The period of transition from serfage to freedom is set at twelve years; at the end of that time the serf is to be fully free, and possessor of his cabin, with an adjoining piece of land.
They are naturally a kind people; but let one example show how serfage can transmute kindness.
Serfage was already recognized in Peter's time as an evil.
Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of foulness.
My aim has been to represent serfagein its normal, ordinary forms rather than in its occasional monstrous manifestations.
If serfage did not create that moral apathy and intellectual lethargy which formed, as it were, the atmosphere of Russian provincial life, it did much at least to preserve it.
So long as serfage existed it was mere mockery to talk about re-organising Russia according to the latest results of political and social science.
It is better to abolish serfage from above than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below.
The abundance of land tended to prevent the development of industry, and the little industry which did exist was prevented by serfage from collecting in the towns.
They held, as I have already explained, an intermediate position between serfage and freedom.
In reality there was, as the French say, le revers de la medaille, and serfage generally appeared under a form very different from that which I have just depicted.
In short, serfage was the chief barrier to all material and moral progress, and in a time of moral awakening such as that which I have described in the preceding chapter, the question of Emancipation naturally came at once to the front.
Up till that time the power of the proprietors had steadily increased, and the area of serfage had rapidly expanded.
If we compare the development of serfage in Russia and in Western Europe, we find very many points in common, but in Russia the movement had certain peculiarities.
In the geographical distribution of serfagewe can see reflected the origin and history of the institution.
This points to the essentially agricultural nature of serfage in its infancy.
He may there see, for instance, how an aristocracy can be created by military promotion, and how serfage may originate and become a recognised institution without any legislative enactment.
The story of St. Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transition from pure serfage to an imperfect freedom.
Like all the greater revolutions of society, the advance from this mere serfage was a silent one; indeed its more galling instances of oppression seem to have slipped unconsciously away.
In Denmark,' says Berthold, 'the peasant was reduced toserfage as a dog.
Serfage was abolished in Mecklenburg only in 1820.
They were naturally a kind people; but let one example show how serfage can transmute kindness.
The period of transition from serfage to freedom was set at twelve years; at the end of that time the serf was to be fully free and possessor of his cabin, with an adjoining piece of land.
Nationally the movement had wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually checked.
Serfage had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a farmer paying a rent in kind for his land.
Sidenote: Tendency toward serfage in the Code of 1705.
This reckless sense of right and wrong is due to that serfage under which the peasants groaned for two hundred and sixty years.
Villeinage was forgotten by the Rhine, the Severn, and the Seine, before serfage was established on the Moskva and the Don.
The project of emancipation, drawn up under the eyes of Nicolas, was not a Russian document in either form or spirit; but a German state paper, based on the misleading western notion that serfage was but villeinage under a better name.
To understand it, we must lay aside all notion of serfage in Moscow and Tamboff being the same thing as villeinage in Surrey and the Isle of France.
Villeinage followed a disastrous war; serfage followed liberation from a foreign yoke.
There is reason to believe that this festival of St. George (in 1601) was hailed by peasant and boyar as a glorious day; that the decree which established serfage in Russia was accepted as a great and popular reform.
Pestel and the conspirators of 1825 put the abolition of serfagein the front of their demands.
The crimes ofserfage have scarcely any parallel, except among savage tribes; and the liberty which some of the freed peasants enjoyed the most was the liberty of revenge.
Serfage came with the spreading light, with the rising of independence, with the sentiment of national life.
In spite of his glittering array of troops, he felt that serfage left him weak, even as the great division of his people into Orthodox and Old Believers left him weak.
Some of the facts which prove this difference between Western villeinage and Eastern serfagelie beyond dispute.
Villeinage was introduced by foreign princes, serfage by native tsars.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "serfage" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
