(A) THE PLANTATION

A plantation is an establishment with compulsory labor, producing garden products especially for the market. The plantation economy universally arose wherever the conduct of agriculture by a class of overlords as a result of conquest coincided with the possibility of intensive cultivation, and was especially characteristic of colonies. In modern times the plantation products have been sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, and cotton; in antiquity they were wine and oil. The course of development generally leads through a preliminary semi-plantation system. Here only the market is regulated and concentrated into one hand, while production is turned over to a servile class as compulsory labor, with joint liability of the community, attachment to the land, and payments to the owner of the semi-plantation, which is a colonizing corporation. This condition dominates in South America down to the revolution at the beginning of the 19th century, and in the New England states down to the separation from the mother country.

Plantations proper are found scattered over the world at large. Twice did the system reach a classical development; first, in the ancient Carthago-Roman plantations, and second in the negro plantations in the southern states of the Union during the 19th century. The plantation proper operates with disciplined servile labor. We do not find, as in the case of the manorial economy, a large estate and individual small holdings of the peasants side by side, but the servile population are herded together in barracks. The main difficulty of the enterprise lies in the recruiting of laborers. The workers have no families and do not reproduce themselves. The permanence of such plantations is therefore dependent upon slave hunts, either through war or through periodical raids on a large slave hunting territory such as Africa was for the negro traffic. The plantation of antiquity¹ developed in Carthage, where it was scientifically described by Mago, as well as in the Latin literature by Cato, Varro, and Columella. A prerequisite for its existence is the possibility of obtaining slaves at all times in the market. The products of the Roman plantation are oil and wine. On the plantation we find side by side the coloni who are free small tenants, and the servi who are slaves. The coloni till the land in grain crops with stock and tools furnished them by the lord and hence constitute a labor force rather than a peasantry in the modern sense. The slaves are without families and without property and are herded together in barracks, combining dormitory, pesthouse, and cell for confinement against escape. Work goes forward under strict military routine, beginning with the answer to reveille in the morning, with march in closed ranks to and from work, and issue of clothing by a warehouse to which it must be returned. The only exception is the villicus or inspector, who possesses a peculium and is contubernalis, meaning that he is permitted to marry a slave woman and has the right to keep a certain amount of livestock on the lord’s pasture.

The hardest problem was that of keeping up the working population. As the natural increase through the promiscuous relations of the slaves was insufficient, an effort was made to stimulate the production of children by promising the slave women their freedom after the third birth. This measure proved vain because no life except prostitution awaited the freed women. The difficulties of the lord who maintained his dwelling in the town increased in view of the steady demand for slaves. Since the permanent supply of the slave market ceased to be possible with the termination of the great wars after the beginning of the imperial period, the slave barracks were doomed to disappear. The shrinkage of the slave market could have no other effect than that which the failure of coal mining would have on modern industry. The Roman plantation changed in character for the further reason that the center of gravity of the ancient culture shifted inland, while the slave barracks were bound to the neighborhood of the coast and the possibility of commerce. With this shifting, of the center of gravity to the land, where traditional manorial economy dominated and corresponding conditions as to transportation obtained, and with the peace brought by the Empire, it was necessary to go over to another system. In the period of decline of the Empire, we therefore find the slaves, insofar as they are concerned with the agricultural work, provided with families and quartered in the mansus serviles, while on the other hand the colons are subjected to labor services and no longer merely to rent payments; that is, the two classes converge. The possessor class dominates the economic and political policy of the empire. Money economy and town life decline; the conditions approach the stage of barter economy.

Similar difficulties appeared in the southern states of the North American union. The plantation system arose here when the great inventions in the field of cotton utilization were made. In the last third of the 18th century were invented the cotton spinning machine (1768–69) and the loom (1785) in England, and in the United States the cotton gin for separating the fiber from the seed (1793); the latter first made possible effective utilization of the cotton crop. Thereupon developed the wholesale marketing of cotton which displaced linen and wool production. However, the mechanical utilization of the product led to entirely opposite effects in Europe and America. In the former, cotton gave the impulse to the organization of a free labor force, the first factories developing in Lancashire in England, while in America the result was slavery.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, efforts were made to use the Indians for mass production, but they soon proved themselves unserviceable, so recourse was had to the importation of negro slaves. But these, without families, did not reproduce themselves, and as the slave trade was forbidden by one after another of the New England states, great scarcity of negroes ensued after a single generation—by the end of the 18th century. The utilization of poor emigrants, who sought to pay the still very considerable costs of the ocean passage by plantation labor, proved insufficient. The next expedient was that of breeding negroes, which was carried on so systematically in many southern states that negro-breeding and negro-consuming states could be distinguished. At the same time there broke out a struggle for land for the application of negro labor. The system required cheap land and the possibility of constantly bringing new land under tillage. If the labor force was dear the land had to be cheap, and negro culture was exploitative (Raubbau) because the negroes could not be trusted with modern implements and used only the most primitive tools. Thus began the struggle between the states with free and those with unfree labor. The peculiar phenomenon was presented that the complementary productive factor “slave” alone yielded a rent, while the land yielded none at all. Politically, this situation meant a struggle between the capitalistic classes of the north and the plantation aristocracy of the south. On the side of the former stood the free farmers, and on that of the planters, the non-slave owning whites of the south, the “poor white trash”; the latter dreaded the freeing of the negroes on grounds of class prestige and economic competition. ²

