6 
CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 
not struggle at once against crushing oppression and the 
destructive forces of inorganic nature. When both are com¬ 
bined against him, he succumbs after a shorter or a longer 
struggle, and the fields he has won from the primeval wood 
relapse into their original state of wild and luxuriant, but 
baneful of superstitions, perpetuated every 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 these are 
the portions of Europe which have suffered the greatest physical degra¬ 
dation. “Feudalism,” says Blanqui, “was a concentration of scourges. 
The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers, became the prop¬ 
erty 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 cause of the rapid depopulation ob¬ 
served in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of monasteries 
which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such misera¬ 
ble 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 VUistoire du Commerce , p. 156. 
The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which, in the time of Charle¬ 
magne, 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- 
Prbs. —Laveegxe, Economic Rurale de la France, p. 104. 
Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruybre the following striking pic¬ 
ture of the condition of the French peasantry in his time: “ One sees 
certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scat¬ 
tered 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, 
