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serf
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  • At first he'd been a little standoffish—as if he were a lord and I were a serf, Jones thought—until he'd seen how the skipper treated him.†   (source)
  • That man freed his serfs of his own free will.†   (source)
  • Her upper-class nobles would not engage in work and instead managed to survive by what they could squeeze out of the labor of the serfs.†   (source)
  • The Mexican peon is a mixture of Mediterranean-blooded Spanish peasant with low-grade Indians who did not fight to extinction, but submitted and multiplied as serfs.†   (source)
  • The old serf laughed.†   (source)
  • They knew the stories of abandoned trains, of the crews that vanished in sudden bursts of rebellion against serfdom.†   (source)
  • When the lord of the manor met his assembled serfs they were always intoxicated with happiness that they could neither justify, nor explain, nor prolong in his absence.†   (source)
  • In fact, it might actually be a peasant top from all the way back when peasant tops first made an appearance in serf-free society, way back in the days of Haight-Ashbury!†   (source)
  • After the confrontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between abolitionist Russia (Nicholas having freed the serfs in 1861) and a Union that paid lip service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery, Peter Pinguid stayed in his cabin for weeks, brooding.†   (source)
  • By the end of a summer day a Morrisonville woman had toiled like a serf.†   (source)
  • I was swinging along with a sweet sword knocking against my thigh and a much sweeter girl matching my strides and a slave-serf-groom-something sweating along behind us, doing the carrying and being our "eyes-behind."†   (source)
  • Pressed us to her with the serf' ous way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.†   (source)
  • Whatever it was called-feudalism and serfdom or capitalism and industrial workers, it was unnatural and unjust.†   (source)
  • Thirty per cent are laborers, labor tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the Middle Ages.†   (source)
  • What was a serf like him doing visiting the nobility? their manner implied.†   (source)
  • The "feudal serf" of Taggart Transcontinental was the only one who seemed untouched by the disaster.†   (source)
  • I don't want to see you working as their serf!†   (source)
  • If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf.†   (source)
  • I can neither exist without work nor work as a serf.†   (source)
  • If you don't look out, you'll turn into one of those real feudal serfs.†   (source)
  • "I didn't take you on as a serf.†   (source)
  • The economy was now characterized by feudalism, which meant that a few powerful nobles owned the land, which the serfs had to toil on in order to live.†   (source)
  • It was the most illiterate nation in Europe, with the majority of its population living in modified serfdom: tilling the fields with wooden plows, beating their wives by candlelight, collapsing on their benches drunk with vodka, and then waking at dawn to humble themselves before their icons.†   (source)
  • The Jews were helping the nobility, but in doing so, in collecting taxes from the serfs and peasants, for example, they were building up against themselves the hatred of these oppressed classes.†   (source)
  • …Ellis Wyatt to pay for the livelihood of those whose job was to tie him and make him unable to live, those who would stand on guard to see that he got no trains, no tank cars, no pipeline of Rearden Metal-Ellis Wyatt, stripped of the right of serf-defense, left without voice, without weapons, and worse: made to be the tool of his own destruction, the supporter of his own destroyers, the provider of their food and of their weapons-Ellis Wyatt being choked, with his own bright energy…†   (source)
  • …your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that you are not to be paid, neither in matter nor in…†   (source)
  • This looked like a feudalism out of our own history—and maybe it was—but whether this mob was the Doral's slaves, his serfs, his hired hands, or all members of one big family I never got straight.†   (source)
  • Once one has owned land, there is no going back to being a serf.†   (source)
  • I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.†   (source)
  • And pretty soon now we'll have serfs again.†   (source)
  • The rapier stars glinted upon his serfdom: dawn reddened on release.†   (source)
  • The serf of chivalry was not a slave for whom there was no hope.†   (source)
  • You are a man who need not have any sons like serfs.†   (source)
  • So when his son said, "We could live in the great house," the thought leaped into his mind as though he saw it actually before his eyes, "I could sit on that seat where that old one sat and from whence she bade me stand like a serf, and now I could sit there and so call another into my presence."†   (source)
  • He had begun to set a value on heads, shoulders and arms—their owners' value, even if the owner was a serf.†   (source)
  • Unfortunately, until the machine age, culture was the exclusive prerogative of a society that lived by the labor of serfs or slaves.†   (source)
