudalism in some respects he regarded as better than new Capital, for the landed aristocracy did at least recognise some obligations to those under their sway, whereas Capital was so concerned with its rights that it forgot ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... modern civilized society, that the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively turned to it. But beyond this alluring spell of its darker and obscurer individual experience, it seems neither to have touched his imagination nor even to have aroused his interest. To Walter Scott the romance of feudalism was precious for the sake of feudalism itself, in which he believed with all his soul, and for that of the heroic old feudal figures which he honored. He was a Tory in every particle of his frame, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... that family soon after Richard's birth. Friedrich, during his later years, cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or any other amusement. Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the powers of feudalism had combined to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him again. While Richard was in his cradle the whole of Saxony ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... understand great men, you and your Wellington! Napoleon was not of the wood of which kings are made, but of the marble of the gods. Let me tell you the "code Napoleon" carried light not only into the Ghettos, but into many another noisome spider-clot of feudalism. The world wants earthquakes and thunderstorms, or it grows corrupt and stagnant. This Paris needs a scourge of God, and the moment France gives Germany a pretext, there will be sackcloth and ashes, or prophecy has ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... feudal lord cannot be expected to have sympathized with such grand patriarchal ideas; they were much too like those of the kingdom of heaven; and feudalism itself had by this time crumbled away—not indeed into monthly, but into half yearly wages. The marquis, notwithstanding, was touched by the old man's words, matter of fact as his reply must sound ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... the problem, their efforts were unavailing. At the Convention of Balta-Liman between Russia and Turkey, where 'coercion' was coupled with 'remedial measures,' an ineffectual attempt was made to ameliorate the wretched condition of the peasantry on the old lines of feudalism; but it was not until the country became autonomous and the legitimate representatives of the people took the matter in hand, that an efficient remedy was applied. Then, as the reader will find detailed in the following pages,[1] more than four hundred thousand heads of families ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... of the ermine of the judge and the robe of the Senator, their aggregation in one man of wealth so enormous as to make Croesus seem a pauper, their picked, paid, and skilled retainers who are summoned by the message of electricity and appear upon the wings of steam. If we look into the origin of feudalism and of the modern corporations—those Dromios of history—we find that the former originated in a strict paternalism, which is scouted by modern economists, and that the latter has grown from an unrestrained freedom of action, aggression, and development, which they commend as the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... agricultural colony in the New World. Then began that series of futile and vexatious dealings on the part of the French court, in granting and withdrawing monopolies, conflicting commissions and patents, with confused purposes of feudalism and restricted privilege, which embarrassed all effective progress, and visited chagrin and disappointment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... value of money, and the possession of it was as sweet to him as to other men. Only he would never soil his soul in acquiring it dishonourably. He was convinced that society as at present organized was all wrong and that the feudalism of the middle ages had simply given place to a worse form of slavery—capitalistic driven labour—which had resulted in the actual iniquitous conditions, the enriching of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor. He was familiar with the socialistic doctrines of the day and had taken ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... and morally, in these old free towns; there is intellectual sickness as well as bodily in those musty gabled houses; the mediaeval spirit blights what revival of healthiness may exist in these commonwealths. And feudalism is outside the gates. There are the brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed doublets and heavy armour, face and dress as unhuman as possible, standing grimacing at the blood spurting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... side of things bore a rude resemblance to feudalism, so on the religious there was a similar anticipation of the mediaeval Catholic Church. The Druids were not a special family, like the Levites, or in any way born into the priesthood. They were an order composed of persons selected, when ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... have received some interesting notes about the present conditions of the native tribes and the position of women. "In most of the Malay States exogamous matriarchy has in comparatively modern times been superseded by feudalism (i. e., the patriarchal rights of the father). But where the old customs survive, the women are still to a large extent in control. The husband goes to live in the wife's village; thus the women in each group are a compact unity, while the men are ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Europe in the nineteenth century; Cavour, beyond all other statesmen of his age, believed in Liberty, religious, social and political and applied it to his vast work of transforming thirty million Italians out of Feudalism, and the stunting effects of autocracy into ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... have wrung from the strong hands of the usurpers. Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, from stake to stake.... Government began in tyranny and force; began in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way like a thunderstorm against the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a time when Germany was sinking down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression of its ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... running lances through one another; when the overworked, underfed labourers of the field cringed and cowered before every lordly whim. Most readers seem to get their notions of chivalry from Scott's Talisman, and their ideas on feudalism from the same author's immortal Ivanhoe. While scholars keep up a merry disputation as to the historical origin of the feudal system, the public imagination goes steadily on with its own curious picture of how that system lived and moved and had its being. ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... midst of an age of gloom and anarchy, when Feudalism was slowly building up a new social organization on the ruins of the Roman Empire, arose that spirit of chivalry, which, in its connection with the Christian religion, forms so sharp a division between the sentiments of ancient and modern times. Following closely on the growth of chivalry as an ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... citizens were successively called to manage the local affairs. It furnished the instance of a community composed of men of small estates who very rarely had to use a mark for their name, and imbued by the spirit of individual independence toned into a respect for law, which, on the decline of feudalism, began to play a part on the national stage. Thus the political character of Boston was sharply defined and firmly fixed. It started in the republican way, went on for over a century in republican habits, and had the priceless heirloom of principles and traditions that were certainly life-giving, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... mediaeval autocratic regime of fixed caste and hereditary status towards a regime of equal social justice. In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of the universal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The end of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the long pilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... but maudlin puerilities or more or less musical verbiage, arising out of a life of depression and enervation as their result; or else that class of poetry, plays, &c., of which the foundation is feudalism, with its ideas of lords and ladies, its imported standard of gentility, and the manners of European high-life-below-stairs in every line and verse." Thus incited to poetic self-expression, Whitman (adds Mr. Conway) "wrote on a sheet of paper, in large letters, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... upon somebody. The man who made his fortune yesterday calls to-day's lucky fellow a nouveau riche and a parvenu. The counter jumper who has snatched his thousands from a sudden rise in stocks, is sure to invest some of his winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... off a willow, and plant two or three in every county in England. Let him alone to work out his own plot . . . we have not seen the end of it yet; but whatever it will be, England has need of him as a transition-stage between feudalism and * * * * ; for many a day to come. If he be not the ideal landlord, he is nearer it than any we are like yet ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... and gave way to feudalism there were new ways of producing wealth. The laws of feudal societies, their customs and institutions, changed to meet the needs brought about through the new methods of making things. Under slavery, the slaves made wealth for their masters and were doled out food enough to keep them alive. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo |
