"Feudalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lilies upon the tomb, and leaned over as if in prayer. Above the tomb, for the first time, flew the flag of another country than our own, the Stars and Stripes, and on either side, the British Jack and the French Tricolor. This is a combination of the Democracies of the world against feudalism and autocracy. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... of the Crusades, the destruction of the Templars, the Papal interdicts, the tragedies caused or suffered by the House of Anjou, by the Emperor—these were full of a more permanent significance; but since then the colossal figure of feudalism was seen standing as it were on tiptoe at Crecy for flight from earth: that was a revolution unparalleled; yet that was a trifle by comparison with the more fearful revolutions that were mining below the Church. By her own internal schisms, by the abominable spectacle ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... old John not touching his hat as the ambulance came in; whereas his successor merely gazed curiously at the occupants, and then slouched back into the lodge. . . . Of course hat-touching is a relic of feudalism, and, as such, too hideous to contemplate in this age of democracy; but still—like a smile—it costs ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... combined in enabling him to give an abiding direction to the career of his country. He made his appearance on the political stage just in the time when a new system of government, favorable to the power of the sovereigns of Europe, was rising upon the ruins of feudalism. The royal authority was gaining rapidly in England and in France. Spain, freed from the domination of the Moors, had just become a power of the first rank. The fleets of Portugal were whitening the most distant seas, conferring upon the ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... older lords. A few non-royal princes, such as Armagnac, or Saint-Pol, or Brittany, remain and will go down with the others; the "new men" of the day, the bastard Dunois or the Constables Du Guesclin and Clisson, grow to greater prominence; it is clear that the old feudalism is giving place to a newer order, in which the aristocracy, from the King's brothers downwards, will group themselves around the throne, and begin the process which reaches its unhappy perfection ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... discriminating perception of antiquity, and their adhesion to it is invincible. Whether they came in with the Normans, or before, history does not say. One thing would seem evident. They are older than the Order of the Garter, and belonged to feudalism. They are the living spirits of feudalism, which have survived its human retainers by several hundred years, and now represent the defunct institution as pretentiously as in King Stephen's day. They are as ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... quite new to me. Caligula was worried in a like manner, I believe. We had near us there a little section of the old world which was trying, in a half-hearted fashion, to maintain itself in the midst of a democracy. It was the manorial life of the patroons—a relic of ancient feudalism which had its beginning in 1629, when The West Indies Company issued its charter of Privileges and Exemptions. That charter offered to any member of the company who should, within four years, bring fifty adults to the New Netherlands and establish them along ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... Feudalism had been gradually stifling old English freedom, and the King saw himself confronted with a feudal baronage, nobles claiming hereditary, military, and judicial power independent of the King, such as degraded the Monarchy and riveted ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... book in hand, and sent the trend of conversation in a new direction. He said, worriedly, "I've been studying up on this and what we're confronted with is two different ethnic periods, barbarism and feudalism. Handling them both at once ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Lescarbot, in 1607, established at Port Royal the first agricultural colony in the New World. Then began that series of futile and vexatious dealings on the part of the French court, in granting and withdrawing monopolies, conflicting commissions and patents, with confused purposes of feudalism and restricted privilege, which embarrassed all effective progress, and visited chagrin and disappointment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... looking round to survey its own social state, found itself in the midst of the ruin and disorder of the disintegrated system of the twelfth century. The life was gone out of the ancient organisation of Catholicism and Feudalism, and it seemed as if nothing but corruption remained. What enabled the leaders of the nation to discern the horror and despair of this anarchic dissolution of the worn-out old, and what inspired them with hope and energy when they thought of the possible ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... to-day we see clearly that race is not the determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we see a people, admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... think of it sentimentally, as it's pictured in the stories and songs—a sort of Christmas-tree Germany. They don't know about the Germany that's grown up—the Germany of iron and coal kings, that combines all the cruelty of feudalism with modern efficiency and science—the Beast with the Brains ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... of an estate on which there were twenty thousand slaves. Especially in times of scarcity, as in 805 and 806, their lot was a miserable one. At such times, they fled in crowds to the monasteries. The social state was that of feudalism "in all but the development of that independence in the greater lords, which was delayed by the strength of Karl, but fostered, at the same time, by his wars and his policy towards ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... grip relaxed, the tribes of Germans, for they were little more even then, fell apart again. Another family like that of Pepin arose under Robert the Strong, and under Hugue Capet (987) acquired the title of Kings of France. The monarchy grew out of the weakening of feudalism, and feudalism had been the gradual setting, in law and custom, of a way of living together, of these detached tribes and clans, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... merely venerable, but almost mysterious; towers were at that time to be found in the mouldering lines of its earliest defences, which belonged to the age of Charlemagne, or one still earlier; battlements adapted to a mode of warfare anterior even to that of feudalism or romance. The customs, usages, and local privileges of Frankfort, and the rural districts adjacent, were of a corresponding character. Festivals were annually celebrated at a short distance from the walls, which had descended from a dateless antiquity. Every thing which met the eye spoke the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... thus the prime source of much that appears in consciousness to have no connection with them. He applies his doctrine in particular to two revolutions, one in the past, the other in the future. The revolution in the past is that of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, which finds its expression, according to him, particularly in the French Revolution. The one in the future is the revolution of the wage- earners, or proletariat, against the bourgeoisie, which is to establish the Socialist Commonwealth. The whole movement of history is viewed ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... ways for the new duties that were given it. The other nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the structure of the feudalism which had been corrupt in its own day, and which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of the progressing race. The one nature magnified labor, the other nature depreciated and despised it. The one honored the laborer, and the other scorned him. The one was simple and direct; ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... of that great institution know as feudalism, M. d'Espard deserved respectful admiration. If he believed himself to be by blood the superior of other men, he also believed in all the obligations of nobility; he had the virtues and the strength it demands. He