CATJSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. (» 



potism which Rome herself exercised over her conquered king- 

 doms and even over her Italian territory ; then, the host of tem- 

 poral and spiritual tyrannies which she left as her dying curse to 

 all her wide dominion, and which, in some form of violence or of 

 fraud, still brood over almost every soil subdued by the Ro- 

 man legions.* Man cannot struggle at once against human op- 



* In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal Christianity whose corrup- 

 tions had converted the most beneficent of religions into the most baneful of 

 superstitions, perpetuated every abuse of Roman tyranny, and added new 

 oppressions and new methods of extortion to those invented by older despot- 

 isms. The burdens in question fell most heavily on the provinces that had 

 been longest colonized by the Latin race, and these are the portions of Europe 

 which have sulTered 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, indo- 

 lent 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 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 mis- 

 erable 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 VHistoire du Commerce, p. 156. See also MiCH- 

 ELET, Histoire de France, Vol. V., pp. 216, 217. 



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. The abbey of Saint- 

 Denis was nearly as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. — Latergne, 

 tlconomie Rurale de la France, p. 104. 



Paul Louis Courier quotes from La BruySre the following striking picture 

 of the condition of the French peasantry in his time : ' ' One sees certain dark, 

 Uvid, 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 spealung of the fortunate peas- 