Slavery is profitable only when it is handled with the most rigid discipline associated with ruthless exploitation. Further requisites are the possibility of cheap provision and feeding of the slaves and extensive mining-out cultivation, which again presupposes an unlimited supply of land. When slaves became costly and celibacy could no longer be maintained for them, the ancient plantation system fell, and with it slavery. Christianity did not exert in this case the influence commonly ascribed to it; it was rather the Stoic emperors who began to protect the family and introduced marriage among the slaves. In North America, the Quakers were especially active in the abolition of slavery. Its doom was sealed, however, from the moment when (1787) Congress [sic] prohibited the importation of slaves beginning with the year 1808, and when the available land threatened to become inadequate. The transformation of the slave economy into a share tenant system which actually resulted, would apparently have come to pass without the war of secession which was unleashed through the withdrawal of the southern states from the Union. The mismanagement of the northern victors, who even gave the negroes a privileged position, resulted, after the withdrawal of the troops, in a universal exclusion of the negroes from the suffrage and the establishment of a strong caste distinction between whites and blacks. The negroes are share tenants bound by debt. Since the railroads are dependent upon the white land owners, the negroes can be excluded from commercial opportunities and their freedom of movement exists only on paper. Thus the emancipation brought about in a disorderly way the condition which must have become established spontaneously and gradually as soon as the factor “land” was exhausted.

(B) ESTATE ECONOMY

By an estate we understand a large-scale capitalistic establishment directed to production for the market, which may be either exclusively devoted to stock raising or exclusively to tillage, or may combine the two. If the central interest is extensive stock raising, the establishment may operate without capital as in the Roman Campagna. Here dominated the famous latifundia whose beginnings apparently go back to the baronial feuds of the theocratic state. The great Roman noble families were landed proprietors of the Campagna; complementary to them are renters who use their numerous herds primarily in the furnishing of milk to Rome. The cultivators, on the other hand were expropriated and removed.

Large scale stock raising, with little use of capital, dominates also in the Pampas of South America and in Scotland. In Scotland again the cultivators were expropriated. After the destruction of Scottish independence at the battle of Culloden in 1746, the English policy treated the old clan chieftains as “landlords” and the clansmen as their tenants. The result was that the landlords assumed the prerogative of owners in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, drove off the tenants and converted the land into hunting grounds or sheep pastures.

Intensive capitalistic pastoral economy developed in England with the growth of the English woolen industry and its promotion by the English kings. After the 14th century, the kings, led by the possibility of levying taxes, granted favors first to exporters of raw wool and later to wool manufacturers producing for home consumption.³ Thus began the transformation of the common pastures into sheep walks—the “enclosure” movement—by the landlords, who regarded themselves as proprietors of the common. The proprietors bought out the cultivators by wholesale or came to an agreement with them, on the strength of which they became large farmers and took up pastoral economy. The result of this process, which went on from the 15th to the 17th century and against which in the 18th century there was an agitation among the people as well as among the social writers, was the origin of a capitalistic class of large renters who leased land with a minimum of labor force and for the most part pursued the raising of sheep for the woolen industry.

Under another form of estate economy the interest centers in the production of grain. An example is England in the 150 years before the repeal of the corn laws under Robert Peel. Down to that time small farmers were displaced on an extensive scale to make way for a more effective cultivation by renters, under a system of protective duties and export bounties. Thus sheep farming and grain farming existed separately side by side, or were combined. This condition lasted until the protective duties on grain were abolished in consequence of the agitations of the Puritans and the English labor class. After this, grain culture was no longer profitable, and the labor force employed in it was released. The English low lands were extensively depopulated while in Ireland the small tenant agriculture persisted on the huge estates of the landlords of that time.

The complete opposite of England is afforded by Russia.⁴ Here in the 16th century there were indeed slaves but the great mass of the peasantry consisted of free share tenants who gave half of their crop to the landlords. The latter possessed the right of terminating the lease at the end of any year, but seldom exercised it. Since, however, the landlords preferred a fixed money rent to the fluctuating payments in kind, they placed the peasantry on the basis of a fixed money rental (obrok). At the same time they attempted to extend the compulsory labor services, to which originally the slaves alone were subject, to the free tenants also; in this, the monastic holdings, which in general were the most economically farmed, took the lead. The growth of money economy resulted in throwing the peasants heavily into debt. Only a single crop failure was necessary for this result, and the freedom of movement of the peasant was lost. From the end of the 16th century, the Czars placed their power and that of the whole administrative organization of the empire at the service of the nobility. The latter, however, was threatened in its very existence because the great landlords were able to give the cultivators more favorable terms of lease, so that the lower nobility faced a scarcity of tenants. The czaristic policy sought to protect them against the great nobles. This purpose was served by the ukase of the Czar Boris Godunov in the year 1597; the leases were declared non-terminable, the peasants being in effect attached to the soil; they were also registered in a tax roll, which again led to a policy of protection of the peasantry on the part of the lords. With the change to a poll tax system under Peter the Great, the distinction between free peasantry and serfs disappeared. Both were attached to the soil and over both the landlord had unlimited power. The peasant had no more rights than a Roman slave. In 1713, the right of knouting was expressly granted to the lords; the inspector of the estate joined the young persons in marriage according to fiat, and the amount of the payments was fixed at the will of the proprietors, as was the levying of recruits. They had the authority to banish an obstreperous peasant to Siberia and could resume the holding of any peasant at any time, although many of the latter succeeded in concealing their possessions and achieving great wealth. There was no court in which the peasant could seek justice. He was exploited by the lord as a source of rent or of labor power, the former in central Russia and the latter in the west, where exportation was possible. These were the conditions under which the Russian peasantry entered the 19th century.

