6 CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 
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. 
himself ? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves, called serfs, who 
were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depop- 
ulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of mon- 
asteries 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.” — Résumé de I) Histoire du Commerce, p. 1656. 
The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which, in the time of Charlemagne, 
had possessed a million of acres, was, down to the Reyolution, still so 
wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was 300,000 livres. The abbey 
of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.— 
LAVERGNE, Economie Rurale dela France, p. 104. 
Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyére 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 indomi- 
table 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, sowing, 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.”— 
Péitition d la Chambre des Députés pour les Villageois que Ven empéche de 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 offences, 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 impo- 
sitions. Moreau de Jonnés, a higher authority, asserts that in a brief exam- 
