he tree is alive that it does stand still.
That was the main difference between the pagan slave and the Christian
serf. The serf still belonged to the lord, as the stick that struck
root in the garden would have still belonged to the owner of the
garden; but it would have become a _live_ possession. Therefore the
owner is forced, by the laws of nature, to treat it with _some_
respect; something becomes due from him. He cannot pull it up without
killing it; it has gained a _place_ in the garden--or the society. But
the moderns are quite wrong in supposing that mere change and holiday
and variety have necessarily any element of this life that is the only
seed of liberty. You may say if you like that an employer, taking all
his workpeople to a new factory in a Garden City, is giving them the
greater freedom of forest landscapes and smokeless skies. If it comes
to that, you can say that the slave-traders took negroes from their
narrow and brutish African hamlets, and gave them the polish of
foreign travel and medicinal breezes of a sea-voyage. But the tiny
seed of citizenship and independence there already was in the serfdom
of the Dark Ages, had nothing to do with what nice things the lord
might do to the serf. It lay in the fact that there were some nasty
things he could not do to the serf--there were not many, but there
were some, and one of them was eviction. He could not make the serf
utterly landless and desperate, utterly without access to the means of
production, though doubtless it was rather the field that owned the
serf, than the serf that owned the field. But even if you call the
serf a beast of the field, he was not what we have tried to make the
town workman--a beast with no field. Foulon said of the French
peasants, "Let them eat grass." If he had said it of the modern London
proletariat, they might well reply, "You have not left us even grass
to eat."

There was, therefore, both in theory and practice, _some_ security for
the serf, because he had come to life and rooted. The seigneur could
not wait in the field in all weathers with a battle-axe to prevent the
serf scratching any living out of the ground, any more than the man in
my fairy-tale could sit out in the garden all night with an umbrella
to prevent the shrub getting any rain. The relation of lord and serf,
therefore, involves a combination of two things: inequality and
security. I know there are people who will at once point wildly to all
sorts of