The Earth as Modified by Human Action | Page 9

abuse of Roman
tyranny, and added new oppressions and new methods of extortion to
those invented by older despotisms. The burdens in question fell most
heavily on the provinces that had been longest colonized by the Latin
race, and those are the portions of Europe which have suffered the
greatest physical degradation. "Feudalism," says Blanqui, "was a
concentration of scourges. The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of
his fathers, became the property of inflexible, ignorant, indolent
masters; he was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever
they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and
surrendered to them half the product of his earnings during the other
three; without their consent he could not change his residence, or marry.
And why, indeed, should he wish to marry, when he could scarcely
save enough to maintain himself The Abbot Alcuin had twenty
thousand slaves, called SERFS, who were forever attached to the soil.

This is the great cauue of the rapid depopulation observed in the
Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of monasteries which
sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable men
to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but the human race
never suffered a more cruel outrage, industry never received a wound
better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the
rudest antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching
end of the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this
time, was received without terror."--Resume de l'Histoire du
Commerce, p. 156.] Man cannot struggle at once against human
oppression and the destructive forces of inorganic nature. "When both
are combined against him, he succumbs after a shorter or longer
struggle, and the fields he has won from the primeval wood relapse into
their original state of wild and luxuriant, but unprofitable forest growth,
or fall into that of a dry and barren wilderness. The abbey of
Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which, in the time of Charlemagne, had
possessed a million of acres, was, down to the Revolution, still so
wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was 300,000 livres.
Theabbey of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of
Saint-Germain-des-Pres.--Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la France, p.
104.
Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyere the following striking
picture of the condition of the French peasantry in his time: "One sees
certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female,
scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and
turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an
articulate voice, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human
face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they
live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of
ploughing, Bowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small
share of the bread they have grown." "These are his own words," adds
Courier, "and he is speaking of the fortunate peasants, of those who had
work and bread, and they were then the few."--Petition a la Chambre
des Deputes pour les Villageois l'en empeche ce danser.
Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in the

twenty-first chapter of his Travels, a frightful account of the burdens of
the rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular
governmental taxes, and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling
offense, he enumerates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin
and nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some
others are as repulsive to humanity and morality, as the worst abuses
ever practised by heathen despotism. But Young underrates the number
of these oppressive impositions. Moreau de Jonnes, a higher authority,
asserts that in a brief examination he had discovered upwards of three
hundred distinct lights of the feudatory over the person or the property
of his vassal. See Etat Economique et Social de la France, Paris, 1890,
p. 389. Most of these, indeed, had been commuted for money payments,
and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary imposts for the benefit of
prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobility, were exempt
from taxation. The collection of the taxes was enforced with
unrelenting severity. On one occasion, in the reign of Louis XIV., the
troops sent out against the recreant peasants made more than 3,000
prisoners, of whom 400 were condemned to the galleys for life, and a
number so large that the government did not dare to disclose it, were
hung on trees or broken on the wheel.--Moreau de Jonnes, Etat
Economique et Social de la France, p. 420. Who can wonder at the
hostility of the French plebeian classes towards the aristocracy in