In Germany, there is a sharp distinction between the west, where leasing of land persisted, and the east and Austria, where demesne economy predominated.⁵ Originally, the state of the peasants was much the same in the two regions, or even more favorable in the east. In the east there was originally no personal servitude and it had the best land law of Germany. The peasants were settled on large-hides (Grosshufen), of the extent of the old royal hide; eviction was forbidden by the state from the time of Frederick William I of Prussia and Maria Theresa, because the peasant was a tax payer and a recruit. In Hanover and Westphalia also, eviction was forbidden, but on the Rhine and in Southwest Germany it was permitted. None the less, the eviction of peasants took on large proportions in the east and did not in the west and south. The reasons are various. After the Thirty Years’ War, which fearfully decimated the peasant population, the holdings were reassigned in the west, while in the east they were consolidated into estates. In the west⁶ and south, intermingled holdings predominated, while in the east were the unified large farms of the nobles. But in the west and south, even where large, unified holdings of the nobility were the rule, no large estates developed. For here land-holding, personal suzerainty, and judicial authority were separate and the peasant could play one against the other, while in the east they were identified as an indivisible fief. This circumstance made it easy to evict the tenant or subject him to compulsory services, although originally only the magistrate and not the landlord had a right to these. Finally, there was less church land in the east than in the west, and the church traditionally showed more consideration to the peasant than did the lay proprietor. Even where in the east large holdings were in the hands of the church, as they were in Austria in the hands of the monasteries, the ecclesiastics managed more economically than the lay holders, but did not have the same interest in going over to export agriculture.

Thus the market relations played a decisive part in this contrast between the east and the west. Large estates arose where the local market could not absorb the available mass of grain production and it was exported abroad. But since a merchant in Hamburg was not in a position to negotiate with the individual peasant in the Mark or in Silesia, the transition to estate farming was inevitable. The peasant in the south and west, on the contrary, had a town in the vicinity, where he could market his products. Hence the landlord could use him as a source of rent, while in the east he could only be treated as labor power. With the decrease in the frequency of towns on the map, there is an increase in the frequency of estates. Finally, an additional force favoring the survival of the old time cultivators in the south and west was the power of manorial law, and the greater degree of traditionalism associated with it. It is even asserted that the Peasant War in west and south Germany had a part in this development. The war ended with the defeat of the peasantry, but operated as a lost general strike and meant the handwriting on the wall for the proprietors. But England had its peasant war in the 14th century and in spite of it the expropriation of the peasantry took place; and if Poland and east Germany had no peasant insurrections the fact is that these, like all revolutions, did not break out where the condition of the oppressed class was worst, that is in our case where the conditions of the peasant class were worst, but rather where the revolutionaries have attained a certain degree of self-consciousness.

The technical expression for the relation of the peasant to the landlord is, in the east, not servility (Leibeigenschaft) but hereditary dependency (Erbuntertänigkeit). The peasant is an appendage of the estate and is bought and sold with the latter. In Germany east of the Elbe, there existed alongside of the peasantry of the princely domains (which were very extensive, amounting in Mecklenburg to half the total land area), the peasantry of the private landlords. The proprietary rights varied widely. The German peasant originally lived under very favorable relations, holding his land subject to a quit-rent. In contrast, the rights of the Slavs were very insecure. This led to the result that conditions became worse for the Germans where the Slavs were in the majority. Thus it came about that in the east in the 18th century the mass of the peasantry lived under the law of serfdom (lassitischem Recht). The peasant had become an appurtenance of the estate. He possessed no secure hereditary title, nor even always a title for life, although he was already bound to the soil and could not leave the estate without the consent of the lord or without securing someone in his place. He was subject to Gesindeszwangdienst, similar to sergeanty in English feudal law; that is, he had not only to perform obligatory services but his children also had to go into the house of the lord as servants, even when the lord himself was only a renter of domain land. Any serf (Lassit) could be compelled by the lord to take up a holding. Finally, the lords assumed the right of increasing the labor dues and displacing peasants at will. Here, however, they came into sharp conflict with the princely power. The rulers of east Germany began to protect the peasantry; they feared, particularly in Austria and Prussia, the destruction of the existing peasant class, not out of love for the peasant as such, but to maintain his class, which was their source of taxes and recruits. It is true that the protection of the peasant was instituted only where a strong state was present; in Mecklenburg, in Swedish Hither-Pomerania and in the county of Holstein the large unified estate economy was able to develop.

About 1890⁷ an estate in the east Elbe country was a seasonal affair. The field work was unequally distributed throughout the year and in the winter the field hands took to auxiliary occupations, the disappearance of which later was a main source of labor difficulties. The estate had male and female servants for the regular farm labor throughout the year. In addition there was a second category of workers on the land, the “inst-folk.” These were married persons living in their own homes, but in Silesia assembled in barracks. They worked on the basis of an annual contract terminable by either party. Their pay consisted either in a fixed allowance of products with the addition of some money, or in a variable share of the product, including the proceeds of the harvest and of the mill. Threshing was done by hand and lasted through the winter, and in general the sixth or tenth sheaf was given to the “instman.” The instmen had a monopoly on this work; the estate owner could not transfer it to other persons. In addition, as long as the three-field rotation persisted, they had one strip in each of the three fields, which was tilled for them by the proprietor, and also had gardens in which they raised potatoes. They received little or no money wages, but fed swine for the market and also marketed any surplus from their share in the crops. Thus they were interested in high prices for hogs and grain, which gave them a common economic interest with the lord, whereas an agricultural labor proletariat paid in money would have desired low prices for these things. The stock and heavy implements were furnished by the lord, but the instmen had to provide flail and scythe.

