| |
| | Karl Marx: His Life and Works Part I |
 | | The feudal system, based on a feudalist economy and on serfdom, stabilized by patriarchal despotism, hereditary dependence, and enslavement of the conscience, collapsed before the onslaught of the new economic power. |
 | | Well, the old feudalist order had been abolished, the storms of the revolution had swept privilege away; bourgeois freedoms such as feudalism had scarcely dreamed of had been established, and all citizens were equal before the law. |
 | | For the sake of appearances, however, provincial diets were established, impotent bodies, vegetating under the shelter of secrecy, bodies in which the squirearchy continued to exercise its territorial despotism behind the mask of parliamentary procedure. |
| www.marxists.org /archive/ruhle/1928/marx/ch01.htm (10972 words) |
|