RELATIONS OF THE RURAL COMMUNITY 743 



the market prices; he is involved in all economic and social conflicts, 

 which always menace directly his existence. As long as the exporta- 

 tion 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 lunker 

 and his laborers. In the first half of the last century the lunker 

 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 lunker '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 through- 

 out the year would be too heavy a burden. 



The more German industry grew up, in the west, to its present 

 height, the more the population underwent an enormous change; em- 

 igration 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 role 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 " feoff ment in trust " (or " entails "), and use their estate as 

 means to invade the aristocratic class. The fideicomissum of the 