  • …and in my harassed inability to keep up, it was like a double-quick-time stamping or dancing; angry grim waltz in which the clutched partners were out to wear one another down; or solo clog or tarantella of the hopping mad; or the limper sway of the almost gone from consciousness; the decorous sevillanas of the stiff whose faces didn't betray how their heels were slamming; the epidemic kick of German serfdom; the squatting kazatsky; the hesitation-step of adolescence; the Charleston.†   (source)
  • And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country.†   (source)
  • Usually, these dignities—the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y.M.C.A.'s, and the managerships of athletic teams—were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions.†   (source)
  • Either we must be the leaders of the Old Ones, who seek for justice against the Saxon: or of the Saxon against the Norman; or of the serf against society.†   (source)
  • The hungry wolf would always attack the fat reindeer, the poor man would rob the banker, the serf would make revolutions against the higher class, and the lack-penny nation would fight the rich.†   (source)
  • Even if the knights had little wish to kill each other on the grand scale, there was no reason why they should not kill the serfs.†   (source)
  • Do you think that they, with their Battles, Famine, Black Death and Serfdom, were less enlightened than we are, with our Wars, Blockade, Influenza and Conscription?†   (source)
  • They are all serfs, in any case.†   (source)
  • He wore it in compliment to the Saxon serfs of the country, whose national headgear was either a kind of diving-cap, or the Phrygian cap, or else this cone of straw.†   (source)
  • Arthur interrupted him at the critical moment "So it comes to this," he said, "that we Normans have the Saxons for serfs, while the Saxons once had a sort of under-serfs, who were called the Gaels—the Old Ones.†   (source)
  • …first years, every vista had been terminated by a marching column of mercenaries, robbing and piling from the Marches—or by a knight of the new order exchanging buffets with a conservative baron whom he was trying to restrain from murdering serfs—or by a golden-haired maiden being rescued out of some lofty keep by means of leather ladders—or by Sir Bruce Saunce Pite riding a full wallop with Sir Lancelot coming detiverly after him—or by a few surgeons carefully ransacking the wounds…†   (source)
  • Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.†   (source)
  • She was a serf, but had received a European education.†   (source)
  • I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the beach into the thickets.†   (source)
  • I had a serf, Filka; just after his burial I called out forgetting 'Filka, my pipe!'†   (source)
  • [*] The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 is meant.†   (source)
  • 'The estate's not his, but mother's; there are fifteen serfs, if I remember.'†   (source)
  • A serf of hers called Pyotr was at once suspected, and every circumstance confirmed the suspicion.†   (source)
  • " "And the man who has run away is your serf."†   (source)
  • Let them unload two of the sumpter-mules, and put the baggage behind two of the serfs.†   (source)
  • An inveterate supporter of serfdom at heart, like all of them!" said Sviazhsky.†   (source)
  • A little serf boy, seeing Prince Andrew, ran into the house.†   (source)
  • From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns.†   (source)
  • Two young citizens were joking with some serf girls who were cracking nuts.†   (source)
  • "He says 'a woman,' and Mary Nikolievna is a lady," remarked a house serf.†   (source)
  • The domestic serfs were crowding in the hall, waiting to bid good-by to the young prince.†   (source)
  • The house was spacious and had rooms for the house serfs and apartments for visitors.†   (source)
  • Not of the military regulations or of the arrangement of the Ryazan serfs' quitrents.†   (source)
  • Pierre proposed going to his estates in the south and there attending to the welfare of his serfs.†   (source)
  • In the outlying serfs' quarters torches and candles were burning and no one slept.†   (source)
  • Had he not established schools and hospitals and liberated his serfs?†   (source)
  • The peasants and house serfs carrying out the things were treading heavily on the parquet floors.†   (source)
  • Forty thousand serfs and millions of rubles!†   (source)
  • Hurry off and tell Maksim, the gardener, to set the serfs to work.†   (source)
  • Some five male domestic serfs, big and little, rushed out to the front porch to meet their master.†   (source)
  • He planned another garden and began a new building for the domestic serfs.†   (source)
  • It is those people I pity, and for their sake I should like to liberate the serfs.†   (source)
  • On other estates the serfs' compulsory labor was commuted for a quitrent.†   (source)
  • My father was the serf of your grandfather and your own father, but you—you more than anybody else—did so much for me once upon a time that I've forgotten everything and love you as if you belonged to my family …. and even more.†   (source)
  • She sang I Dreamt that I Dwelt, and when she came to the second verse she sang again: I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls With vassals and serfs at my side, And of all who assembled within those walls That I was the hope and the pride.†   (source)
  • He stood towards the myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided against themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dull-witted loyal serf.†   (source)
  • The change in her, the growing old, the revelation and responsibility of serf, as a woman, made this experience appear to have extended over months.†   (source)