The lord required additional laborers at harvest time and employed wandering laborers—the so-called “Landsberg harvesters”—or he hired men from the villages. In addition, the instman himself, unless he would see his wages reduced, had to furnish at least one additional hand during the summer and probably a second at harvest time, for which he had recourse to his wife and children, so that the family as a whole stood in a sort of labor partnership with the lord. Contractual freedom in the industrial sense obtained only with the migratory workers and the instmen of the dependent farmers, whose condition was found unamenable to “regulation” (cf. below). However, there had been for them a fundamental change since the time of hereditary serfdom, since at that period the estate proprietor had operated without capital of his own, with the aid of the hand and team work of the peasants; hence no separation of the worker from his tools had then taken place.

(C) THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MANORIAL SYSTEM

The estate economy was similarly organized in Poland and White Russia, export countries which brought their grain to the world market through boat traffic on the Vistula and the Memel. In interior Russia, the lords preferred to lease the land to the peasants, who thus retained control of their own labor power.

The complicated mutual dependence of the proprietor and the peasant, the exploitation of the latter by the former as a source of rent or as labor force, and finally the tying up of the land through both, was the cause which brought about the disintegration of the manorial organization of agriculture. This change meant the personal emancipation of the peasant and agricultural laborer, with freedom of movement, the freeing of the soil from the communal organization of the peasants and from the rights of the overlord, and reciprocally the freeing of manorial land from the encumbrance of peasant rights where they existed, i. e., where the rulers followed a policy of protecting the peasantry. Liberation could take place in different ways. First, through expropriation of the peasants, who became free but landless, as in England, Mecklenburg, Hither-Pomerania, and parts of Silesia. Second, through expropriation of the overlord, who lost his land while the peasant became free with possession of the land. This occurred in France and southwest Germany, and in general in almost every region where the lords exploited the land by leasing, and also in Poland, as a result of Russian interference. Finally, it might come about through a combination of the two methods, the peasant becoming free with a part of the land. This was the course of events where an estate form of organization existed, which could not be easily displaced. Thus the Prussian state was compelled to lean upon its landed proprietors because it was too poor to replace them with salaried officials.

The breakdown of the manorial agricultural system made possible also the abolition of the hereditary judicial authority of the proprietors, the various socage rights or banalités, and finally all the political and religious restrictions upon the land in the way of obligatory infeudation or the so-called mortmain. Abolition of these incumbrances might take various forms: 1. Amortization laws relating to church lands, as in Bavaria. 2. Abolition or limitation of the fideicommissum, especially in England. 3. Finally, abolition of the fiscal privileges of the proprietory estates, such as freedom from taxation and similar political privileges, as was accomplished in Prussia by the tax legislation of the sixties of the 19th century. Such were the different possibilities. The result depended on the question who was to be expropriated, the landlord or the peasant, and if the latter whether with or without the land.

The motivating force in connection with the breakdown of the manorial system operated in the first place from within the manor and was primarily economic in character. The immediate cause was the development of market operations and market interests on the part of both lords and peasants, and the steady growth of the market for agricultural products in connection with money economy. However, these considerations either failed to bring about the dissolution of the manorial system, or if they did it was done in accordance with the interests of the lords who expropriated the tenants and used the land to establish large farming enterprises.

In general, it was necessary for other interests to come in from without. One such was the commercial interest of the newly established bourgeoisie of the towns, who promoted the weakening or dissolution of the manor because it limited their own market opportunities. The town and its economic policies on the one side and the manor on the other were antagonistic, not so much in the sense that one represented a barter economy and the other a purely money economy, for the manors produced to a large extent for the market, without the opportunities of which it would have been impossible for the landlord to raise large money payments from the peasants. Through the mere fact of the compulsory services and payments of the tenants, the manorial system set limits to the purchasing power of the rural population because it prevented the peasants from devoting their entire labor power to production for the market and from developing their purchasing power. Thus the interests of the bourgeoisie of the towns were opposed to those of the landed proprietors. In addition, there was the interest on the part of the developing capitalism in the creation of a free labor market, to which obstacles were opposed by the manorial system through the attachment of the peasants to the soil. The first capitalistic industries were thrown back upon the exploitation of the rural labor power in order to circumvent the guilds. The desire of the new capitalists to acquire land gave them a further interest antagonistic to the manorial system; the capitalistic classes wished to invest their newly acquired wealth in land in order to rise into the socially privileged landed class, and this required a liberation of the land from feudal ties. Finally, the fiscal interest of the state also took a hand, counting upon the dissolution of the manor to increase the taxpaying capacity of the farming country.

These are the various possibilities in connection with the dissolution of manorial economy. In detail, its development was extraordinarily complicated. In China,⁸ the feudal system was abolished in the third century before our era, and private property in the land established. Shi-Huang-Ti, the first emperor of the Ching dynasty, rested his power on a patrimonial in contrast with a feudal army, relying for its support on taxation of the dependent classes. The Chinese humanists, the precursors of the later Confucians, took their stand on the side of the monarchy and played the same rationalizing role as the corresponding group in Europe. Since that time, fiscal policy in China has changed times without number.⁹ The two poles between which it vibrated were those of a taxation state and a “managerial” (leiturgisch) state, i.e., between one paying its army and officials out of taxation and treating its subjects as a source of taxation and one utilizing them as a source of servile labor, supplying its needs by holding specified classes responsible for payments in kind. The latter policy is the one followed by the Roman Empire at the time of Diocletian, when compulsory communes were organized for the purpose. One system made the masses formally free, the other made them state slaves. The latter were utilized in China in the same way as they were in Europe in those cases where the lords exploited the dependent population as labor power and not through rent charges. In the latter case private property disappeared, and obligations to the land and attachment to the land, with periodical redistribution, came in. The final result of this development in China after the 18th century was the abandonment of the leiturgical principle in favor of the taxation principle; taxes were paid to the state, along with which unimportant remains of public labor services survived. The taxes flowed into the hands of the mandarins, whose payments to the court were rigidly fixed, while they pushed the taxes of the peasantry as high as possible. This, however, was notably more difficult because the power of the clans was so great that every official had to secure the consent of the Chinese peasantry. The result has been extensive liberation of the peasants. There are still a few tenants, but they are personally free and pay only a moderate rent.