had brought up his children in his own principles, and taught them from the cradle ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... opposition did not surprise the astute Patrick Henry Hanway; it had been foreseen, and he met it with prompt money. He had made his alliances with divers railway corporations and other big companies, and set in to overturn that feudalism in politics which had theretofore been dominant. The aristocrats felt the attack upon their caste; they came forth for that issue and ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... history of those highest in the land we can only imagine what must have been that of the rest. Feudalism, which was a part of Spain's Gothic inheritance, had always made that country one of its strongholds, and chivalry had nowhere else found so congenial a soil. There was no great artisan class, as in France, creating a powerful "bourgeoisie"; no "guilds," or simple "burghers," as in Germany, ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... became the most civilized nation in Europe. Poetry, philosophy, and art thence found their way to France, England, and Germany, being greatly assisted by the invention of printing, which just then was beginning to make books cheaper than they ever had been. At the same time feudalism was ruined, because the invention of gunpowder had previously been changing the art of war. For example, the King of France, Louis XI, as well as the King of England, Henry VII, had entire disposal of the national artillery; and therefore overawed the barons and armored knights. Neither moated fortresses ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... part of our forefathers that men who had freedom in worship carried also the capacity for self-government. The occasion of the French Revolution was the purchase of a diamond necklace for Queen Marie Antoinette at a time when the treasury was exhausted; the cause of the revolution was feudalism. Not otherwise, the occasion of the great conflict that is now shaking our earth was the assassination of an Austrian boy and girl, but the cause is embedded in racial antagonisms and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... antagonistic principles which had been working for centuries, so the uprising and war in Japan in 1868-70, which resulted in national unity, one government, one ruler, one flag, the overthrow of feudalism, the abolition of ancient abuses, and the making of new Japan, resulted from agencies set in motion over a century before. Foreign intercourse and the presence of aliens on the soil gave the occasion, but not the cause, of ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... was veritably regal. Very slender as yet, no trace of fulness to be seen over hip or breast, the curves all low and flat, she yet carried her extreme height with tranquil confidence, the unperturbed assurance of a chatelaine of the days of feudalism. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... money, and the possession of it was as sweet to him as to other men. Only he would never soil his soul in acquiring it dishonourably. He was convinced that society as at present organized was all wrong and that the feudalism of the middle ages had simply given place to a worse form of slavery—capitalistic driven labour—which had resulted in the actual iniquitous conditions, the enriching of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor. He was familiar ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... Tory institutions. They will say that they have been obliged to shift their ground, but that they hope to work with better results from their new position. The business of the party is to prevail upon Household Suffrage to accept the survivals of feudalism, and a verdict in the new court of appeal that shall ratify the old creed. It is a creditable enterprise. Will it succeed? It seems but too likely that the efforts contemplated will only serve to weaken the institutions ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... time when it was written, the days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Commedia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is the view of Carlyle about some familiar personality like Johnson than is that of Macaulay, how ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... we understand Whitman when he says that although Shakespeare is 'of astral genius,' he is 'entirely fit for feudalism . . . is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism,' and contains much which is 'ever ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... unfamiliar fact that cheap land is sometimes very dear land. They learned, too, that you cannot make farmers in a day out of men who have been denied access to the soil for generations. That was the set purpose of Russia, and the legacy of feudalism in western Europe, which of necessity made the Jew a trader, a town dweller. With such a history, a man is not logically a pioneer. The soil of south Jersey is sandy, has to be coaxed into bearing ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... sort of family to her. That was a remnant of feudalism in her character, perhaps, which had suddenly developed during the months she had spent in Muro. But that, too, was natural, as it was natural that they should love her and almost worship the ground she trod. For the poorer classes ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... entirely of brick, being probably the largest English structure of that material constructed since the Roman epoch. Only the shell of the castle remains, an interesting and picturesque specimen of the half fortress, half mansion of the latter days of feudalism. The main gateway on the southern front has flanking towers over eighty feet high, surmounted by watch-turrets from which the sea is visible. The walls are magnificently overgrown with ivy, contrasting beautifully with the red brick. Great trunks of ivy grow ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... moreover, like Europe in general, was, politically, on the threshold of a transitional period. During the whole course of the 16th century the monarchical form of government was in every large country, with the single exception of Poland, rising on the ruins of feudalism. The great powers of the late 16th and early 17th centuries were to be the strong, highly centralized, hereditary monarchies, like France, Spain and Sweden. There seemed to be no reason why Denmark also should not become a powerful state under the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Johnson A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism The Editor An Experiment in Syndicalism Hugh H. Lusk Labor: "True Demand" and Immigrant Supply Arthur J. Todd The Way to Flatland Fabian Franklin The Disfranchisement of Property David McGregor Means Railway ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... democratic socialism promulgated to-day. The party of function, the Liberal party, insists on the break-up of this structural socialism to meet the new needs of progressive civilization. But when feudalism has been left far behind, and many of the changes introduced by Liberalism have become part of the social structure, they fall under the protection of Conservatives who are fighting against new Liberal innovations. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... found among strangers, and her victory would have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson's civilization was two years old—a thin veneer over a century of feudalism—and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... smile, but when we consider the steps now taken by the Mormons to concentrate their numbers, and their ultimate design to unite themselves with the Indians, it will not be at all surprising, if scenes unheard of since the days of feudalism should soon be re-enacted. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... portion of the world, where an hereditary, or at least traditional, despotism has never ceased since the earliest social records, and where a mode of thought infinitely more degrading than any feudalism has become ingrained in the blood and soul of the chief races, presents far more favourable conditions to the growth and development of the true adventurer than are offered in any free country. For in a free country the majority can rise and overthrow the favourite of ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... social manifestations, so pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate between advance and retrogression—this Goliardic poetry stands alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited, interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism; because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it implies no metaphysical determination; because it is pagan in the sense of being natural; because it is devoid of allegory, and, finally, because ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... its close by the revival of classical learning. The history of free thought in it is complicated, by being to some extent the struggle of deeds as well as of ideas, a social as well as a religious struggle. It was the period which witnessed both the dissolution of feudalism and the theocratic centralization in the popedom; and while reason struggled on the one side against the dogmatic system, it struggled on the other to assert the rights of the state against the church, and to put restraints ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... populations. It had not yet completely reached the nobles and the knights, or even all the ecclesiastics who served it and who were consecrated to its mission. Thus, amid a sort of political chaos were seen the glaring evils of feudalism. Kings and princes and their followers lived the lives of swine. Private blood-feuds were regarded lightly. There was as yet no single central power. Every man carried his life in his hand, trusting to sword and dagger ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, by political speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to be useful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, and strengthening the hands of modern feudalism. They are beginning already to see that, under the process whereby men of easy virtue obtain offices from the general government, as the reward of treachery to free principles, the strength and vitality of the party are rapidly declining. To ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... perhaps nothing very striking, but they felt occasionally the thrill of coming activities which were struggling for birth in that pregnant mother-night which seemed to be shrouding the sunset of the century—and they were saved from the immediate horrors of a revolution. Feudalism and the Pope had left our fathers obedience, en masse, and Luther had planted hope through the reformation of the individual. So the great wave of aspiration after a patent scheme of universal brotherhood passed over the people of these realms with only a wetting of the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... were, and all bowed down before him and became his men, and swore oaths of fealty to him, that they would be faithful to him against all other men." It was this oath which marked the difference between English and Continental feudalism, though they were now in other respects alike. On the Continent each tenant swore to be faithful to his lord, but only the lords who held directly from the crown swore to be faithful to the king. The consequence was that when ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... insight De Lolme possessed. He saw that the early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power. He understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the independence ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... walk was taken in company with the American missionary (once a marine in Perry's squadron, who later invented the jin-riki-sha), to see a hill-temple and to study the wayside shrines around Yokohama. Seven weeks' stay in the city of Yedo—then rising out of the debris of feudalism to become the Imperial capital, T[o]ki[o], enabled me to see some things now so utterly vanished, that by some persons their previous existence is questioned. One of the most interesting characters I met personally was Fukuzawa, the reformer, and now "the intellectual father of half of the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in, with the downfall of feudalism, the beginnings of the centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion, but now seen to be an unduly delayed transition from the monarchical to the constitutional epoch: all show that even widespread deterioration ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... into feudalism, but I am the suzerain. The lords shall pay me tribute, and they shall keep ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Egyptian feudalism: the status of the lords, their rights, their amusements, their obligations to the sovereign—The influence of the gods: gifts to the temples, and possessions in mortmain; the priesthood, its hierarchy, and the method of recruiting ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... matters in a kind of guild, father to son, through old-established families of flute- [216] players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lises (to borrow an expression from French feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper functions of gentlemen—schole, leisure, in the two senses of the word, which in truth involve one another—their whole time free, to be told out in austere schools. Long easeful nights, with more than enough to ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... of small states, the era of slavery, then feudalism and serfdom, and at last the birth of modern nations, the development of machinery, and the vast nexus of exploitation known as capitalism—the stage which at one blow had been utterly destroyed just as it had been ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... enlightened inquiry. Richelieu's interest in the progress of New France had not endured for many years after the founding of his great Company. It is true that during the next fifteen years he remained chief minister, but the great effort to crush the remaining strongholds of feudalism and to centralize all political power in the monarchy left him no time for the care of a distant colony. Colbert, on the other hand, had well-defined and far-reaching plans for the development of French industrial interests ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. Having no other source of wealth than the produce of the soil, men depended on the landlord for the means of escaping starvation; and thus his power became paramount over the liberty of the subject and the authority of the State. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of Numbers, for instance, in which the horrible truth is frequently too evident, and only equalled by the fact that after lust had played out its passion, unfortunate women, taken in captivity, could, by divine command, be turned adrift to rot or starve. In Christian Feudalism we find nothing much better. If I have read history correctly, and I may be wrong—the upper-grade women in mediaeval Europe, who were adored, not with love, but with lascivious and sensual worship, by Christian knights and troubadours, and who, like ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... sinister intentions; but may it not also be considered, and with more probability, as the result of an endeavor to do justice in an age of violence?—the only means by which Law could establish its footing in the midst of feudalism. Might not Irish juries at this day justifiably desire to conduct their proceedings with some greater approximation to the judicial principles of the Council of Ten? Finally, if we examine, with critical accuracy, the evidence on which our present impressions of Venetian government are founded, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... are numerous instances of the tyranny exercised over women by the feudal system. Feudalism, composed as it was of military ideas and ecclesiastical traditions, exercised the well known "rights of seigniory." These "rights" comprised a jurisdiction which is now unprintable, and had even the power to ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... than it is. I have no taste for antiquity—at least I should not choose a house to reside in because it is old. Indeed I do not recollect that I was even so romantic as to overcome my aversion to rats and rheumatism, those faithful attendants upon your noble relics of feudalism; and I much prefer a snug, modern, unmysterious bedroom, with well-aired sheets, to the waving tapestry, mildewed cushions, and all the other interesting appliances of romance. However, though I cannot promise you ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... entrusted to a middle class without noble traditions, wretchedly educated, full of Ungeist, with a passion for clap-trap, only wanting to be left alone to push trade and make money; so ignorant as to believe that feudalism can be abated without any heroic Stein, by providing that in one insignificant case out of a hundred thousand, land shall not follow the feudal law of descent; without a single vital idea or sentiment or feeling for beauty or appropriateness; well persuaded that if more trade is done in England ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Feudalism was dying! Divine right, monarchy, aristocracy, oppression, despotism, tyranny—these and all other devils of the old world order were bound for the limbo which awaits outworn, discredited social institutions. ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... the liberty they confer of association and combination, they facilitate industrial enterprise on a large scale. The same institutions, in another of their aspects, give a most direct and potent stimulus to the desire of acquiring wealth. The earlier decline of feudalism [in England] having removed or much weakened invidious distinctions between the originally trading classes and those who had been accustomed to despise them, and a polity having grown up which made wealth the real source of political influence, its acquisition was invested with a factitious value ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... has characterized both our national despotism and our legislation; for ever since those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over the whole country until the seventeenth. The old communal tenure of the Brehon law was gradually ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... a sorrowful thing to Alister to seem for a moment to follow the example of the recreant chiefs whose defection to feudalism was the prelude to their treachery toward their people, and whose faithlessness had ruined the highlands. But unlike Glengarry or "Esau" Reay, he desired to sell his land that he might keep his people, care for them, and share with them: his people ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... enforced upon the blacks in South Carolina as to keep them in practical slavery. They could, while bearing the name of freeman, be legally subjected to all the oppressive features of serfdom, peonage, and feudalism combined, without possessing the right to claim, much less the power to exact, any of the prerogatives and amenities belonging to either of those systems of human bondage. All this could be done without violating ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... at work. His name is Hunger. Let us be glad that Italy can't enrich herself by manufactures. Who knows? The revolution against militarism may begin there, as that against feudalism did in France. Talk of enthusiasm! How should we feel if we read in the paper some morning that the Italian people had formed into an army of peace—refusing to pay another ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... populace and their leaders had been among the first who dared to fight for him; but he would not be a simple King of Parliaments. He preferred to reign with the help of his nobles. For though he distrusted feudalism, he dreaded Cortes still more. So, while in most of the new monarchies of Europe the subjection or humiliation of the baronage was a primary article of policy, John tried to win his way by lavish gifts of land, while resolutely checking feudalism in government, curtailing local ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... imitate the foreigners (it is clear that this is a polite way of indicating Scott), who in their pictures put the historical dominators of them in the background; he has himself made such persons principal actors. And though he admits that "a treatise on the decline and fall of feudalism in France; on the internal conditions and external relations of that country; on the question of military alliances with foreigners; on justice as administered by parliaments, and by secret commissions on charges of sorcery," might not have been read while the novel was; the sentence ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... was the supreme type of that sheer individualism which had burst forth from the restraints of feudalism. He stood alone fighting his commercial contests with persistent personal doggedness. Beneath his occasional benevolence and his religious professions was a wild ardor in the checkmating or bankruptcy of his competitors. These were his enemies; he fought them with every mercantile ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... vigilance can freedom be maintained. Yet it is the only true Democracy; and the logic of its arrival is assured to us by the historical necessity that progress in all countries must pass through the preliminary stages of feudalism and commercialism on its way to realize the true life ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... bronze fishes, called shachi-hoko, are huge metal figures, like dolphins, from four to twelve feet high, which were set on the pinnacles of the old castle towers in the days of feudalism. That from Nagoya, exhibited at the Vienna Exposition, had scales of ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... substituted order for violence, and equality for oppression. It has rendered France, in fact, such as the world has seen her, with her immeasurable glory and her intervals of repose. But it is not the less true that throughout thirteen centuries, by the result of conquest and feudalism, France has always retained two positions, two social classes, profoundly distinct and unequal, which have never become amalgamated or placed in a condition of mutual understanding and harmony; which have never ceased to combat, the one to conquer right, the other ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... encouraged a real genius in James de Veaux, the painter, so soon to fall a victim to tuberculosis. That was a promising religious, literary, and artistic life, which kept time to the looms of the industrial belt or idealized the nascent feudalism of the South. But we must turn to the fierce economic and political struggles about to be reopened in Washington—struggles in which Americans of that day as well as of ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... of wealth pushed into the curriculum the science that deals with wealth, political economy. The growth of cities that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the conflicts between the interests of classes,—viz., landowners, capitalists, and laborers,—the rapid decay of feudalism and the spread of political democracy following the French Revolution, the expansion of commerce to all corners of the globe and the resulting development of colonialism, all these human interests gave a new meaning to the study of history and politics ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... proprietaries of vast tracts of land, and it is with regard to these lands that the troubles in the Assembly arise. The proprietaries are regarded as renegades from the faith; for the Assembly here is Quaker almost to a man. They hate the feudalism of the tenure of the proprietaries, and they are resolved to tax these lands, although they will not defend them, and although no income is at present derived ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... make a mistake if you supposed that the people of the eleventh century objected to this form of government. They supported Feudalism because it was a very practical and necessary institution. Their Lord and Master usually lived in a big stone house erected on the top of a steep rock or built between deep moats, but within sight of his subjects. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... feudalism refused to acknowledge other than an individual responsibility for a fief, it was unable to overcome the tribal theory of the indivisibility of the family, which maintained its unity in some places even under a feudal exterior. But as generations proceeded, and the relationships ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... of Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and sobriety and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... execution of its chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of feudalism was past.