The systematic suppression of freedom, in the very instincts of the human mind, turned Christian Europe into a universal slave-pen of bondage and tyranny; there were only captives and jailers, abject serfs and their inhuman masters. Freedom found a refuge only in the fastnesses of the mountains; in the wars against the pagan Saxons the last freemen of the plains were slain like wild beasts; a thousand of their brave leaders were beheaded on the market square of Quedlinburg, thousands were imprisoned in Christian convents, or dragged away to the bondage of feudal and ecclesiastic slave farms where they learned to envy the peace of the dead and the freedom of the lowest savages. “One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice; and when they rise to their feet they show a human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of plowing, sowing, and harvesting, and, therefore, deserve some small share of the bread they have grown. Yet they were the fortunate peasants—those who had bread and work—and they were then the few” (while half the arable territory of France was in the hands of the church). “Feudalism,” says Blanqui, “was a concentration of all scourges. The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers, became the property of ignorant, inexorable, indolent masters. He was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered to them half the product of his earnings during the other three; without their consent, he could not change his residence or marry. And why, indeed, should he wish to marry, if he could scarcely save enough to maintain himself? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves called serfs, who were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of convents which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but the human race never suffered a more cruel outrage; industry never received a wound better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the rudest antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end of the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was received without terror.”