Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/35

 were free and proud owners of small farms, noted for their industry and independence of spirit. They had energy, initiative, character, and property. They knew how to till the soil, rotate and care for crops, manage laborers, and conserve their interests. They, more than the gentry, furnished economic managers to direct the development of colonies in America.

To planting corporations, the very process that transformed England from a feudal into a mercantile state also furnished a mass of laborers detached from the soil and prepared to face the primitive conditions of life and work on the American frontier. It is a fact of deep significance in the history of migration that serfdom practically disappeared in England more than two hundred years before its last legal traces were removed from the Continent. The essential economic characteristic of serfdom was bondage to the soil. A serf was not a chattel; he was not bought and sold in the market place; he was attached to the land, going with the estate whenever it was transferred. As land without his labor was worthless, it was the interest of the lord to hold him fast to it, thus making him virtually a part of real property and depriving him of all initiative for migration.

Against serfdom the drift of economic life in England began to run heavily by the middle of the fifteenth century, but the institution was not abolished by one drastic stroke, such as Alexander made in Russia in 1861 or Lincoln made in the United States two years later. On the contrary it was by gradual stages extending over two centuries that English serfs commuted their fixed service of labor and produce into the form of a cash payment; it was by becoming renters that they finally broke the tie which bound them to the soil and won their liberty. But that liberty had its disadvantages; for, if the renter could voluntarily leave the soil which nourished him, he could also be driven from it when his lord found more lucrative uses for the land.