I'll slay the noble in his hall;
With girls and whisky I'll have my fling,
And the world will honor me like a king."
One of the most popular of these robber songs has a chorus running thus, addressed in menace to the noble and the rich:
"We have come to drink your wine,
We have come to steal your gold,
We have come to kiss your wives!
Ha! ha!"
This reckless sense of right and wrong is due to that serfage under which the peasants groaned for two hundred and sixty years. Serfage made men indifferent to life and death. The crimes of serfage have scarcely any parallel, except among savage tribes; and the liberty which some of the freed peasants enjoyed the most was the liberty of revenge.