Your committee has invited me to speak on “rural community,” which I can understand only in the sense of “rural society,” on account of the opposition of this society to the city and to industry as other topics of your programme. Your wish cannot possibly be fulfilled if taken in its literal sense. The social constitution of rural districts is the most individual and most connected with historical development of all social communities. It would not be reasonable to speak collectively on the rural conditions of Russia, Ireland, Sicily, Hungary, and the Black Belt. But even if I confine myself to the districts with developed capitalistic culture, it is scarcely possible to treat the subject from one common point of view. For a rural society, separate from the urban social community, does not exist at the present time in a great part of the modern civilized world. It does not exist in England any more, except, perhaps, in the thoughts of dreamers. The constant proprietor of the soil, the landlord, is not an agriculturist but a lessor; the temporary owner of the estate, the tenant or lessee, is an undertaker, a capitalist like others. The laborers are partly migrating laborers of the season, and the rest are journeymen of exactly the same class as other proletarians. All are joined together for a certain time and then are scattered again. If [A 726]there is a specific rural social problem it is only this: Whether and how the no longer existing rural communitiy or society can arise anew so as to be strong and enduring.

But also in the United States, at least in the vast regions producing cereals, there does not exist now what might be called “rural society.” The old New England town, the Mexican village, and the old slave plantation do not determine any longer the physiognomy of the country. And the peculiar conditions of the first settlements in [213]the primeval forests and on the prairies have disappeared. The American farmer is an undertaker like others. Certainly there are numerous farmers’ problems, mostly of a technical character or pertaining to the politics of communication, which have played their rôle in politics and have been excellently discussed by American scholars.

But there exists not yet any specific rural social problem. This is not the case since the abolition of slavery and the solution of the question, how the immense area of settlement which was in the hands of the Union has been disposed of. The present difficult social problems of the South are also in the rural districts essentially ethnical and not economical. You cannot establish, on the basis of questions concerning irrigation, railroad-tariff, homestead laws, etc., however important these matters are, a theory of rural community as a characteristic social formation; this may become different in the future. But if anything is characteristic in the rural conditions of the great wheat-producing states of America, it is – to speak in general terms – the absolute individualism of the farmers’ economics, the quality of the farmer as a mere business man. This is quite different on the European Continent. It will, therefore, probably be better to explain briefly in what respect and for what reason it is different. The difference is caused by the specific effects of capitalism on the soil of old civilized countries and the much denser population of these countries. If a nation, as the German, supports its [214]inhabitants, whose number is but little smaller than the white population of the United States, in a space smaller in size than the State of Texas, if it has founded and is determined to maintain its political position and the importance of its culture for the world upon this narrow, limited basis, the manner of the distribution of the soil gains determinative importance for the differentiation of the society and all economical and political conditions of the country. In consequence of the close congestion of the inhabitants and the lower valuation of the bare working forces the possibility of quickly acquiring estate which has not been inherited is limited. Thus social differentiation is necessarily fixed – a fate which also your country approaches. This increases the power of historical tradition, which is naturally the greatest in agricultural production, for which the [A 727]so-called “law of the decreasing production of the soil,” the stronger bondage by the natural limits and conditions of production, the more constant limitation of quality and quantity of the means of production, diminish the importance of technical revolutions. In spite of technical progress production can be revolutionized least by purely rational division of labor and concentration of labor, acceleration of the change of capital, and substitution of the organic parts of raw material and working forces by inorganic raw materials and mechanical means of labor. This inevitably predominating power of tradition in agriculture creates and maintains, on the European Continent, those types of rural population which do not exist in a new country, as the United States; to these types belongs first the European peasant.

This peasant is totally different from the farmer in England or in America. The English farmer is, to-day, a sometimes quite remarkable undertaker and producer for the market; almost always he has rented the estate. The American farmer is an agriculturist who has mostly acquired, by purchase or as the first settler, the soil as his [215]property; sometimes he has rented it. He produces for the market – the market is older than the producer here. The European peasant of the old type was a man who had, in most instances, inherited the soil and who produced mostly for his own wants. The market in Europe is younger than the producer. Of course, for many years the peasant sold the superfluous products and, though he spun and wove, could not satisfy his wants by his own work. But he did not produce to gain profit, like a business man, for the past two thousand years had not trained him to this. Up to the time of the French Revolution the European peasant was only considered as a means for the purpose of supporting certain ruling classes. In the first place his duty was to provide, as cheaply as possible, the neighbor-town with food. The city prohibited, as far as possible, rural trade and the exportation of cereals as long as its citizens were not provided. Thus matters remained up to the end of the eighteenth century; for the artificial maintenance of the cities at the expense of the country was also a principle of the princes who wanted to have money in their countries and large intakes from the taxes. Moreover, the peasant was doomed to support, by his services and by paying taxes, the proprietor of the land who possessed the superior ownership of his land and quite often also the right of the peasant’s body. This remained so up to the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Another of the peasant’s [216]duties was to pay to his political lord the taxes for his estate – from which the knight was exempt – and to supply the armies with recruits, from which the cities were exempt. This remained so until the tax-privileges were abolished and the service in the army became the duty of every one, in the nineteenth century.