In India, the manorial system still persists; indeed it first arose in a secondary manner out of the practice of tax farming by the fisc. English legislation protects the peasantry, who formerly had no rights, in the same way that Gladstone’s laws protected the Irish in the possession of their holdings and against arbitrary increase in the traditional payments; but it has not in principle changed the established order.

In the near east, also, the feudal tenure exists, but only in a modified form, since the old feudal army has disappeared. Fundamental changes in Persia and other countries exist only on paper. In Turkey the institution of the wakuf (cf. below) has hitherto prevented a modernization of land holding relations.

In Japan, the medieval period comes down to 1861 when, with the downfall of the rule of the nobility, feudal land holding also fell away through the dissolution of the proprietary rights. The pillars of the feudal system, the Samurai, were impoverished, and turned to industrial life; out of this class the Japanese capitalists have developed.

In the Mediterranean region in antiquity,¹⁰ feudal land holding was displaced only within the region immediately under the power of the great cities like Rome and Athens. The town bourgeoisie was in opposition to the landed nobility, with the further conflict between the townsmen as creditors and the country folk as debtors. This situation, in connection with the necessity of securing the great mass of peasants for military service, led in Greece to an endeavor to fit out the hoplites with land. This was the significance of the legislation of the so-called tyrants, as for example, the laws of Solon. The knightly families were compelled to enter the peasant organizations. The legislation of Cleisthenes of about 500 B. C. understood by democracy the condition that every Athenian, to enjoy the privileges of citizenship, must belong to a “demos,” i. e., a village, just as in the Italian. democracies of the middle ages the nobility were compelled to join the guilds. It was a blow against the land system with its scattered holdings, and against the power of the nobility, who up to that time had stood above and outside the villages. After this time the knights possessed only the same voting power and opportunity to hold office as any peasant. At the same time, the system of intermingled holdings was everywhere set aside.

The class struggles in Rome had similar results for the agricultural organization. Here the field division was in the form of squares of 200 acres and upward. Each holding was set off by a balk of turf which must not be plowed up; the limites were public roads, removal of which was also forbidden, in order to maintain accessibility. The land was transferable with extraordinary facility. This system of agrarian law must have been known in the time of the twelve tables and must have been established at a single stroke. It is a law in the interest of the town bourgeoisie, which treats the land holdings of the nobility after the fashion of territory used in towns for speculative building and systematically removes the distinction between land and movable property. Outside the immediate territory belonging to the town, however, the ancient land system was undisturbed. The civilization of antiquity—down to Alexander the Great in the East and Augustus in the West —was riparian in character and the system of tenure remained unchanged in the interior; from here it later worked outward again, and finally conquered the entire Roman Empire, to remain the dominant institution through the first half of the middle ages. The merchant republics of the Italian towns, under the leadership of Florence, first took up the path toward liberation of the peasantry. To be sure, they deprived the peasants of political rights, to the advantage of the town rulers and councils, the crafts and the merchant guilds, until the nobility itself turned to the peasantry for support against the town population. In any case, the towns liberated the peasantry, in order to buy up the land and release themselves from the clutches of the ruling families (Cp. above, p. 75).

In England,¹¹ no legal emancipation of the peasants ever took place. The medieval system is still formally in force, except that under Charles II serfdom was abolished and infeudated land became private property, in “fee simple.” The only explicit exception was the “copyhold” land, which was originally in the possession of unfree peasants, the occupier holding no formal grant, but only a copy of one recorded in the rolls of the manor. In England, the mere fact of the development of a market, as such and alone, destroyed the manorial system from within. In accordance with the principle fitting the situation, the peasants were expropriated in favor of the proprietors. The peasants became free but without land.

In France ¹² the course of events is exactly the opposite. Here the revolution put an end to the feudal system at one blow in the night of August 4, 1789. However, the measure adopted at that time still required interpretation. This was given by the legislation of the Convention, which declared that all burdens against peasants’ holdings in favor of overlords were presumed to be of feudal character and that they were abolished without compensation. In addition, the state confiscated the enormous estates of the émigrés and of the church, conferring them upon citizens and peasants. However, since equality of inheritance and distribution of holdings had arisen long before the abolition of the feudal burdens, the final result was that France, in contrast with England, became a land of small and medium sized farms. The process was one of creating property in the hands of the. peasantry through the expropriation of the landlords. This was possible because the French landlord was a courtier-noble and not a farmer, seeking his living in the army or in civil service positions upon which he had in part a monopolistic claim. Thus no productive organization was destroyed but only a rent relation.

