Nor was it simply a matter of education, as such. Another thing had also become clear to Jozef in the time he'd spent in Grantville-and perhaps clearer still, during the months that followed when he'd resided in Magdeburg. The sort of broad-ranging skills that were necessary in a population to create and sustain the technical marvels which the Americans took for granted also presupposed complete mobility of labor. There was no way around it. Not, certainly, in the long run. The needed skills for that sort of advanced technical society were simply too complex, too inter-connected-most of all, too unpredictable. The demand could only be met by a productive population which was free to move about at will, to learn whatever skills and apply themselves to whatever labor they chose. You could no more regulate it than you could regulate it a bonfire.

Put it all together, and the conclusion was obvious. Jozef had come to it long before he left Grantville. If the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania was to have any chance at all of surviving the historical doom so clear and explicit even in Grantville's sketchy historical records of the future of eastern Europe-the Commonwealth had been the one and only major European power which had simply vanished by the end of the eighteenth century-then serfdom had to be destroyed. And Jozef could see only two options. Either the Poles and Lithuanians destroyed serfdom themselves, or someone else would destroy it for them-and, in that second event, might very well destroy the Commonwealth in the process.

But how to explain that, even to the young man standing next to him-much less the mounted archer putting on this impressive display?