[A 728]Finally, the peasant was dependent upon the rural productive community into which the half-communistic settlement had placed him two thousand years ago. He could not manage as he wanted, but as the primeval rotation of crops prescribed. This remained so up to the dissolution of these half-communistic bonds. But also after the abolition of all this legal dependency the peasant could not become a rationally producing little agriculturist as, for instance, the American farmer. Together with the village and its characteristic contrast to the individual settlement of the American farmer, numerous relics of ancient communistic conditions of forest, water, pasture, and even arable soil, which united the peasants extraordinarily firm and tied them to the inherited form of husbandry, survived the liberation of the peasants. But to these relics of the past which America has never known, certain factors are added nowadays whose effects also America will one day experience, – the effect of modern capitalism under the conditions of completely settled old civilized countries. The limited territory causes there a specific social estimation of the ownership of land, and the tendency to retain it, by bequest, in the family. The superabundance of labor forces diminishes the desire to save labor by the use of machines. Where now by migration into the cities and foreign countries the working forces become limited and dear, there, on the other hand, the high price of the soil by purchase and hereditary divisions diminish the capital of the buyer. To gain a fortune by agriculture is not possible in Europe nowadays. The time in which this will be possible in the United States is approaching its limit. We will not forget [217]that the modern boiling heat of capitalistic culture is connected with heedless consumption of natural material for which there is no substitute. The supply of coal and ore will still last for future times, which it is difficult to determine at present. The utilization of new forces, farm-land, here will also soon have reached an end; in Europe it no longer exists. The agriculturist can never hope, as husbandman, to gain more than a modest equivalent for his work. He is, in Europe, and also to a great extent in this country, excluded from participating in the great chances of speculative business talent.

The strong blast of modern capitalistic competition rushes, in agriculture, against a conservative opposing current, and it is exactly rising capitalism which, in old civilized countries, increases the counter-current. The use of the soil as investment of capital, and the sinking rate of interest in connection with the traditional social valuation of rural soil, push the price of real estate to such a height that the price of farm-land is always paid partly à fonds perdu, so to say, as entrée, as entrance fee into this social stratum. Thus capitalism causes the increase of the number of idle renters of land by the increase of capital for agricultural operation. Thus peculiar [A 729]contrasting effects of capitalism are produced; and these contrasting effects alone make the “flat land” in Europe appear as the support of a separate “rural society.” For with the conditions of old civilized countries the differences caused by capitalism assume the character of a cultural contest. Two social tendencies resting upon entirely heterogeneous bases wrestle with each other. The old economic constitution asked: How can I give, on this given soil, work and sustenance to the greatest possible number of men? Capitalism asks: How can I produce as many crops as possible for the market from this given soil with as few men as possible? From the technical economical point of view of capitalism the old rural settlement of the country is, therefore, considered overpopulation. Capitalism produces the crops from the soil in mines, foundries, and machine factories. The past of thousands of years struggles against the invasion of the capitalistic spirit.

This combat assumes, however, partly the form of peaceable transformation. As to certain points of agricultural production the [218]little peasant, if he knows how to free himself from the fetters of tradition, is able to adapt himself to the conditions of the new husbandry. The rising rate of rent in the vicinity of the cities, the rising prices for meat, dairy products, and garden vegetables, the intensive care of the young cattle, which the self-working small farmer can employ, connected with the higher expense for hired men, usually opens very favorable opportunities to the little farmer who works without hired assistance, near wealthy centres of industry. This is the case everywhere, where the process of production is developed in the direction of increasing intensity of labor, not of capital.

The former peasant is transformed here, as we observe in France and southwestern Germany, into a laborer who is in the possession of his means of production and perseveres in this independence, because the intensity and high quality of his work, increased by his private interest in it, and his adaptability of it to the demand of the local market, procures for him an economical superiority, which continues to exist, even where the agriculture on a large scale would preponderate technically.

The great success of the formation of corporations among the small farmers of the Continent must be ascribed to these peculiar advantages which, in certain branches of production, the work of the responsible small agriculturists possesses in opposition to the hired labor of the large farmer. These corporations have proved to be the most influential means of the peasants’ education for husbandry. But through these corporations new communities of husbandry are created, which bind the peasants together, and change this way of economic thinking and feeling from the purely individualistic form which the economic struggle for existence in industry assumes under the pres[A 730]sure of competition.This, again, is only possible because [219]the great importance of the natural conditions of production in agriculture, its being bound to place, time, and organic means of work, and their publicity weaken the effectiveness of the individual competition of the farmers among each other. But where those conditions of a specific economic superiority of small farming do not exist, because the importance of self-responsible work as to quality disappears behind that of capital, there the old peasant struggles for his existence as a hireling of capital. It is the high social valuation of the owner of the land that makes him a subject of capital and ties him psychologically to the clod; the loss of the estate means for him degradation in an old civilized country with stronger economic and social differentiation. Not rarely the peasant’s struggle for existence becomes the economic selection in favor of the most frugal, i.e., those most lacking culture. For the pressure of agricultural competition is not felt by him who uses his products not as articles of trade, but for his own consumption, sells but little thereof, and can, for this reason, buy but few other products. Thus sometimes a partial retrogression into natural husbandry occurs. Only with the French “System of two children” the peasant can maintain himself, for generations, as a small proprietor in the inherited possession.The obstacles which the peasant meets who wants to become a modern agriculturist urge the separation of the possession from management; the landlord keeps his capital for operation, and he can draw it out from husbandry. Partially the government tries to create a mean between property and lease.

The peasant cannot remain a peasant, and he cannot become a land-owner on account of the high valuation of the land.