Similar in character but less revolutionary and rather by gradual steps was the course of development in south and west Germany. In Baden, the liberation of the peasants was begun as early as 1783 by the Margrave Charles Frederick, who was influenced by the Physiocrats. The crucial fact is that after the wars of liberation, the German states adopted the system of written constitutions, and no relationship in connection with which the name of bondage (Leibeigenschaft) could be used is compatible with a constitutional state. Hence the unlimited labor dues, taxes, and services which had anything of the character of personal servitude were everywhere abolished. In Bavaria, it was done under Montgelas and confirmed by the constitution of 1818; the peasants received freedom of movement and finally, favorable property rights. This happened in almost all of south and west Germany in the course of the 20’s and 30’s; only in Bavaria the substance of it was not achieved until 1848. In that year the last remains of the cultivators’ burdens were removed by conversion into money obligations, in the handling of which state credit institutions lent aid. Specifically, in Bavaria personal dues were abolished without compensation; other dues were converted into money payments and made subject to extinction by purchase; at the same time, all feudal ties were unconditionally dissolved. Thus in south and west Germany, the landlord was expropriated and the land given to the peasant; the change was the same as in France except that it took place slowly and according to a more legal process.

Quite different was the course of events in the east—in Austria, and the eastern provinces of Prussia, in Russia, and in Poland. Here, if drastic measures had been taken as in France, a functioning agricultural organization would have been destroyed and only chaos would have resulted. It might have been possible to promote a disintegration of the manors into peasant holdings, as happened in Denmark, but it would not have been possible simply to declare feudal burdens abolished. The landed proprietors of the east possessed neither implements nor work animals. There was no rural labor force, but small holders subject to services of man and team, by whose labor the proprietor tilled his land; that is, it was an organization for working the land, which could not be summarily set aside. A further difficulty existed in the fact that there was no official class for the administration of the rural districts, and the government was dependent on the estate holding nobility to perform public functions on an honorary basis. Summary measures, such as the presence of an official staff of lawyers made possible in France, were therefore excluded here, as they were in England in view of the aristocratic justices of the peace.

If the protection and maintenance of the peasantry is regarded as the proper objective of an agrarian system, then the dissolution took place in an ideal manner in Austria. In any case, it was better than the Prussian methods, because the Austrian rulers, especially Charles VI and Maria Theresa, knew better what they were doing than did, for example, Frederick the Great, of whom his father said that he did not know how to terminate a lease and box the ears of the tenant.

In Austria,¹³ with the exception of the Tyrol, where a free peasantry predominated, hereditary bondage and a landed nobility had existed side by side. The system of estates using the peasants as labor force was most common in Pomerania, Moravia, Silesia, Lower Austria, and Galicia; elsewhere, a renting system predominated. In Hungary, leasing and exploitation by servile labor were intermingled. The greatest degree of personal servitude obtained in Galicia and Hungary. Here were distinguished “rusticalists” who were subject to contributions according to a cadaster, and “dominicalists” who were settled on demesne land (Salland) and were not subject to contributions. The rusticalists were in part in the better position. They were divided again, as were also the dominicalists, into commuted and non-commuted. The holdings of the non-commuted were subject to retraction, while the commuted possessed hereditary rights.

After the second half of the 17th century, capitalistic tendencies began to intrude into this organization. Under Leopold I the state interfered, at first in a purely fiscal connection, under the form of a compulsory enrolment in cadasters. The policy was to determine from exactly what land the state could collect taxes. When this measure proved without effect, the authorities tried the system of “labor patents” (1680–1738). The object was legislative protection of the laborers; the maximum of work which might be demanded from every peasant was determined. The eviction of the peasants was not yet made impossible, however, and Maria Theresa adopted the system of tax “rectification,” aiming to reduce the incentive to evict the peasantry by making the proprietor responsible for the taxes of any peasant displaced by him. But this measure also proved insufficient, and in 1750 the Empress interfered directly with peasant evictions, though again without accomplishing anything conclusive. Finally, in 1771, she promulgated the system of complete registration. The landed proprietors were compelled to draw up registers (Urbarien—a sort of Domesday Book) in which each peasant holding, with its obligations, was definitely fixed. At the same time, the peasants were given the right to commute the obligations and so to acquire hereditary possession. This expedient broke down in Hungary at once, while in Austria it met with notable success. It represented the attempt to maintain the existing number of peasants and to protect them against the advance of agrarian capitalism. It did not constitute a dissolution of the existing agricultural organization; the peasants were to be protected, but the nobility were also to maintain their position.

Under Joseph II the legislation first took on a revolutionary character. He began by dissolving personal bondage and granting what he understood by this dissolution, namely, freedom of movement, free choice of occupations, freedom in marriage, and freedom from sergeanty or obligatory domestic service. He gave the peasants, in principle, property in their holdings, and in the tax and registration law of 1789 struck out on a really new path. The former system of compulsory services and payments in kind on the feudal holdings was terminated, the dues and aids being converted into fixed money payments to the state. This attempt to go over at one step to a taxation state broke down. The peasants were not in a position to realize from their products an income large enough to make the money payments, and the economic program of the proprietors was so violently disturbed that a great storm arose, forcing the emperor on his death bed to retract a large part of his reforms. Not until 1848, as a result of the revolution, were all the burdens of the peasantry removed, partly with and partly without compensation. Insofar as compensation was required, the Austrian state fixed a very moderate valuation of the services and set up credit institutions as a means of extinguishing them. This legislation represented the crowning of the efforts of Maria Theresa and Joseph II.