  • A movement of impatience was noticed in his audience as he resumed: "I merely wish to state, for the information of all concerned, that the reason for Mr. Pavlicheff's interest in your mother, Mr. Burdovsky, was simply that she was the sister of a serf-girl with whom he was deeply in love in his youth, and whom most certainly he would have married but for her sudden death.†   (source)
  • [Pause] Think, Anya, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and all your ancestors were serf-owners, they owned living souls; and now, doesn't something human look at you from every cherry in the orchard, every leaf and every stalk?†   (source)
  • pocketed at least a third of the money paid by Russian peasants to their lords in the days of serfdom.†   (source)
  • All our eminent socialists are merely old liberals of the class of landed proprietors, men who were liberals in the days of serfdom.†   (source)
  • 'If I were to recognize the Russian orthodox religion and emancipate the serfs, do you think Russia would come over to me?'†   (source)
  • In the good old days, this man, whom we will call P—, owned four thousand souls as serfs (souls as serfs!†   (source)
  • "And I have heard of YOU," continued the prince, addressing Ivan Petrovitch, "that when some of your villagers were burned out you gave them wood to build up their houses again, though they were no longer your serfs and had behaved badly towards you."†   (source)
  • Then came a cart, and behind that walked an old, bandy-legged domestic serf in a peaked cap and sheepskin coat.†   (source)
  • From his arms next issued the Kshatriya, or warriors; from his breast, the seat of life, came the Vaisya, or producers—shepherds, farmers, merchants; from his foot, in sign of degradation, sprang the Sudra, or serviles, doomed to menial duties for the other classes—serfs, domestics, laborers, artisans.†   (source)
  • The disappointment and impatience of the Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in two movements.†   (source)
  • Who made them serfs of the soil?†   (source)
  • What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law?†   (source)
  • They had cut the whole of the big meadow, which had, in the years of serf labor, taken thirty scythes two days to mow.†   (source)
  • It was in the darkest days of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People!†   (source)
  • It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs.†   (source)
  • The Templar, a serf in all but the name, can possess neither lands nor goods, and lives, moves, and breathes, but at the will and pleasure of another.†   (source)
  • The serf wore the customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before, in the old hereditary halls of England.†   (source)
  • Serf!†   (source)
  • At first he was called only Grigoriy, and was some gentleman's serf; he commenced calling himself Petrovitch from the time when he received his free papers, and further began to drink heavily on all holidays, at first on the great ones, and then on all church festivities without discrimination, wherever a cross stood in the calendar.†   (source)
  • On ordinary days a serf-boy used to keep driving them away with a large green branch; but on this occasion Vassily Ivanovitch had sent him away through dread of the criticism of the younger generation.†   (source)
  • A serf!†   (source)
  • His health being drunk with acclamations, he was not so baronial after all but that in trying to return thanks he broke down, in the manner of a mere serf with a heart in his breast, and wept before them all.†   (source)
  • As the noble never suspected that anyone would attempt to deprive him of the privileges which he believed to be legitimate, and as the serf looked upon his own inferiority as a consequence of the immutable order of nature, it is easy to imagine that a mutual exchange of good-will took place between two classes so differently gifted by fate.†   (source)
  • He must bring nothing outside; we will go in—in among the dirt, and possibly other repulsive things,—and take the food with the household, and after the fashion of the house, and all on equal terms, except the man be of the serf class; and finally, there will be no ewer and no napkin, whether he be serf or free.†   (source)
  • It is scarcely less difficult for them to conceive it, than for us to form a correct notion of what a slave was amongst the Romans, or a serf in the Middle Ages.†   (source)
  • "And yet this Kolya, who has three thousand serfs, has not put in an appearance here tonight to see you off," I cut in suddenly.†   (source)
  • The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.†   (source)
  • With millions of fellow-serfs, he had learned to look upon Russia as the great deliverer from the North.†   (source)
  • If Europe ever becomes a grand council of free nations,—as I trust in God it will,—if, there, serfdom, and all unjust and oppressive social inequalities, are done away; and if they, as France and England have done, acknowledge our position,—then, in the great congress of nations, we will make our appeal, and present the cause of our enslaved and suffering race; and it cannot be that free, enlightened America will not then desire to wipe from her escutcheon that bar sinister which…†   (source)
  • All the aristocracies of the Middle Ages were founded by military conquest; the conqueror was the noble, the vanquished became the serf.†   (source)