It is not yet possible to speak of a real “contest” between capitalism and the power of historical influence, in this case of growing conflicts between capital and ownership of the soil. It is a process of selection partly, and partly of depravation. Quite different conditions prevail where not only an unorganized multitude of peasants are powerless in the chains of the financial powers of the cities, but [220]where there is an aristocratic stratum above the peasants, which struggles not only for its economic existence, but also for the social standing which the history of centuries has granted this class. This is the case especially where this aristocracy is not tied to the rural districts by pure financial interest, as is the English lord, or only by the interests of recreation and sport, but where its representatives are concerned, as agriculturists, in the economic conflict and are closely connected with the country.

Then the dissolving effects of capitalism are increased. Because ownership of land gives social position, the price of the large estates rises high above the value of their productivity. “Why did [A 731]God create him in his wrath?” The answer is: “Rents! Rents! Rents!” says Byron of the English landlord. And, in fact, rents are the economic basis of all aristocracies that need a gentlemanly, workless income for their existence. But exactly because the Prussian “Junker” despises the urban possession of money, capitalism makes him the rent-debtor. A strong, growing tension between city and country results therefrom. The conflict between capitalism and tradition is now tinged politically, for the question arises, if the economic and political power shall definitely pass over into the hands of the urban capitalism, whether the small rural centres of political intelligence with their peculiarly tinged social culture shall decay and the cities, as the only carriers of political, social, and esthetic culture, shall occupy the field of the combat. And this question is identical with the question whether people who were able to live for politics and the state, as the old, economically independent land aristocracy, shall be replaced by the exclusive domination of professional politicians who must live on politics and on the state. In the United States this question has been decided, at any rate for present days, by one of the bloodiest wars of modern times, which ended with the destruction of the aristocratic, social, and political centres of the rural dis[221]tricts. Even in America, with its democratic traditions handed down by Puritanism as an everlasting heirloom, the victory over the planters’ aristocracy was difficult and was gained with great political and social sacrifices. But in countries with old civilization matters are much more complicated. For there the struggle between the power of the historical notions and the pressure of the capitalistic interests summon social forces to battle, as adversaries of civil capitalism, which in the United States were partly unknown, or stood partly on the side of the North.

A few remarks concerning this:

In the countries of old civilization and of limited possibilites of economic expansion money-making and its representatives play necessarily a considerably smaller social rôle than in a country that is still new. The importance of the class of state officials is and must be much greater in Europe than in the United States. The much more complicated social organization makes a host of specially trained officials, employed for lifetime, indispensable in Europe, which will exist in the United States only in a much smaller number even after the movement of civil service reform shall have attained all its aims. The jurist and officer of administration in Germany, in spite of the shorter and more intensive German college education for the university, is about thirty-five years old when his time of preparation and his unsalaried activity is completed and he obtains a salaried office. Therefore he can corne only from wealthy circles. On the other hand, he is trained to unsalaried or low-salaried service, which [A 732]can find its reward only in the high social standing of his vo[222]cation; thus a character is stamped on him which is far from the interests of money-making and places him on the side of the adversaries of their dominion. If in old civilized countries, as in Germany, the necessity of a strong army arises, which Germany needs to maintain its independence,this means, for the politicial institutions, the support of an hereditary dynasty. Also the decided follower of democratic institutions – as I am – cannot wish to remove it where it has been preserved. For it is in military states, if not the only, yet the best, historically indorsed form (because it is interested personally in preservation of right and of a legal govemment), in which the Cæsarian dominion of the sword of military parvenus can be averted, by which France is again and again menaced. Hereditary monarchy – one may judge about it theoretically as one wants to judge – warrants to a state, which is forced to be a military state, the greatest freedom of the citizens – as great as it can be in a monarchy – and so long as the dynasty does not become degenerated, it will have the political support of the majority of the nation. The English Parliament knew very well why it offered Cromwell the crown, and equally well Cromwell’s army knew why it prevented him from accepting it. Such an hereditary, privileged dynasty has a natural affinity with the holders of other social privileges. To these conservative forces belongs in the European countries the church; first the Roman Catholic Church, which, in European countries, even on account of the multitude of its followers, is a power of quite different importance [223]and character that it possesses in Anglo-Saxon countries; also the Lutheran Church. Both churches support the peasant, with his conservative conduct of life, against the dominion of urban rationalistic culture. The rustic movement of corporation stands, to a great extent, under the guidance of clergymen, who are the only ones capable for leadership in the rustic districts. Ecclesiastic, political, and economic points of view are here intermingled. In Belgium the rural corporations are means of the clerical party in the conflict against the socialists; the latter are supported by the consumers’ unions and the productive associations. In Italy almost nobody who does not present his confessional certificate finds credit with certain corporations. Likewise the aristocracy of a country finds strong backing in the church, although the Catholic Church is, in social regard, more democratic nowadays than formerly. The church is pleased with patriarchal conditions of labor because they are of personal human character, contrary to the purely commercial relations which capitalism creates. The church possesses the sentiment that the relation between a lord and a serf, but not the bare commercial conditions created by the labor market, can be developed and penetrated ethically. Deep, historically conditioned contrasts, [A 733]which have always separated Catholicism and Lutheranism from Calvinism, strengthen that anti-capitalistic attitude of the European churches.

[224]Finally, in an old civilized country, the “aristocracy of education,” the Bildungsaristokratie, as it likes to be called, a strong class of the population without personal interest in economics, views more skeptically and criticises more sharply the triumphal procession of capitalism than can be naturally and justly the case in a country, such, for instance, as the United States.