In Prussia,¹⁴ there has been a pronounced and persistent distinction between the peasants on the crown lands and those on private holdings. For the former, Frederick the Great himself had been able to put through thoroughgoing protective measures. In the first place, he abolished the compulsory domestic service (Gesindeszwangdienst). Then, in 1777, he made the peasants’ holdings hereditary. In 1779, Frederick William III proclaimed the abolition of compulsory services in principle, requiring every recipient of a lease on crown land to renounce them explicitly. Thus on the crown domains a modern agricultural system was gradually built up. In addition, the peasants were granted the right of purchasing full proprietory rights for a relatively moderate sum; the officialdom of the state concurred in these measures, not only on account of the income which the commutation money would bring to the treasury, but also because with acquisition of full proprietorship the claims of the crown peasantry against the state were extinguished and the labor of administration reduced.

With regard to the peasantry on private holdings, the task was much more difficult. Frederick the Great wished to do away with servitude but encountered the formally effective objection that there was no servitude in Prussia, but only hereditary dependency. The crown was not in a position to effect anything against the nobility, and its own officialdom made up of the nobles. The catastrophe of Jena and Tilsit first brought about a change. In 1807, hereditary personal dependency was abolished. The question was what should become of the land which was held by the peasantry in unfree tenure. Prussian official opinion was divided. The alternative was whether to aim at the largest quantity of produce from a given piece of land, or to lay the emphasis on maintaining the maximum peasant population. In the first case the English agricultural system offered a model, as it then represented the highest degree of intensive cultivation; but this system involved sacrificing the population on the land. This course was favored by Over-President von Schoen and his circle. The other course meant turning away from the example of England and from intensive cultivation. After long negotiations appeared the Regulation Edict of 1816. It represented a compromise between administrative policy and the protection of the peasantry.

First, the peasants who owned teams were declared subject to “regulation,” while the small cultivators were in effect excluded, since the state proprietors declared that they could not do without the hand labor. Even those with teams were only included if the occupied land was registered in the tax rolls and if they had occupied it since 1763. The selection of this year as the boundary point meant that a minimum of the peasant holdings were included in the scheme. The regulation became effective on application. The peasant received his holding as property and no longer furnished labor services or payments, but at the same time he lost his rights against the estate. That is, he renounced his right to receive from the proprietor help in emergencies, assistance in repairing buildings, to the use of the common pasture and woodland, and to advances from the estate to meet tax payments. Especially, however, the peasant had to turn over to the proprietor one-third of all hereditary possessions and half of non-hereditary possessions. This manner of regulation was extraordinarily favorable to the estate proprietor. He had indeed to provide himself with implements and stock, but he retained the hand labor of the Kossäten, while he was freed from the rights of pasture of the peasantry and could consolidate his holdings, since the prohibition of eviction was suspended at once. The peasant liable only for hand labor and not subject to the regulation could now be summarily evicted. In Silesia, the nobility, who were especially strong, secured still further exceptions in their own favor, while in Posen, where Polish proprietors were affected, the entire peasant class was made subject to the regulation.

Not until 1848 did the legislation take the final step in Prussia. In 1850, the dissolution of all burdens on the peasantry was proclaimed. Every peasant, with the exception of the day laborers, was now placed under the regulation and every obligation against peasant holdings was made subject to commutation, whether it resulted from the regulation or was independent of it. This included hereditary rents and other payments. It is true that in the meantime the holdings of the smaller peasants had long ago been appropriated by the estate proprietors.

The net result of the development in Prussia has been a decrease both in the numbers of the peasantry and the extent of peasant holdings. Since 1850 a progressive prole-tarizing of the working population has gone on. The decisive cause was the increase in the value of land. The earlier custom of granting land to the “instmen” was no longer profitable; their shares in the fruits of the threshing and grinding were also changed into money payments. Of especial importance was the introduction of sugar beet culture, which gave agriculture a highly seasonal character, requiring migratory labor; this was provided by the so-called “Sachsen-gänger,” coming first from the Polish provinces of the east and later from Russian Poland and Galicia. For these people it was not necessary either to build dwellings or to allot land; they allowed themselves to be herded together in barracks and were satisfied with a style of living which any German laboring man would have rejected. Thus to an increasing extent a nomadic labor force took the place of the original land-bound peasantry and of the labor force of later times which was loyally attached to the land by a community of economic interest with the proprietor of the estate.

In Russia;¹⁵ even Alexander I had talked about the emancipation of the peasants, but had done as little towards it as Nicholas I. The defeat of Russia in the Crimean war was required to set things in motion. Alexander II feared a revolution, and for that reason promulgated, in 1861, after endless consultations, the great manifesto liberating the peasants. The problem of dividing the land was solved in the following way. For each province of the empire was set a minimum and maximum holding for each person (nadyel); the amounts varied from three to seven hektares. The proprietor, however, could avoid the regulation altogether by giving the peasants outright a fourth part of the minimum share. In this way he acquired in effect a rural proletarian family completely dependent upon the opportunity to work on his estate. Otherwise the peasant received his share of land only for compensation. The latter was higher in proportion as the share was smaller, the law makers arguing from the better quality of the land and its greater yield. Moreover, during a certain transition period the obligatory services of the peasants were kept in force, and the commutation of dues by the peasant made dependent on the consent of the proprietor. The system resulted in the peasantry falling extensively in debt to the proprietors. The commutation payments were fixed relatively high, amounting to 6% for 48 years; they were still running when the revolution of 1905–07 broke out. More favorable terms were granted the peasants on the royal estates and crown lands, who were liberated with complete ownership of their land.

It is true that the Russian peasants were liberated only in one direction; they were freed from the proprietors, but not from the joint obligations of the commune. In regard to these, personal servitude was maintained. The peasant did not have freedom of movement, for the mir could recall anyone, no matter whom, who had grown up in the village. This right was kept intact because the Government saw in the so-called agrarian communism a conservative force and a support of czarism against the progress of liberalism (cf. above, p. 19).

