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Chapter 2 - Poverty
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From Poverty by James Platt
Page 43 Poverty
the agrarian laws enacted with a view to remedy
the evil. The
unsettled state of the country following the downfall of the Roman
Empire must have been the occasion of an incalculable
amount of misery.
In France, during the Middle Ages the great majority of the
people were in a state of bondage to their feudal superiors, who,
however, were obliged to attend to the maintenance of the serfs,
and many free men, in order to avoid destitution, surrendered
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Books - Factual
Sociology
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their liberty and became serfs. The
tyranny, feudal and priestly, to which the masses were subject
in the so-called ages of faith? - or, more truly, the ages of
darkness - is horrible to think of. To compare the "present" with
the "past," men should occasionally read those hateful registers
which remain to us of the Inquisition - not only the extracts
given by Llorento, or by Lamotte-Langon, but in what remains of
the original registers of Toulouse. Read them in all their flatness,
in all their dryness - so dismal, so terribly savage. At the end
of a few pages, you feel yourself stricken with a chill; a cruel
shiver fastens upon you - death, death, death, is traceable in
every line. Already you are in a bier, or else in a stone cell
with mouldy walls. Happiest of all are the killed. The house of
horrors is the in pace. This phrase it is which comes back unceasingly,
like an ill-omened bell sounding again and again the heart's ruin
- of the living dead; always we have the same word, "immured"
- a living death. It was a frightful machinery for crushing and
flattening, a most cruel method for shutting the human soul. It
failed to do so. But we are too apt to forget what centuries of
misery our forefathers passed through. It must have seemed a sin
to laugh and be merry, whilst such horrible cruelties were going
on. We ought to be thankful and rejoice that we live in an age
when every man, let him be ever so poor, is free to think and
act for himself - a free man, be he ever so poor; not a slave,
a serf, a wretch, whose life, whose will, whose acts were at the
mercy of his lord and master. We have crowded dwellings; vice
and squalor exists amongst us now; but in the olden times, the
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© Peter Smith 2008
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