And, in truth, while doing full justice to the sentiments and the endeavours of the benevolent despots, it cannot honestly be said that their efforts had done much to improve the condition of the labouring classes by the end of the eighteenth century. The great majority of the peasants of Europe were throughout that century absolute serfs. To take once more the example of Prussia, the only attempts to improve the condition of the peasants had been made in the royal domain, and they had only been very tentative. The dwellers on the estates of the Prussian nobility in Silesia and Brandenburg were treated no better than negro slaves in America and the West Indies. They were not allowed to leave their villages, or to marry without their lords’ consent; their children had to serve in the lords’ families for several years at a nominal wage, and they themselves had to labour at least three days, and often six days, a week on their lords’ estate. These _corvées_ or forced labours occupied so much of the peasant’s time that he could only cultivate his own farm by moonlight. This state of absolute serfdom was general in Central and Eastern Europe, in the greater part of Germany, in Poland and in Russia, and where it existed the artisan class was equally depressed, for no man was allowed to learn a trade without his lord’s permission, and an escaped serf had no chance of admission into the trade-guilds of the cities. Towards the west a more advanced civilisation improved the condition of the labourers; the Italian peasant and the German peasant on the Rhine had obtained freedom to marry without his lord’s interference; but, nevertheless, it was a leading prince on the Rhine, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects to England to serve as mercenaries in the American War of Independence. In France the peasant was far better off. The only serfs left, who existed on the domain of the Abbey of Saint-Claude in the Jura, on whose behalf Voltaire wielded his powerful pen, were in a far happier condition than the German serfs; they could marry whom they pleased; they might emigrate without leave; their persons were free; all they were deprived of was the power of selling their property or devising it by will. The rest of the French peasants and the agricultural classes generally were extremely independent. Feudalism had left them some annoyances but few real grievances, and the inconveniences they suffered were due solely to the inequalities of the copyhold system of tenure and its infringements of their personal liberty. The French peasants and farmers were indignant at an occasional day’s _corvée_, or forced labour, which really represented the modern rent, and at the succession-duties they had to pay the descendants or representatives of their ancestors’ feudal lords. The German, Polish, and Hungarian peasant, on the contrary, crushed beneath the burden of his personal servitude, did not dream of pretending to