Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Bulfinch

Bulfinch’s sentence has the cool, cataloging confidence of a 19th-century writer who believes social order can be diagrammed like a family tree. He opens with “other classes,” as if hierarchy is a given and the only remaining task is to sort people into compartments. The phrase “freemen, owners of small portions of land” lands as a reassuring label of autonomy, but he immediately tightens the leash: they are “independent,” yes, except when they “voluntarily” become vassals. That adverb does heavy ideological work. It sanitizes coercion by recasting it as choice, smoothing over the structural reality that “voluntary” often meant “there was no safer alternative.”

The subtext is a theory of power as protection racket disguised as social contract. “More opulent neighbors” sounds neighborly, almost quaint, but “whose power was necessary for their protection” reveals the underlying mechanics: security is monopolized by those with wealth, and dependence is framed as prudence. Bulfinch isn’t raging against feudal arrangements; he’s normalizing them through calm narration, turning unequal relations into a practical response to danger.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of romantic medievalism, Bulfinch often packages the past as intelligible, even instructive. This line participates in that project: it makes feudal vassalage legible to a modern reader by describing it as a rational bargain. The unintended sting is how contemporary it feels: “independence” remains a cherished word, while the conditions that undercut it are often treated as mere necessities.