As soon as intellectual and esthetic education has become a profession, their representatives are bound by an inner affinity to all the carriers of ancient social culture, because also for them that profession cannot and must not be a source of heedless gain. They look distrustfully upon the abolition of traditional conditions of the community and upon the annihilation of all the innumerable ethical and esthetic values which cling to them. They doubt if the dominion of capital would give better, more lasting guaranties to personal liberty and to the development of intellectual, esthetic, and social culture which they represent, than the aristocracy of the past has given. They want to be ruled only by persons whose social culture they consider equivalent to their own; therefore they prefer the dominion of the economically independent aristocracy to the dominion of the professional politician. Thus it happens nowadays in the civilized countries – a peculiar and, in more than one respect, serious fact – that the representatives of the highest interests of culture turn their eyes back, stand with deep antipathy opposed to the inevitable development of capitalism, and refuse to cooperate in the rearing of the structure of the future. Moreover, the disciplined masses of working-men created by capitalism are naturally inclined to unite in a class party, if new districts for settlement are no longer available, and if the working-man is conscious of being forced to remain inevitably a proletarian, as long as he lives, which is bound to come about sooner or later also in this country, or has already come. The progress of capitalism is not hemmed in by this; the working-man’s chances to gain political power are insignificant. Yet they weaken the political power of the citizen and strengthen that of the citizen’s aristocratic adversaries. The downfall of the German civic liberalism is based upon the joined effectiveness of these motives. Thus in old [225]countries, where such a rural community, aristocratically differentiated, exists, a complex of social and political problems arises. An American cannot understand the importance of agrarian questions upon the European Continent, especially in Germany, yea, even German politics, and must arrive at entirely wrong conclusions if he does not keep before his eyes these great complexes. It is a peculiar combination of motives which is effective in these old countries and [A 734]explains their deviation from American conditions. Besides the necessity of strong military preparations, there are essentially two factors: First, something which never existed in the greater part of America, which may be designated as Rückständigkeit, viz., the influence of a gradually disappearing older form of rural social constitution. The second factor, circumstances which have not yet become effective in America, but to which this country, which is so elated by every million of increased population and by every rise of the valuation of the soil, will infallibly be exposed, exactly as Europe has been: the dense population, the high value of the soil, the stronger differentiation of the profession and the peculiar conditions resulting therefrom, under which the rural community of old civilized countries opposes capitalism joined to the influence of great political and social powers which are only known to old countries. Capitalism produces, under these circumstances, even to-day effects in Europe which can be produced in America only in future days.

In consequence of all those influences, European capitalism, at least on the Continent, has a peculiar authoritative stamp which contrasts with the citizen’s equality of rights and is usually distinctly felt by Americans. These authoritative tendencies, and that anticapitalistic sentiment of all those factors of Continental society of which I have spoken, find their social backing in the conflict between the country aristocracy and the urban citizens. But the country aristocracy undergoes, under the influence of capitalism, serious inner transformations which alter completely the character the aristocracy has inherited from the past. I should like to show how this has taken place in the past and how it continues to be carried on in the present, by the example of Germany.

[226]The social constitution of the rural districts in Germany shows sharp contrasts which every one traveling in the country does not fail to observe: the farther toward the west and south, the denser is the rural settlement, the more the small farmers predominate, the more dispersed and various is the culture; the farther toward the east, especially the northeast, the more extended are the fields of cereals, of sugar-beets, and potatoes, the more the gross culture prevails, the more numerous a rural class of journeymen without property stands in opposition to the aristocracy of land-owners. This difference is of great importance.

The class of the rural land-owners of Germany, consisting particularly of noblemen residing in the region east of the Elbe, rules politically the leading German state. The Prussian House of Lords represents this class, and the right of election gives them also a determinative position in the Prussian House of Representatives. It imprints upon the corps of officers of the army their character, as [A 735]well as upon the Prussian officials and upon the German diplomacy, which is almost exclusively in the hands of noblemen. The German student adopts their custom of life in the students’ fraternities in universities, and also the civilian “officer of the reserve;” a growing part of all the more highly educated Germans belong to this rank. Their political sympathies and antipathies explain many of the most important presuppositions of German foreign politics. Their obstructionism impedes the progress of the laboring-class; the manufacturers alone would never be sufficiently strong to oppose the working-men under the democratic rights of electing representa[227]tives for the German Reichstag. They are the props of protectionism which industry alone would never have been able to accomplish. They support orthodoxy in the state church. Whatever remains and vestiges of authoritative conditions surprise the foreigner – who only sees the exterior side of Germany and has neither the time nor opportunity to enter into the essence of German culture – and cause the erroneous opinions which are circulated in foreign countries concerning Germany, results directly or indirectly from the influence of these classes, as many of the most important contrasts of our interior politics are based upon that difference of the rural social constitution between the east and the west.

The question arises: How can this difference be explained historically; for it has not always existed. Five centuries ago landlordship ruled the social constitution of the rural districts. However various were the conditions of the peasant’s dependency which arose from this, and however complicated the social constitution of the country was, in one point harmony prevailed, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the usually far extended possessions of the feudal lord were nowhere – also not in the east – connected with gross culture; though the landlord cultivated a part of his estate, this culture was but little larger than peasants’ culture. By far the greater part of his income depended upon the taxes which the peasants contributed. It is one of the most important questions of the German social history, how from this comparatively great uniformity the present strong contrast has arisen.