[2] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Henry II. or Edward I.; but his work was the indispensable preliminary to theirs, for a strong monarchy was the first requisite of the state. To establish the power of the crown was William's principal care. The disintegrating tendencies of feudalism had already been visible under the Anglo-Saxon kings. William, while he established fully developed feudalism as a social, territorial, and military system in his new dominions, took measures to prevent it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... the great soldier with 900,000 men against his 128,000 arrogated the right to outlaw and brand him as the disturber of public peace. I have already said this was their ostensible plea, but the real reason was his determination to exterminate feudalism and establish democratic institutions as soon as he could bring the different factions into harmony. He failed, but the colossal cost of his failure in men and money is unthinkable. His subjugation left Great Britain alone with a debt, as already stated, of eight ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... through the weakness of Stephen and the confusions of the civil war, it was a certain class of men, the great nobles, that fell heir to the lost strength of government. This was because of the development of feudalism during the intervening time. The greater landholders had come to exercise over those who held land from them certain powers which in modern times belong to the officers of government only. A landlord could call upon his tenants for military service to him, and for the contribution ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... and the founders of the line of demi-gods; which assign to a population bronzed beneath the suns of the West, the blue-eyed Minerva and the yellow-haired Achilles (physical characteristics of the North); which introduce, amongst a pastoral people, warlike aristocracies and limited monarchies, the feudalism of the classic time,—even these might serve you to trace back the primeval settlements of the Hellenes to the same region whence, in later times, the Norman warriors broke on the dull and savage hordes of the Celt, and became the Greeks of the Christian world. But this interests ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... their center and their source, that is to say, in the court itself. Like the whole ancient regime the court is the empty form, the surviving adornment of a military institution, the causes of which have disappeared while the effects remain, custom surviving utility. Formerly, in the early times of feudalism, in the companionship and simplicity of the camp and the castle, the nobles served the king with their own hands. One providing for his house, another bringing a dish to his table, another disrobing him at night, and another looking after his falcons and horses. Still later, under Richelieu ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... listlessness, partly from distrust of the law, which they have never understood, and of which even to this day they have but a scanty knowledge. No province of France has preserved more old traditions or longer endured the abuses of feudalism. Nowhere else, perhaps, has the title of the lord of the manor been handed down, as hitherto with us, to the owners of certain estates; and nowhere is it so easy to frighten the people with reports of some absurd ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... the foreman of a jury could not give in the verdict because of his inability to read it? Was this a colony fit for independence? If it were a republic to-morrow, it would be a monster in legislation—half-jacobinism, half-feudalism. Mr. Bulwer designated Mr. Warburton and his friends, in the course of his speech, by the term "philosophical Radicals." Mr. Grote, in reply, said that the designation was quite as respectable as that of "literary Whig." The debate was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... these writers and scholars no sooner think of a book than they must have it. And do not suppose me to complain. I am a man who will not have a single shilling expended by those who serve immediately about my person. I confess to exacting that kind of dependency. Feudalism is not an objectionable thing if you can be sure of the lord. You know, Clara, and you should know me in my weakness too, I do not claim servitude, I stipulate for affection. I claim to be surrounded by persons loving me. And with one? . . . dearest! So ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is still a masterless man" (p. 83). As Mr. Wells has evidently read a good deal about Japan, he no doubt takes this expression from Japanese feudalism, which made a distinct class of the "ronin" or masterless man, who had, by death or otherwise, lost his feudal superior. But is it really, to our Western sense, a misfortune to be a masterless man? Does the healthy human spirit suffer from having no one to bow down to, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... objectionable in a man who had emigrated from a free State, but because he, Ezekiel Corwin, had difficulty in discovering the entrance. When he succeeded, he found himself before an iron gate, happily open, but savoring offensively of feudalism and tyrannical proprietorship, and passed through and entered an avenue of trees scarcely distinguishable in the darkness, whose mysterious shapes and feathery plumes were unknown to him. Numberless odors equally vague and mysterious were heavy in the air, strange and delicate plants rose dimly ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... cor- nice (one of the features of Langeais) which is merely ornamental, as it is not machicolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as well. The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on the rains of feudalism. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... to Oswego. Difficulties. The Expedition abandoned. Shirley and Johnson. Results of the Campaign. The Scourge of the Border. Trials of Washington. Misery of the Settlers. Horror of their Situation. Philadelphia and the Quakers. Disputes with the Penns. Democracy and Feudalism. Pennsylvanian Population. Appeals from the Frontier. Quarrel of Governor and Assembly. Help refused. Desperation of the Borderers. Fire and Slaughter. The Assembly alarmed. They pass a mock Militia Law. They ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... sentiments were comparatively weak, for they were not creative. He has exercised his genius in the creation of no character in which religious sentiment or religious passion is dominant. He could not, of course,—he, the poet of feudalism,—overlook religion as an element of the social organization of Europe, but he did not seize Christian ideas in their essence, or look at the human soul in its direct relations with God. And just think of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... waves—hills cropped out here and there—great castles of syenite appeared, giving a strange and weird appearance to the forest. From a distance it would almost seem as if we were approaching a bit of England as it must have appeared during feudalism; the rocks assumed such strange fantastic shapes. Now they were round boulders raised one above another, apparently susceptible to every breath of wind; anon, they towered like blunt-pointed obelisks, taller than the tallest ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... sometimes a single individual is appropriately designated as the "king" of a branch of industry. By a sort of combination of the two ways in which graded superiority and inferiority of the group come into being the feudalism of the Middle Ages arose. So long as the full citizen—either Greek, Roman, or Teutonic—knew no subordination under an individual, there existed for him on the one hand complete equality with those of his own order, but on the other hand rigid exclusiveness toward those of lower orders. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Convention of Balta-Liman between Russia and Turkey, where 'coercion' was coupled with 'remedial measures,' an ineffectual attempt was made to ameliorate the wretched condition of the peasantry on the old lines of feudalism; but it was not until the country became autonomous and the legitimate representatives of the people took the matter in hand, that an efficient remedy was applied. Then, as the reader will find detailed in the following pages,[1] more than four hundred thousand heads ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... savage, failed altogether to bring tranquillity. After 1381 a full century of social chaos supervened, merging at times into actual civil war, until, in 1485, Henry Tudor came in after his victory at Bosworth, pledged to destroy the whole reactionary class which incarnated feudalism. For the feudal soldier was neither flexible nor astute, and allowed himself to be caught between the upper and the nether millstone. While industrial and commercial capital had been increasing in the towns, capitalistic methods of farming had invaded the country, and, as police improved, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... great speeches, what many other people are every day saying less forcibly, that the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries silently behind the British Constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... apprehensive. For this at least we all know too well, that we are on the eve of a great political crisis, if not of political change. That a struggle is approaching between the newly-risen power of democracy and the apparently departing power of feudalism; and another struggle, no less imminent, and far more dangerous, between wealth and pauperism. These two quarrels are constantly thought of as the same. They are being fought together, and an apparently common interest unites for the most part the millionaire with the noble, in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... (Scotland) Act 1874, there is, however, not much distinction between burgage tenure and free holding. It is usual to speak of the English burgage-tenure as a relic of Saxon freedom resisting the shock of the Norman conquest and its feudalism, but it is perhaps more correct to consider it a local feature of that general exemption from feudality enjoyed by the municipia as a relic of their ancient Roman constitution. The reason for the system preserving for so long its specifically distinct form in Scottish conveyancing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... famous land-grant policy, which, becoming more and more reckless and improvident in its exactions, and cunningly combining the power of great corporations with vast monopolies of the public domain, has signally eclipsed all other schemes of commercial feudalism, and left to coming generations a problem involving the very life of our popular institutions. The fruits of this legislation were not foreseen at the time, but the legislation itself fitly belongs to the ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... of his discourse, and by adroit digressions he applied the doctrine of his system to feudalism. The poetry—religious and profane—and the abrupt eloquence of that period had a grand opening in this vast theory, wherein the Doctor had amalgamated all the philosophical systems of the ancients, and from which he brought them out again classified, transfigured, purified. The false dogmas ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... eternally waving flags like lunatics and mouthing absurd phrases about imperialism and patriotism, national destiny, and rubbish of that sort. Our duty is to humanity, and not to any decayed symbols of feudalism. The talk of patriotism and imperialism is a gigantic fraud, and the tyranny of it makes our names hated throughout the world. We have no right to enforce our sway upon the peace-loving farmers and the ignorant blacks of South Africa. They rightly hate us for it, and so do the millions ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... men, you and your Wellington! Napoleon was not of the wood of which kings are made, but of the marble of the gods. Let me tell you the "code Napoleon" carried light not only into the Ghettos, but into many another noisome spider-clot of feudalism. The world wants earthquakes and thunderstorms, or it grows corrupt and stagnant. This Paris needs a scourge of God, and the moment France gives Germany a pretext, there will be sackcloth and ashes, or prophecy has ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... from Gaza to the Euphrates, is feudal. The system, generally prevalent, flourishes in the mountain region even with intenseness. An attempt to destroy feudalism occasioned the revolt against the Egyptians in 1840, and drove Mehemet Ali from the country which had cost him so much blood and treasure. Every disorder that has subsequently occurred in Syria since ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... be prepared and fought out by the working-class alone. The French bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition—though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth—soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the "impartiality" of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... those of the neighboring chief, if the head possessed brains, no doubt the people were made content. Food was abundant; commerce was unknown; the chief could not eat or waste more than his people could easily produce for him; and until disturbing causes came in with Captain Cook, no doubt feudalism wrought satisfactory results here. One wonders how it was invented among such a people, or who it was that first had genius enough to insist on obedience, to make rules, to prescribe the tabu, and, in short, to ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... living in seclusion at the city of Kyoto, with such powers of administration as he still retained confined to matters of religion and education. On the other hand, was the Shogun, or Tycoon, the acknowledged head of a feudalism, which, while nominally recognizing the Mikado's authority, had usurped the sovereign power, and really governed the country. But in 1868, the altered circumstances in which Japan found herself brought about a revolution. ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... loved by the petty princes to whom it was never other than highly, utterly respectful, and lo! the peasant-songs blew and blossomed into gigantic art forms, useful to the composers who came in a time when feudalism was as clean swept away as the wigs and patches that were its insignia. To change this rather too eloquent trope, Haydn, living a life of deadly routine and dulness, duly subservient to his divinely appointed betters, took the songs ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... robbery lawful. They developed high-spun theories of nationality, patriotism, and loyalty. They took all the rank, glory, power, and prestige of the great civil organization, and they took all the rights. They threw on others the burdens and the duties. At one time, no doubt, feudalism was an organization which drew together again the fragments of a dissolved society; but when the lawyers had applied the Roman law to modern kings, and feudal nobles had been converted into an aristocracy of court nobles, the feudal nobility no ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... feel that they were one. It was by his power that England, Scotland, and Ireland were brought to some vague acknowledgment of a common suzerain lord, and the foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It was he who ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... him led Ronald away from the swift clang and throbbing hum of the bells and in the direction of the old cemetery. Passing through the clumsy tower-gate that lifts its grimy bulk sullenly, like a huge head-stone over the grave of a dead time of feudalism, he reached the burial-ground and entered the quiet enclosure. The usual touching reverence of the Germans for their dead was strikingly manifest around him. The humbler mounds, walled up with rough stones a foot or two above the pathway level, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... fathers wished to preserve property in their families, the right of women to inherit became slowly established as civilization advanced. In Judea, Greece and Rome, certain rights of a woman to hold property were clearly settled. In the reversion to force under feudalism, woman's rights to outside property suffered; but they have been gradually restored during the last few centuries. To-day, in civilized lands, a woman's rights to property, inherited or definitely given her or ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... present condition of things appear in the Bishop's eyes as a creation of the Christian spirit, an extension of that liberalising, enfranchising, and enriching spirit which has already destroyed so many of the works of feudalism. But he faces the question of the part which the Church must play in the world; he faces it with honesty ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Bonaparte and the old order in Europe interested Goethe and Beethoven. The victory, whichever way it goes, will simply bring chaos nearer, and so set the stage for a genuine revolution later on, with (let us hope) a new feudalism or something better coming out of it, and a new Thirteenth Century at dawn. This seems to be the slow, costly way of the worst ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social organization, was not any more a system under which their energies could have scope to move. Thenceforward not the Catholic Church, but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the mischievous feudalism of the 19th century. A handful of men have invented distant, seductive loans, have introduced national debts in countries happily ignorant of them, have advanced money to unsophisticated Powers on ruinous terms, and then, by appealing ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... purpose—that the maternal instinct was strong in her there is no denying. To explain definitely her social and personal moral standards requires a biography that has not yet been written. Socially she had a hatred of feudalism, of religious and military despotism. She sympathised with and helped the aspirations towards a wider, a more humane view of a social system, and fraternal equality and social liberty were to her holy doctrines. Perhaps fully to understand George Sand from ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... them justice, the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached themselves to his ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... was based on property. Chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism. In ancient Athens, for example, those Athenians who owned the property of the City-State, and the slaves with which to work it, also governed the nation. Under feudalism, the nobility owned the country and governed it. The more land a noble owned, the larger his voice in government. ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... despotic government had been preserved certain relics of feudalism. The sovereigns and great ministers who had humbled the aristocracy did not wish to humiliate it. While depriving the nobles of all political power they had carefully preserved to them their social privileges. ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... order of the old mediaeval world were both alike threatened by the power that had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and social position. The University, on the other hand, was a ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... conquered. In various lands alike we meet with the combination of the patriarchal household with the village, the combination of agricultural with pastoral life, to which the Aryans early settled down among non-Aryan populations. This type of society, which is the basis of feudalism, is recognised alike in India and in Germany. It stretches far back into the past, and may even be recognised in some quarters ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the hound, the beggar, and the herdsman, all glow alike in the harmonious coloring of his peopled epic. We see the dawn of our English nation, the defense of Christendom against the Koran, the grace and the terror of feudalism, the rise of monarchy out of baronies, the rise of parliaments out of monarchy, the rise of industry out of serfage, the pathetic ruin of chivalry, the splendid death struggle of Catholicism, the sylvan tribes of the mountain (remnants of our prehistoric forefathers) beating themselves to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... moral as well. The Chinese as a nation were suffering from a grave complaint. Their civilization had been made almost bankrupt owing to unresisted foreign aggression and to the native inability to cope with the mass of accumulated wrongs which a superimposed and exhausted feudalism—the Manchu system—had brought about. Yuan Shih-kai knew that the Boxers had been theoretically correct in selecting as they first did the watchword which they had first placed on their banners—"blot out the Manchus ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... extended by Presidents Harrison and Cleveland until the operations of the reform embrace the greater part of the service, including fully 85,000 appointments. It is not probable that the nation will ever again return to the feudalism of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... afraid, my dear George, that you are animated by a somewhat reactionary bias in favour of feudalism, which in your own best interests you would do well to curb. It is enough to say that some of the peers supported the House of Commons, and the majority were too timid to make any stand against the numbers and violence of the other House. Nowadays, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... that this should be so, for the whole course of French history since the thirteenth century had led up to the absolutism of Louis XIV. During the early ages of feudalism France had been distracted by the wars of her kings against rebellious nobles. The virtues and firmness of Louis IX {2} (1226-70) had turned the scale in favour of the crown. There were still to be many rebellions—the strife ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... to the ancient spirit of the South which had risen before in the cause of liberty. Feudalism and the oppression of the peasants would return under the rule of the Bourbons, he assured them. They began to look upon the abdicated Emperor as the Angel of Deliverance. The people of Lyons were equally enthusiastic, winning ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Plot of Pitt; the Saloons glitter, the flesh-coloured Drawers gyrate as before. It was for "The Cabarus" then, and her Muscadins and Money-changers, that we fought? It was for Balls in flesh-coloured drawers that we took Feudalism by the beard, and did, and dared, shedding our blood like water? Expressive Silence, muse thou ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... represented most completely the finished feudal system, and who took it most to heart. His law, his romance, and his religion, his self-command, and his terrible fury were all a part of this innate feudalism, and exercised within its limits; and we must suppose that he thoroughly felt his responsibility as the chief of his feudatories, while at the same time he had no idea of his having any responsibilities towards the lower part of his subjects. Such a man was specially ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... territory among his followers in repartimientos, assigning a considerable portion of land with all its native inhabitants to each of his followers in proportion to their rank and services, under the denomination of commanderies, according to the baneful system of feudalism then prevalent in Europe. Having thus quieted the restless ambition and mutinous spirit of his soldiers, he advanced towards the south to extend his conquests, accompanied by a respectable force both of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... work of the Assembly was the legal destruction of feudalism and serfdom—a long step in the direction of social equality. We have already noticed how in July while the Assembly was still at Versailles, the royal officers in the country districts had ceased to rule and how the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the Mikado was both the civil ruler and the military leader of his people. Under him there were exercising authority throughout the land about 150 feudal lords. Feudalism of one kind or another prevailed in Japan until 1868. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the feudal principle was apparently on the decline. In the year 1600, however, Tokagawa Iyoyasu, with an army composed of the clans of the east and north defeated the combined forces of those ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... condition. So long as he has money enough in his pocket to pay his labourers and buy a little stock, my father, like every British farmer, is content. The fact is, he is a serf as much as his men, and until we get rid of feudalism he will remain so." ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... fulfil the will and work out the intentions of my uncle—I saw at once that to sell any portion of the property must separate me, to a certain extent, from those who long looked up to our house, and who, in the feudalism of the west, could ill withdraw their allegiance from their own chief to swear fealty to a stranger. The richer tenants were those whose industry and habits rendered them objects of worth and attachment; to the poorer ones, to whose improvidence and whose follies (if you will) their poverty was ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... of, as cynics have spoken of them, without thankfulness, since the added myriads have been happy, and the wealth has flowed not to a few, but to all. But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had abolished here and doomed to general abolition hereditary aristocracy, and that which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy, primogeniture in the inheritance of land. You had established, though under the semblance of dependence on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... decisive victory Japan had ever known, one that was followed by two and a half centuries of peace, needs to complete it a recital of two important events, one being the founding of Yedo, the great eastern capital, the other the organization of the system of feudalism. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism, miraculously kept from ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the eighteenth century, which were still tainted with feudalism, were changed into the socio-political conditions of the modern world, partly by a slow and continuous evolution, but much more by three revolutionary movements. First there was the great upheaval at the end of the eighteenth ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... were those of Christianity with the new races, then lying in wait along the skirts of the Roman Empire, and biding their time. From a necessity already demonstrated in the ancient world, he would have foreseen the necessity of Feudalism for the modern, as following inevitably in the train of barbarian conquest, the recurrence of which had been distinctly foreshadowed. In connection with the Protestantism of intellect in religious matters, he would have anticipated a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... ambition of the burghers. In this way Italy came to be divided into the two world-famous factions known as Guelf and Ghibelline. The struggle between Guelf and Ghibelline was the struggle of the Papacy for the depression of the Empire, the struggle of the great burghs face to face with feudalism, the struggle of the old Italie stock enclosed in cities with the foreign nobles established in fortresses. When the Church had finally triumphed by the extirpation of the House of Hohenstaufen, this conflict of Guelf and Ghibelline was really ended. Until the reign of Charles V. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... memories of feudalism, hear of a man so addressed, so flattered, and we leap at once to the conclusion that he is hereditary and absolute. Hereditary he is; born of a great family, he must always be a man of mark; but yet his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one sees such a typical bit of feudalism as this,' he said, without the smallest embarrassment, pointing to the old men, the gates, the hurdles, which Gregson was now placing in position, and finally the Squire himself. 'I wouldn't have missed it for worlds. It's as good as a play. You're fighting ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 1806 Scott began 'Marmion,' designed as a romance of Feudalism to succeed the Border study in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel.' The circumstances of the time, no doubt, to some extent prompted the choice of subject. Napoleon was diligently working out his ambitious scheme ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... directors. Sometimes Ditmar called on them at their homes, which stood overlooking the waters of the Charles River Basin. The attitude toward him of the Chipperings and their wives was one of an interesting adjustment of feudalism to democracy. They were fond of him, grateful to him, treating him with a frank camaraderie that had in it not the slightest touch of condescension, but Ditmar would have been the first to recognize that there were limits to the intimacy. They did not, for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... charity that never faileth. But this is not the only country that has had a land question to settle. Almost every nation in Europe has done for itself what England is now palled upon to do for Ireland. In fact, it is a necessary process in the transition from feudalism to constitutional self-government. Feudalism gave the land to a few whom it made princes and lords, having forcibly taken it from the many, whom it made subjects and serfs. The land is the natural basis of society. ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... 14, 1791, the constitution then proposed was still incomplete; and had to be submitted to another assembly to be completed. They however accomplish some things worthy of note. In 1789 they abolish feudalism, root and branch; and the payment of tithes. The latter meant the separation of church and state, in matters of support and government; and this event seemed to the deists, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... as certain as the past—slavery, feudalism, individualism, collectivism. This is the statement of a ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... system could not long survive the invention of dynamite. Not that we are dynamitards: indeed the absurdity of the inference shows how innocent we were of any practical acquaintance with explosives; but we thought that the statement about gunpowder and feudalism was historically true, and that it would do the capitalists good to remind them of it. Suddenly, however, the Federation made a very startling practical application of the Class War doctrine. They did not blow anybody up; but in the general election of 1885 they ran two candidates ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... of industry will be, in Spain, as I think everywhere, parallel rather than unified. One thing is certain, however long the fire smoulders before it flares high to make a clean sweep of Spanish capitalism and Spanish feudalism together, Cordova, hoary city of the caliphs, where ghosts of old grandeurs flit about the zigzag ochre-colored lanes, will, when the moment comes, be the center of organization of the agrarian revolution. When I was leaving Spain I rode with some young men who were emigrating ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... Ages is an expression of the spirit of feudalism and of the genius of the Church. From the union of feudalism and Christianity arose the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, the homage to woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those of amorous metaphysics, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... melancholy beauty cannot be omitted from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of the pageantry ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... personal worth, a far more fearless assertion of equality, and a far more democratic feeling permeating society than, for instance, in the United States. Sweden, on the other hand, is essentially an aristocratic country, with a landed nobility and many other remnants of feudalism in her political and social institutions. Two countries so different in character can never be good yoke-fellows. They can never develop at an even pace, and the fact of kinship scarcely helps matters ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... century, when the free Communes developed all over Western Europe and succeeded in breaking the power of feudalism, it was left to Ghent and Bruges to raise the free city to a standard of independence and prosperity which it did not attain in other countries, placed under a stronger central power. In the shadow of their proud belfries over 80,000 ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... intercourse with them. The daimios, who had been compelled to live at Yedo, flocked to Kioto. The Mikado, countenanced by the foreigners, overcame the resistance of the party of the Shoguns. He removed his residence to Yedo, now called Tokio (1869). Feudalism was abolished (1871), and a constitution promulgated in 1889. The empire was thus united and strengthened. Institutions and customs of Western civilization were rapidly introduced. Political and legal reforms kept pace with ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher |
