RELATIONS OF THE RURAL COMMUNITY 741 



more rational, for this would have been true also for the west, 

 but because it was, under the historically established condi- 

 tions, the only possible economic means to obtain a higher in- 

 come. 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 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 pro- 

 duction 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 pur- 

 poses, 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 appro- 

 priated 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 com- 

 pleted by the Russian frontier, which cut off the rear country, for a 

 gross industry which might arise in the east now placed its develop- 

 ment 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 communication, 

 obligation, division by bequest. The landlord stands outside of the 

 rural productive community. Occasionally he assists his lessee with 



