first, the brutal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised
over her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian territory; then,
the host of temporal 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 Roman
legions. [Footnote: In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal
Christianity, whose corruptions 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 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