742 THE RURAL COMMUNITY 



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 products fall. Each purchase, each com- 

 pensation 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 agra- 

 rian 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 exist- 

 ence of large rational agriculture, instead of the state's land mono- 

 poly 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 

 communication 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 land-owner'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 agri- 

 cultural 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 lunker. 

 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, and which is 

 sold and mortgaged, estimated for bequests, and acquired by compen- 

 sating the co-heirs; hence it is always burdened anew with running 

 interests. Therefore the owner alone is exposed to the fluctuation of 