[228]Exclusive landlordship was dissolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century, partly in consequence of the French Revolution or of the ideas disseminated by it, partly in consequence of the Revolution of 1848; the division of the rights of ownership of land between landlords and peasants has been abolished, the duties and taxes of the peasants have been removed. The brilliant investigations of Professor G[eorg] F[riedrich] Knapp and his school have shown how decisive, for that kind of agrarian constitution which originated then and still exists, was the question: How was the estate divided, after the dissolution of the manor community, between the former land[A 736]lords and the peasants? In the west and south the soil came, the greater part, into the hands of the peasants (or remained therein), but in the east a very large part fell into the hands of the former masters of the peasant, the Rittergutsbesitzer, who established there gross cultures with free laborers. But this was only the consequence of the fact that the uniformity of the agrarian constitution had disappeared before the emancipation of the peasants. The difference between the west and east was confirmed but not created by the same. The difference had existed, in its main points since the sixteenth century, and meanwhile had constantly grown. Landlordship had undergone interior changes before its dissolution. Everywhere in the east and west the endeavor of the landlords to increase their intakes was the urging factor. This desire had sprung [229]up with the invasion of capitalism, the growing wealth of the inhabitants of cities, the growing possibility of selling agricultural products. The transformations effected in the west and south date partly back to the thirteenth century, in the east to the fifteenth century. The ways by which the landlords pursued their aim were characteristic. In the south and west they remained landlords, i.e., they increased the rates of rent, interest, and taxes of the peasants, but they did not go into rural culture. In the east they became Gutsherren, cultivating lords; they appropriated parts of the peasants’ land (they legten Bauern, as the saying was), procured thus a large estate for themselves, became agriculturists, and used the peasants as serfs to till their own soil. Gross culture existed there – only to a smaller extent and with labor of serfs – even before the emancipation of the peasants; but not in the west. What has caused this difference?

When this question is discussed, vast weight is laid upon the conduct of political power; indeed, this power was greatly interested in the formation of the agrarian constitution. Since the knight was exempted from paying taxes, the peasant was the only one in the country who paid them. When standing armies were established, the peasants furnished the recruits. This, in connection with certain points of view of commercialism, induced the rising territorial state to forbid by edicts the Bauernlegen, i.e., the appropriation of the peasants’ land by the lords, hence to protect the existing peasants’ farms. The stronger the ruler of the country was, the better he succeeded; the mightier the nobility was, the less he succeeded. According to this the differences of the agrarian constitution in the east are based, to a great extent, upon these conditions of power. But in the west and south we find that, in spite of the greatest weakness of a great many states, in spite of the indubitable possibility to appropriate peasants’ land, the landlords do not attempt this at all. They do not show at all any tendency to deprive the peasant, to [A 737]establish a gross culture, and to become agriculturists themselves. And also the important formation of the conditions of the peasants’ rights to the soil cannot have been the decisive reason. In the east great numbers of peasants with originally very good rights of possession have disappeared; in the west also those with the most unfavorable rights of [230]possession have been preserved because the landlords did not at all want to remove them.

The decisive question is, therefore: How did it happen that the landlord of the German south and west, although he had ample opportunity of appropriating the peasants’ land, did not do this, while the eastern landlord deprived the peasants of their land in spite of the resistance of the power of the state?

This question can be put into a different form. The western landlord did not renounce the utilization of the peasants’ land as a source of income when he renounced its appropriation. The difference is only that he used the peasants as taxpayers, while the landlord of the east, by becoming Gutsherr, began to use the peasants as a laboring force. Therefore, the question must be asked: Why there one thing, here another?

As with most historical developments, it is rather improbable that a single reason could be assigned as the exclusive cause of this different conduct of the landlords; for in this case we should chance upon this cause in the sources. Therefore, a long series of single causative factors have been adduced for explanation, especially by Professor von Below in a classical investigation in his work Territorium und Stadt. The question can only be, if the points of view can be augmented, especially from economical considerations. Let us see in which points there was difference between the conditions, in which the eastern and the western landlord were when endeavoring to extort from their peasants more than the traditional taxes.

The establishment of gross operations was facilitated, for the western landlords, by the fact that their landlordship as well as patrimonialization of the public powers had grown gradually on the soil of ancient liberty of the people; the east, on the contrary, was a territory of colonization. The patriarchal Slavonian social constitution [231]was the edifice invaded by German clergymen in consequence of their superior education, German merchants and artisans in consequence of their superior technical and commercial skill, German knights in consequence of their superior military technic, and German peasants in consequence of their superior knowledge of agriculture. Moreover, in the time of the conquest of the east, German social constitution, together with the political forces, had been completely feudalized. The social constitution of the east was, from the very beginning, adapted to the social preëminence of the knight, and the German invasion altered this but little. The German peasant, [A 738]even under the most favorable conditions of settling, had lost the support given to him, also in the feudal period, by firm traditions, the old mutual protection, the jurisdiction of the community in the Weistümer in the west. The regularly more numerous Slavonian peasantry did not know anything of such traditions. Besides, in the west regularly the parcels of which the estates of the lords consisted, because they had gradually arisen upon originally free land, were intermingled even in single villages; they crossed everywhere the patrimonial rights of the small owners of territory and thus they secured for the peasant, by their variety and mutual conflicts, his toilsome existence; very frequently the peasant was politically, personally, and economically subjected to quite different lords. In the east the combination of lordship and patrimonial rights over a whole village was in the hand of one lord; the formation of a “manor,” in the English sense, was regularly facilitated because much more frequently, from the very beginning, but one knight’s court had been founded in a village or had originated already from the Slavonian social constitution. And finally there is an important factor, upon [232]which Professor von Below correctly lays special stress: the estate of the knights in the east, though at first small in proportion to the entire territory of a village, was nevertheless usually much larger than was customary in the west. Therefore, the enlargement of the cultivation of his estate was, for the lord, not only much more easy than in the west, but also a much less remote idea. Thus from the very beginning there existed, in the method of the distribution of the land, the first inducement to differentiation between east and west. But this difference of the size of the original estate of the landlord was connected, as to its causes, with differences between the economic conditions of the east and those of the west; even in the Middle Ages considerably different conditions of existence were thus created for the ruling social class.

