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Rh In the fourteenth century the kings of France, in enfranchising the communes on the domains, repeatedly allege this doctrine as one of their motives. Undoubtedly, the real motive was that more revenue could be got from them by taxing them as communes than by exacting feudal dues from the members as serfs, but it all helped to spread the doctrine as an idea of what would be "right." This review now shows that the doctrine of liberty and equality by "nature," by birth, and by natural right was not by any means an eighteenth-century dogma. It had been growing and spreading for eighteen hundred years. It had begun in skepticism about the fairness of slavery; it could not begin with anything else. It went on until it became a philosophical notion of liberty, meaning the natural right of every one to pursue happiness in his own way, and according to his own ideal of it; it could not stop short of that.

This dogma did not emancipate slaves or serfs. During a thousand years, from the sixth to the sixteenth century, the peasants of France and England passed through the stages of slavery, serfdom, villainage, and compulsory settlement, by persistent struggles of their