  • They even whisper that because he has slain Monseigneur, and because Monseigneur was the father of his tenants—serfs—what you will—he will be executed as a parricide.†   (source)
  • Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.†   (source)
  • During his last year at school he came in for an estate of two hundred serfs, and as almost all of us were poor he took up a swaggering tone among us.†   (source)
  • So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired.†   (source)
  • He said a word or two of leave-taking; but Miss Wade barely inclined her head, and Harriet, with the assumed humiliation of an abject dependent and serf (but not without defiance for all that), made as if she were too low to notice or to be noticed.†   (source)
  • The Hungarian nobles set free millions of serfs, at an immense pecuniary loss; and, perhaps, among us may be found generous spirits, who do not estimate honor and justice by dollars and cents.†   (source)
  • When the officer is noble and the soldier a serf—one rich, the other poor—the former educated and strong, the latter ignorant and weak—the strictest bond of obedience may easily be established between the two men.†   (source)
  • Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so to-day there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers.†   (source)
  • Aniska was a dressmaker in the country, one of our former serf girls who had been trained in Moscow, a pretty wench.†   (source)
  • Amongst aristocratic nations, especially amongst those in which birth is the only source of rank, the same inequality exists in the army as in the nation; the officer is noble, the soldier is a serf; the one is naturally called upon to command, the other to obey.†   (source)
  • One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general's favorite hound.†   (source)
  • No longer a serf, but a freeman and a landholder, Gurth sprung upon his feet, and twice bounded aloft to almost his own height from the ground.†   (source)
  • The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.†   (source)
  • Soon, however, the political power of the clergy was founded, and began to exert itself: the clergy opened its ranks to all classes, to the poor and the rich, the villein and the lord; equality penetrated into the Government through the Church, and the being who as a serf must have vegetated in perpetual bondage took his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and not infrequently above the heads of kings.†   (source)
  • She did not lose her head, however, and promptly sent for a sister of her mother's Princess Avdotya Stepanovna H——, a spiteful and arrogant old lady, who, on installing herself in her niece's house, appropriated all the best rooms for her own use, scolded and grumbled from morning till night, and would not go a walk even in the garden unattended by her one serf, a surly footman in a threadbare pea-green livery with light blue trimming and a three-cornered hat.†   (source)
  • Where the land with serf-labor and good management gave a yield of nine to one, on the half-crop system it yields three to one.†   (source)
  • Zverkov was talking of some exuberant lady whom he had at last led on to declaring her love (of course, he was lying like a horse), and how he had been helped in this affair by an intimate friend of his, a Prince Kolya, an officer in the hussars, who had three thousand serfs.†   (source)
  • "Nay," said Wamba, "never think I envy thee, brother Gurth; the serf sits by the hall-fire when the freeman must forth to the field of battle—And what saith Oldhelm of Malmsbury—Better a fool at a feast than a wise man at a fray."†   (source)
  • Although the serf had no natural interest in the fate of nobles, he did not the less think himself obliged to devote his person to the service of that noble who happened to be his lord; and although the noble held himself to be of a different nature from that of his serfs, he nevertheless held that his duty and his honor constrained him to defend, at the risk of his own life, those who dwelt upon his domains.†   (source)
  • Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.†   (source)
  • The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom.†   (source)
  • It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom.†   (source)
  • "As for your dislike of it, excuse my saying so, that's simply our Russian sloth and old serf-owner's ways, and I'm convinced that in you it's a temporary error and will pass."†   (source)
  • And he used to be a house serf.†   (source)
  • I decided not to keep about me any freed serfs, who have been house servants, or, at least, not to intrust them with duties of any responsibility.'†   (source)
  • There were even two or three outbreaks of applause when he spoke of serfdom and the distressed condition of Russia.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER IV No crowd of house-serfs ran out on to the steps to meet the gentlemen; a little girl of twelve years old made her appearance alone.†   (source)
  • When the crop is growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; as soon as it is ready for market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimes happens, there is anything left, he hands it over to the black serf for his Christmas celebration.†   (source)
  • I am well dressed and reckoned not a poor man; the emancipation of the serfs hasn't affected me; my property consists chiefly of forests and water meadows.†   (source)