The west was more densely settled, and, which is decisive in our opinion, local communication, the exchange of goods within and between the smallest local communities, was undoubtedly more developed than in the east. This becomes evident by the fact that the west was so much more densely settled with towns. It is based partly upon the simple historical fact that the culture of the west was, in each respect, older, partly upon a less evident, but important geographical difference, the far greater variety of the agricultural division of the west in comparison with the east. Considered from a purely technical view, the communication on the extended plains of the German east must have met with less impediments than in the much intersected and differentiated territory of the west. But such technical possibilites of communication do not determine the measure of exchange; on the contrary, because, in the west and [A 739]south, bottoms, valleys of rivers, plateaux, are intermingled, because climatic and other natural conditions of the production of goods are very noticeably differentiated within narrow districts, the economic inducement to trade, to the development of a relatively intensive communication were so much stronger than on the large plains of the east where the neighboring towns have much more frequently nothing to exchange with each other (as even to-day), because all of them produce the same goods in consequence of the greater uniformity of production caused by their geographical situation. Historical and [233]natural conditions of an intensive local trade were (and still are), for these reasons, more favorable in the west.

It is Professor von Below’s merit to have pointed to the fact that, in the Middle Ages, the knighthood of the west was not only not exclusively but not even predominantly founded upon territorial possession. Taxes, toll traverse, rents, and imposts which depend upon a certain amount of local traffic played a rôle. This was undoubtedly much less possible in those days (as at present) in the east. Whoever wanted to live there as a knight must found his existence rather upon the income from his own operation of agriculture. Large organizations for the production of goods and for external commerce, as those of the “Teutonic Order,” are only a different phase of the same fact; the monotony of Eastern production directed transportation into more distant regions, and the local money economy remained considerably inferior to that of the west according to all symptoms. If the very uncertain possible estimations are only approximately correct, also the conditions of the peasants’ existence in the east and west must have been very different. It is scarcely probable that the lord would have taken up the operation of agriculture with its toil, risk, and the little gentlemanly contact with the mercantile world, if he could have lived as well in the east as in the west on the peasants’ taxes, tolls, tithes, and rents. But we may conjecture why it was not equally possible in the east as in the west; for to make it possible, the peasants must be economically able to pay taxes of considerable amount, sufficient for the wants of the landlord; it is by no means evident that the peasants could afford to do this. This would presuppose that the peasant’s self-interest in the productivity of his land had reached a certain degree, that he himself had attained a certain amount of economic education. But no[234]thing could and can be substituted for that educating influence which is exerted upon the peasant by an intensive formation of urban communities, by well-developed local communication, by opportunity and inducement to sell rural products in the nearest possible local markets; this great difference may still be seen by comparing the peasant of the plain of Baden with the peasant of the east.

[A 740]It is not the natural difference of physical and chemical quantities of the soil or difference of the economic talent of the races, but the historically established economic milieu which forms the determinative factor in the difference of the results of peasants’ agriculture.

A certain number of towns upon a given area was necessary to inspire the mass of the peasants with at least such a degree of interest in production that the lord was only enabled to draw from them the means necessary for his sustenance, using the peasants as “funds for interest.” Where these influences of culture, which cannot be replaced even by the best labor and best will, were lacking, the peasant lacked frequently the possibility and always the incentive to push the income from his land beyond the traditional measure of his own needs.

But if number and area are compared, the cities in the east were much fewer in number than in the west and south. And the development of gross agriculture in the east dates characteristically from an epoch in which not the rise but the decadence of the cities, and a quite noticeable decadence, can be observed. For its surplusage of grain the east was thus directed to its development to an agricultural export territory, with all qualities of such. This direction reached its culmination in our century after the abolition of the English grain duties. On the other hand, several parts of the west needed, even at the end of the Middle Ages, large importations of foodstuffs, especially cattle. The entire contrast is perhaps most evidently expressed by the difference in the prices of almost all agricultural products in the east and west in favor of the latter, which difference was only lately removed in consequence of the hidden premiums of [235]grain exportation which we now have granted for a decade. Even the railroads had somewhat diminished this difference, but left it in the middle of the last century, still very great. The unreliable condition of German numismatical history, besides many other technical difficulties, prevents us from obtaining a sufficient quantity of reliable data for the Middle Ages, but it seems well-nigh impossible that it has been different in general in that period, in spite of great fluctuations in single instances.