Led by political considerations, the Russian government proceeded differently in the western provinces, especially in Poland, ¹⁶ where the Code Napoleon had abolished serfdom, although under the condition that on the removal of the peasant the land reverted to-the overlord. This specification, which had led to wholesale expulsion of the peasants, was in its turn abolished in 1846. Then in 1864 the Rus-sions carried out the liberation of the Polish peasants, as a measure directed against the Polish nobility, who had supported the revolution of 1863, and with the object of attaching the peasantry to Russian policy. In consequence, the relation of the peasant to the soil was determined on the basis of his own declaration. Thus the liberation took the form of an out-and-out dispossession of the Polish nobility. In particular, this fact explains the extensive woodland and pasture privileges of the peasants.

The dissolution of the feudal land system resulted in the agricultural system of today. In part, the peasantry are freed from the land and the land from the peasantry, as in England; in part the peasantry are freed from the proprietors, as in France; in part the system is a mixture, as in the rest of Europe, the east inclining more toward the English conditions.

The form of the final adjustment has been largely influenced by the laws of inheritance, in which regard there was the greatest contrast between England and France. In England, the feudal inheritance with primogeniture became universal for the land; the eldest son alone, whether of peasant or overlord, inherits all the land. In France, equal division of the land was the rule, even under the old regime; the civil code only made it obligatory. Within Germany we find the most extreme contrasts. Where individual inheritance persists it is not primogeniture in the English sense, but rather sets up a principal heir, (anerbe) who receives the land and is required to provide for other heirs. This law obtains in some cases on purely technical grounds, as for example in connection with large estates, or a great farm in the Black Forest, where physical division is impossible; or it may be historically grounded, coming down from the period of feudal overlordship. The manorial lord was interested in the capacity of the land to support services, and hence in maintaining farms undivided. In Russia, we find agrarian communism down to the reforms of Stolypin in 1907; the peasant received his allotment of land not from his parents but from the village community,

Modern legislation has entirely abolished feudal ties. In some regions these have been replaced by a system of trusts or fideicommissa. These are first met with in the form of certain peculiar foundations in the Byzantine Empire, beginning with the 12th century. To protect the land against the emperors, it was given to the church and thus received a character of sanctity. The purpose for which the church could use it, however, was rigidly prescribed, as for example the maintenance of a number of monks. The remainder of the rent, to the amount of nine-tenths of the total, accrued permanently to the family establishing the foundation. Thus arose in the Moslem world the wakuf, a foundation apparently in favor of the monks or for some other pious purpose, but in reality designed to secure to a family a rent while preventing the Sultan from levying taxes on the land. This device of the fideicommissum was brought by the Arabs to Spain and then taken over by England and Germany. In England it aroused resistance, but the lawyers devised a substitute in the institution of “entails.” The nature of the institution is this: the indivisibility and inalienability of holdings of land is secured by agreement on its transfer from one generation to the next, so that no change is possible during the lifetime of the holder. In this way the greater part of the land of England has been concentrated into the hands of a small number of families, while in Prussia a while ago one-sixteenth of the land was tied up in trusts. The result is that a latifundian ownership obtains in England, Scotland, and Ireland and also (before 1918) in parts of Silesia and the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and to a small extent in certain parts of Germany.

The manner in which the agrarian system developed and the feudal organization was displaced has had extraordinarily far-reaching consequences, not only for the progress of rural conditions but for political relations in general. Especially has it influenced the question whether a country was to have a landed aristocracy, and what form it would take. An aristocrat in the sociological sense is a man whose economic position sets him free for political activities and enables him to live for political functions without living by them; hence, he is a receiver of fixed income (Rentner, rentier). This requirement cannot be met by those classes who are bound to some occupation by the necessity of working to provide a living for themselves and their families, that is, by business men and laborers. In an agricultural nation, specifically, the complete aristocrat lives on ground rents. The only country which really possesses such an aristocracy in Europe is England—to a limited extent also the Austria of former times. In France, on the contrary, the expropriation of the landed classes led to an urbanization of political life, since only the plutocracy of the towns, and no longer the landed aristocracy, were economically free enough to make politics a profession. The economic development of Germany left only a thin stratum of landlords free for political life, chiefly in the eastern provinces of Prussia, where the expropriation of the peasants went farthest. The majority of the Prussian Junkers formed no such aristocratic stratum as the English landlords. They are rather a rural middle class with a feudal stamp, coming down from the past, whose members are occupied as agricultural entrepreneurs in the day-to-day economic struggle of business interests. With the fall in grain prices since the seventies and the rise in the demands of life, their fate was sealed, for the average knightly holding of 400 to 500 acres can no longer support a lordly aristocratic existence. This fact explains the extraordinarily sharp conflict of interests in which this class has stood, and still stands, and their position in political life.

With the dissolution of the manors and of the remains of the earlier agrarian communism through consolidation, separation, etc., private property in land has been completely established. In the meantime, in the course of the centuries, the organization of society has changed in the direction described above, the household community shrinking, until now the father with his wife and children functions as the unit in property relations. Formerly this was simply impossible for physical reasons. The household has at the same time undergone an extensive internal transformation, and this in two ways; its function has become restricted to the field of consumption, and its management placed on an accounting basis. To an increasing extent the development of inheritance law in place of the original complete communism has led to a separation between the property of the man and the woman, with a separate accounting. This two-fold transformation was bound up with the development of industry and trade.