  • Now, in our own day, we landowners in the serf times used various improvements in our husbandry: drying machines and thrashing machines, and carting manure and all the modern implements—all that we brought into use by our authority, and the peasants opposed it at first, and ended by imitating us.†   (source)
  • Although the serf had no natural interest in the fate of nobles, he did not the less think himself obliged to devote his person to the service of that noble who happened to be his lord; and although the noble held himself to be of a different nature from that of his serfs, he nevertheless held that his duty and his honor constrained him to defend, at the risk of his own life, those who dwelt upon his domains.†   (source)
  • The naked Saxon serf was drowning the sense of his half-year's hunger and thirst, in one day of gluttony and drunkenness—the more pampered burgess and guild-brother was eating his morsel with gust, or curiously criticising the quantity of the malt and the skill of the brewer.†   (source)
  • In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.†   (source)
  • You heard, no doubt, Avdotya Romanovna, when you were with them the story of the servant Philip who died of ill treatment he received six years ago, before the abolition of serfdom.†   (source)
  • "I don't believe it," Sviazhsky replied quite seriously; "all I see is that we don't know how to cultivate the land, and that our system of agriculture in the serf days was by no means too high, but too low.†   (source)
  • Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.†   (source)
  • That of the serf, or bondsman, was sad and sullen; his aspect was bent on the ground with an appearance of deep dejection, which might be almost construed into apathy, had not the fire which occasionally sparkled in his red eye manifested that there slumbered, under the appearance of sullen despondency, a sense of oppression, and a disposition to resistance.†   (source)
  • 'How many serfs has your father?'†   (source)
  • His wife, Marfa Ignatyevna, had obeyed her husband's will implicitly all her life, yet she had pestered him terribly after the emancipation of the serfs.†   (source)
  • "—And then observing the distress which her communication gave to Wilfred, she instantly added, "But the steward Oswald said, that if nothing occurred to renew his master's displeasure against him, he was sure that Cedric would pardon Gurth, a faithful serf, and one who stood high in favour, and who had but committed this error out of the love which he bore to Cedric's son.†   (source)
  • The man knew—indeed his mistress did not conceal the fact—that having to send one of her serfs as a recruit she had decided to send him, as he had no relations and his conduct was unsatisfactory.†   (source)
  • To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the Veil of Race.†   (source)
  • It was not, perhaps, of importance in the days of serfdom, and it may not be of importance in England.†   (source)
  • Nikolai Petrovitch had at that time only just moved into his new home, and not wishing to keep serfs in the house, he was on the look-out for wage-servants; the woman of the inn on her side complained of the small number of visitors to the town, and the hard times; he proposed to her to come into his house in the capacity of housekeeper; she consented.†   (source)
  • It was no maiden's idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism, poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race.†   (source)
  • This will be an abundant fulfilment of the Prince's promises, so far as this herd of Saxon serfs is concerned."†   (source)
  • We had four servants, all serfs.†   (source)
  • He despised the nobility, and believed the mass of the nobility to be secretly in favor of serfdom, and only concealing their views from cowardice.†   (source)
  • Prior Aymer, therefore, and his character, were well known to our Saxon serfs, who made their rude obeisance, and received his "benedicite, mes filz," in return.†   (source)
  • Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; "the emancipation of the serfs was a different matter.†   (source)
  • This playful paragraph finished, of course, with an outburst of generous indignation at the wickedness of parricide and at the lately abolished institution of serfdom.†   (source)
  • For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.†   (source)
  • They forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting, the rule of inequality:—that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free workman among serfs.†   (source)
  • He ordered, however, Oswald to keep an eye upon him; and directed that officer, with two of his serfs, to convey Ivanhoe to Ashby as soon as the crowd had dispersed.†   (source)
  • Once during the year after Fyodor Pavlovitch's marriage with Adelaida Ivanovna, the village girls and women—at that time serfs—were called together before the house to sing and dance.†   (source)
  • The gentleman with the gray whiskers was obviously an inveterate adherent of serfdom and a devoted agriculturist, who had lived all his life in the country.†   (source)
  • They are not servile, and even after two centuries of serfdom they are free in manner and bearing, yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious.†   (source)
  • "Excuse me," Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, "self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it."†   (source)
  • Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave the freedmen a power and independence which they could not yet use.†   (source)