If, therefore, the landlord wanted to make a more intensive use of his peasants, much greater difficulties obstructed in the east his plan to use them as funds for interest, on account of the peasants’ traditional lack of development, the weakness of the local markets for rural products, and the smaller intensity of communication. I should like to ascribe to this circumstance a much greater importance – of course only in the form of an hypothesis yet to be proved at the sources – than has been done before, so far as I know: The landlord of the east has selected the method of operating his own agricultural estate, not because the gross operation was technically [A 741]more rational, – for this would have been true also for the west, – but because it was, under the historically established conditions, the only possible economic means to obtain a higher income. He became an operating landlord, and the peasant, bound more and more to the soil, became a serf with the duty to give his children to his lord as menials, to furnish his horses and wagons for husbandry, his own working force for all sorts of work of the entire year, while his own land was considered more and more a mere reward for his labor. In spite of the state’s opposition the lord constantly expanded the land which he cultivated. When later on the emancipation of the peasants [236]came, it could not, as on a 4th of August in France, cancel, in the German east, the landlords from the agrarian constitution. Not only because an impecuniary state with still undeveloped industry could not easily determine to renounce their gratuitous service in the administration and in the army, but above all, because the decree of the abrogation of the feudal rights there where lord and peasants found themselves in a production community did not decide at all the most important point: the fate of the soil which was considered to be in the possession of the landlord, not of the peasant. To declare it simply to be the peasants’ property – as was done later in Russian Poland for political purposes, in order to ruin the Polish nobility – would have annihilated in Prussia some twenty thousand large operated estates, the only ones which the country then possessed; it would not only have obliterated a class of renters, as it did in France. Therefore only a part of the peasants, the larger estates, and only a part of their lands were saved from being encompassed by the landlords, the remainder was appropriatcd by the latter.

The east continued to be, and became henceforth more and more, the seat of agricultural capitalism, as industrial capitalism took its seat especially in the west. This development was completed by the [237]Russian frontier, which cut off the rear country, for a gross industry which might arise in the east now placed its development closely behind that frontier to Russian Poland.

The Prussian Rittergutsbesitzer of the east, who was originated under these conditions, was a social product, very different from the English landlord. The English landlord is generally a lessor of land, not an agriculturist. His tributaries are not peasants, as in the Middle Ages, but capitalistic enterprises for cultivation of the land. He is the monopolist of the soil. The estate in his possession is kept in the family by the artful juristic mechanism of “entails,” which arose, like the modern capitalistic monopolies, in a constant struggle with legislation; it is withheld from circulation, obligation, division by bequest. The landlord stands outside of the rural productive community. Occasionally he assists his lessee with [A 742]loans of capital, but he enjoys an intangible existence as a lessor. As a social product he is a genuine child of capitalism, arisen under the pressure of those above-mentioned contrasting effects which capitalism produces in completely populated countries with an aristocratic social constitution. The “landed aristocrat” wishes to live as a gentleman at leisure. His normal striving aims at rents, not at profit. The technically sufficient measure of the estate and the measure of the property necessary for his maintenance are by no means in harmony with each other; more intensive operation, in German places, demands, for instance, the diminution of property; the rising luxury of the aristocratic class requires its enlargement, especially as the prices of prod[238]ucts fall. Each purchase, each compensation of co-heirs, burdens the estate with heavy debts, while the operation of the estate becomes the more sensitive to fluctuating conjunctures the larger and more intensive it is. Only in an agrarian constitution, as the English, this development is abolished, which, together with the increased density of population and rising valuation of the land, endangers everywhere, nowadays, the existence of large rational agriculture, instead of the state’s land monopoly which many reformers demand. The opposite extreme has been carried out – private monopoly of the land. But the private monopoly of the land produces, in certain economic respects, effects similar to those of the state’s monopoly; it withdraws the soil from circulation and separates operation from possession. Either may now go its own way. The interest of the capitalistic farmer striving after the undertaker’s profit and the landowner’s interest in the rents, striving after the preservation of an inherited social position, run side by side without being tied to each other, as is the case with the agricultural operation of the free owners. The practical significance of this is that the elasticity of husbandry against agricultural crises is powerfully increased. The shock falls upon two strong shoulders, the land monopolist and the capitalistic landlord. The crisis results in lowering the rent, probably in the change of the lessee, in a gradual diminution of the cultivated soil, but not in a sudden destruction of many agricultural estates nor in any sudden social degradation of many land-owning families.

Quite different are the conditions of the eastern Prussian Junker. He is a rural employer, a man of a thoroughly civilian type, esteemed according to the size of his estate and income; he possesses scarcely more than one and a half to two United States “sections,” but by tradition he is incumbered with high life and aristocratic wants. He is usually the free owner of the soil which he cultivates, [239]and which is sold and mortgaged, estimated for bequests, and acquired by compensating the co-heirs; hence it is always burdened anew with running interests. Therefore the owner alone is exposed to the fluctuation of [A 743]the market prices; he is involved in all economic and social conflicts, which always menace directly his existence. As long as the exportation of grain to England flourished, he was the strongest supporter of free trade, the fiercest opponent to the young German industry of the west that needed protection; but when the competition of younger and cheaper soils repelled him from the world market and finally attacked him at his own home, he became the most important ally of those manufacturers who, contrary to other important branches of German industry, demanded protection; and joined them in a common struggle against the workmen’s demands. For meanwhile capitalism had also gnawed at the social character of the Junker and his laborers. In the first half of the last century the Junker was a rural patriarch. His laborers, the peasants whose land he had formerly appropriated, were by no means proletarians. They received, in consequence of the Junker’s impecuniosity, no wages, but a homestead, land, and the right of pasturage for their cows; during harvest-time and for threshing a certain portion of the grain, paid in wheat, etc. Thus they were, on a small scale, agriculturists with a direct interest in their lord’s husbandry. But they were expropriated by the rising valuation of the land; their lord withheld pasture and land, kept his grain, and paid them wages instead. Thus the old community of interest was dissolved, the laborers became proletarians. The operation of agriculture became operation of the season, viz., restricted to a few months. The lord hires wandering farm-hands, since the maintenance of unoccupied laborers throughout the year would be too heavy a burden.

