Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/125

 side the historian amidst the ruins of the Capitol, and with Rome, and all the monuments of Roman power and magnificence under his eye, might venture to ask whether they, magnificent and imposing as they are, suggest ideas of greater social interest,—are connected with grander moral results on the condition, well-being, and civilisation of the human race in every land, than these rude excavations in the isle of Vigr, which once held Rolf Ganger's vessels.

It is evident that such a country in such a climate never could have afforded a rent, either in money or in natural products, for the use of the land, to a class of feudal nobility possessing it in great estates, although it may afford a subsistence to a class of small working landowners, like the bonders, giving their own labour to the cultivation, and helping out their agricultural means of living with the earnings of their labour in other occupations—in piracy and pillage on the coasts of other countries in the 9th century, and in the 19th with the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the wood trade, and other peaceful occupations of industry. On account of these physical circumstances—of a soil and climate which afford no surplus produce from land, after subsisting the needful labourers, to go as rent to a landlord—no powerful body of feudal nobility could grow up in Norway, as in other countries in the middle ages; and from the same causes, now in modern times, during the 400 years previous to 1814 in which Denmark had held Norway, all the encouragement that could be given by the Danish government to raising a class of nobility in Norway was unavailing. Slavery even could not exist in any country in which the labour of the slave would barely produce the subsistence of the slave, and would leave no surplus gain from his labour for a master; still less could a nobility, or body of great landowners drawing rent, subsist where land can barely