  • Then fetching from a cupboard a stoup of wine and two flagons, she placed them on the table, and said in a tone rather asserting a fact than asking a question, "Thou art Saxon, father—Deny it not," she continued, observing that Cedric hastened not to reply; "the sounds of my native language are sweet to mine ears, though seldom heard save from the tongues of the wretched and degraded serfs on whom the proud Normans impose the meanest drudgery of this dwelling.†   (source)
  • He attributed the tragic crime to the habits that had become ingrained by ages of serfdom and the distressed condition of Russia, due to the lack of appropriate institutions.†   (source)
  • …the person of a noble and freeborn damsel, the Lady Rowena of Hargottstandstede; also upon the person of a noble and freeborn man, Athelstane of Coningsburgh; also upon the persons of certain freeborn men, their 'cnichts'; also upon certain serfs, their born bondsmen; also upon a certain Jew, named Isaac of York, together with his daughter, a Jewess, and certain horses and mules: Which noble persons, with their 'cnichts' and slaves, and also with the horses and mules, Jew and Jewess…†   (source)
  • Now, by the abolition of serfdom we have been deprived of our authority; and so our husbandry, where it had been raised to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage primitive condition.†   (source)
  • The relic of barbarism, the primitive commune with each guarantee for all, will disappear of itself; serfdom has been abolished—there remains nothing but free labor, and its forms are fixed and ready made, and must be adopted.†   (source)
  • The whole effect on the public, of Rakitin's speech, of his noble sentiments, of his attacks upon serfdom and the political disorder of Russia, was this time finally ruined.†   (source)
  • "Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him.†   (source)
  • Their wealth is the least they can surrender; they must also carry off with them the swarms that are besetting the castle, subscribe a surrender of their pretended immunities, and live under us as serfs and vassals; too happy if, in the new world that is about to begin, we leave them the breath of their nostrils.†   (source)
  • They want to put a monument to your Pushkin for writing about women's feet, while I wrote with a moral purpose, and you,' said he, 'are an advocate of serfdom.†   (source)
  • The big house with the old family furniture; the rather dirty, far from stylish, but respectful footmen, unmistakably old house serfs who had stuck to their master; the stout, good-natured wife in a cap with lace and a Turkish shawl, petting her pretty grandchild, her daughter's daughter; the young son, a sixth form high school boy, coming home from school, and greeting his father, kissing his big hand; the genuine, cordial words and gestures of the old man—all this had the day before…†   (source)
  • It's simple lust of power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination—something like a universal serfdom with them as masters—that's all they stand for.†   (source)
  • —"A barley loaf and a pitcher of water—that THEY gave me, the niggardly traitors, whom my father, and I myself, had enriched, when their best resources were the flitches of bacon and measures of corn, out of which they wheedled poor serfs and bondsmen, in exchange for their prayers—the nest of foul ungrateful vipers—barley bread and ditch water to such a patron as I had been!†   (source)
  • He had not even formed a definite idea of the fundamental principles of the reforms connected with the emancipation of the serfs, and only picked it up, so to speak, from year to year, involuntarily increasing his knowledge by practice.†   (source)
  • When Nicholas first began farming and began to understand its different branches, it was the serf who especially attracted his attention.†   (source)
  • Nicholas knew that this Daniel, disdainful of everybody and who considered himself above them, was all the same his serf and huntsman.†   (source)
  • The third was a domestic serf, about forty-five years old, with grizzled hair and a plump, well-nourished body.†   (source)
  • That same evening a house serf who had come from Borovsk said he had seen an immense army entering the town.†   (source)
  • Nicholas, who, as the roads were in splendid condition, wanted to take them all for a drive in his troyka, proposed to take with them about a dozen of the serf mummers and drive to "Uncle's."†   (source)
  • It had bare deal floors and was furnished with very simple hard sofas, armchairs, tables, and chairs made by their own serf carpenters out of their own birchwood.†   (source)
  • After marching through a number of streets the patrol arrested five more Russian suspects: a small shopkeeper, two seminary students, a peasant, and a house serf, besides several looters.†   (source)
  • On the one hand, the chief steward put the state of things to him in the very worst light, pointing out the necessity of paying off the debts and undertaking new activities with serf labor, to which Pierre did not agree.†   (source)
  • When a decision had to be taken regarding a domestic serf, especially if one had to be punished, he always felt undecided and consulted everybody in the house; but when it was possible to have a domestic serf conscripted instead of a land worker he did so without the least hesitation.†   (source)
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