[240]The more German industry grew up, in the west, to its present height, the more the population underwent an enormous change; emigration reached its culmination in the German east, where only lords and serfs existed in far extended districts and whence the farm laborers fled from their isolation and patriarchal dependency either across the ocean, to the United States, or into the smoky and dusty but socially more free air of the German factories. On the other hand, the owners of estates import whatever laborers they can get to do their work: Slavonians from beyond the frontier, who, as “cheaper hands,” drive out the Germans. The owner of an estate acts to-day as every business man, and he must act thus, but his aristocratic traditions contrast with such action. He would like to be a landlord and must become a commercial undertaker and a civilian. Instead of him other powers endeavor to snatch the rôle of a landlord.

The industrial and commercial capitalists begin to absorb more and more the land. Manufacturers and merchants who have become rich buy the knights’ estates, tie their possession to their family by a “feoffment in trust” (or “entails”), and use their estate as means to invade the aristocratic class. The fideicommissum of the [A 744]parvenu is one of the characteristic products of capitalism in an old country with aristocratic traditions and a military monarchy. In the German east the same thing takes place now which has been going on in England for centuries until the present conditions were established there and which America will also experience in future days, though only after all free land has been exhausted and after the economic pulsation of the country has slowed down.

For while it is correct to say that the burden of historical tradition does not overwhelm the United States and that the problems originating from the power of tradition do not exist here, yet the effects of the power of capitalism are the stronger and will, sooner or later, [241]further the development of land monopolies. When the land has become sufficiently dear so as to secure a certain rent, when the accumulation of large fortunes has reached a still higher point than today, when, at the same time, the possibility of gaining proportionate profits by constant new investments in trade and industry has been diminished so far that the “captains of industry,” as has occurred everywhere in the world, begin to strive for hereditary preservation of their possessions instead of new investments that bring both gain and danger, then, indeed, the desire of the capitalistic families to form a “nobility” will arise, probably not in form though in fact. The representatives of capitalism will not content themselves any longer with such harmless play as pedigree studies and the numerous pranks of social exclusiveness which startle so much the foreigner. Only when capital has arrived at this course and begins to monopolize the land to a great extent, will a great rural social question arise in the United States, a question which cannot be cut with the sword, as was the slave question. Industrial monopolies and trusts are institutions of limited duration; the conditions of production undergo changes, and the market does not know any everlasting valuation. Their power lacks also the authoritative character and the political aristocratic mark. Monopolies of the soil create infallibly a political aristocracy.

As far as Germany is concerned, in the east a certain approach to English conditions has begun in consequence of the tendencies of development, while the German southwest shows similarity with France in the social formation of the country. But, in general, the intensive English stock-breeding is not possible in the German east on account of the climate. Therefore capital absorbs only the soil which is most favorable for agriculture. But while the inferior districts in England remain uncultivated as pastures for sheep, in the German east they are settled by small farmers. This process has a peculiar feature, inasmuch as two nations, Germans and Slavonians, struggle with each other economically. The Polish [A 745]peasants who have fewer wants than the Germans, seem to gain the upper hand.

While thus under the pressure of conjuncture the frugal Slavonian small farmer gains territory from the German, the advance of [242]culture toward the east, during the Middle Ages, founded upon the superiority of the older and higher culture, has changed completely to the contrary under the dominion of the capitalistic principle of the “cheaper hand,” Whether also the United States will have to wrestle with similar problems in the future, nobody can foretell. The diminution of the agricultural operations in the wheat-producing states results, at present, from the growing intensity of the operation and from division of labor. But also the number of negro farms is growing and the migration from the country into the cities. If, thereby, the expansive power of the Anglo-Saxon-German settlement of the rural districts and, besides, the number of children of the old, inborn population are on the wane, and if, at the same time, the enormous immigration of uncivilized elements from eastern Europe grows, also here a rural population might soon arise which could not be assimilated by the historically transmitted culture of this country; this population would change forever the standard of the United States and would gradually form a community of a quite different type from the great creation of the Anglo-Saxon spirit.

For Germany, all fateful questions of our economic and social politics and of our national interests are closely connected with that contrast between the rural constitution of the east and that of the west and with its further development. To discuss here, in a foreign country, the practical problems arising therefrom I should not consider correct. Destiny which has incumbered us with a history of thousands of years, which has placed us in a country with a dense population and an intensive culture, which has forced us to maintain the splendor of our old culture, so to say, in an armed camp within a world bristling with arms, has placed before us these problems. We must match them.

The friendly nation whose guests we are does not yet know such problems; several of them this nation will probably never encounter. It has no old aristocracy; hence there do not exist the tensions caused by the contrast between authoritative tradition and the purely commercial character of modern economic conditions. Rightly it celebrates the purchase of the immense territory in whose centre we are here, as the real historical seal imprinted upon its [243]democratic institutions; without this acquisition, with powerful and warlike neighbors at its side, it would be forced to wear the coat of mail like ourselves, who constantly keep in the drawer of our desks the march order in case of war. But on the other hand, the greater part of the problems for whose solution we are now working will [A 746]approach America within but few generations; the way in which they will be solved will determine the character of the future culture of this continent. It was perhaps never before, in history, made so easy for any nation to become a great civilized nation as for the American people. But according to human calculation it is also the last time, as long as the history of mankind shall last, that such conditions for a free and great development will be given, the areas of free soil vanishing now everywhere in the world.

One of my colleagues has quoted here the words of Carlyle: “Thousands of years have passed before thou couldst enter into life, and thousands of years to come wait in silence what thou wilt do with this thy life.” I do not know if, as Carlyle believes, the single man can or will place himself, in his actions, upon the sounding-board of this sentiment. But a nation must do so, if its existence in history is to be of lasting value.