Alack! It is distressing to notice that the sacred rights of humanity can not triumph except at the cost of torrents of blood and of unnumbered disasters! But who is to be cursed as the true cause of all such evils? Is it not the oppressor, seeing that he bends his fellow-men under the yoke of a frightful slavery, lives on the sweat of the brow of his fellow-men, depraves, debases and martyrizes his fellow-beings, kills them to satisfy a whim or out of sheer cruelty, and thus compels them to reconquer by force the freedom that they have been deprived of? Never forget this, my son, if, once subjugated, the whole Gallic race had shown itself as patient, as timid, as resigned as did our poor ancestor Fergan the weaver, our slavery never would have been abolished! After vain appeals to the heart and reason of the oppressor, there is but one means left to overthrow tyranny--revolt--energetic, stubborn, unceasing revolt. Sooner or later right triumphs, as it triumphed with us! Let the blood that our triumph has cost fall upon the heads of those who enslaved us. Accordingly, my son, thanks to our innumerable insurrections, slavery was at first replaced by the state of the colonist, or serfdom, the regime under which my great-grandfather Justin and my grandfather Aurel lived. Under that system, instead of being forced to cultivate under the whip and for the exclusive benefit of the Roman masters the lands that they had plundered us of by conquest, the colonist had a small share of the harvest that he gathered. He could no longer be sold as a draft horse, along with his children; he could no longer be submitted to the torture or killed; but they were, from father to children, compelled to remain attached to the same domain. If the domain was sold, the colonist likewise changed hands under the identical conditions of toil. Later the condition of the colonists was further improved; they were granted the rights of citizenship. When the Gallic legions were formed, the soldiers that composed them became completely free. My father Ralf, the son of a colonist, gained his freedom in that manner; I, the son of a soldier, brought up in camp, was born free; and I shall bequeath that freedom to you, as my father bequeathed it to me together with the duty to preserve it for your descendants. When you will read this narrative, my son, after you will have become acquainted with the manifold sufferings of our ancestors, who were slaves for so many generations, you will appreciate the wisdom of the wish expressed by our ancestor Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak. You will admire his sagacity in expecting that, by piously preserving the memory of its bravery and of the independence that it once enjoyed, the Gallic race would be able to draw from the horror for Roman oppression the strength to overthrow it.