HANOVERIAN VILLAGE LIFE. 469 



fraction of an acre, and no two of wliieli lie together. To remedy the 

 evils of this system, Verkoppelung commissions were created for each 

 province by the state, which also undertook the draining, irrigation, 

 and laying out of roads through the land on which they worked. 



Any landholder in a village may, by merely notifying the district 

 magistrate, call a meeting of the farmers to consider whether the land 

 of the village shall be verkoppelt, but, if less than half the landowners 

 respond to the call, or if a majority are against the measure, the caller 

 of the meeting has to pay its legal expenses. If half the landowners' 

 respond, and the question is favorably decided, notice is at once sent 

 by the magistrate to the general Verkoppelung commission. This 

 commission decides whether the village meeting did its work in a 

 legal way, and, if the requisite amount of red tape proves to have 

 been used, appoints an inferior commission to see that the roads, 

 canals, and ditches are properly placed, and to be responsible for the 

 honest performance of the work to be done. The first work of this 

 commission is to register the value of the land owned by each farmer ; 

 then the land is ditched, and canals and roads are built. After the work 

 is finished, all the land of the village is divided into a certain number 

 of grades, generally eight, the first of which contains the best farming- 

 land ; the remainder containing continually poorer and poorer land un- 

 til in the last are placed the mountain pasture-fields. Upon each one 

 of these subdivisions a value is then set by the commission ; the total 

 value put upon the land being, of course, equal to the value of all the 

 village land before the Verkoppelung. The commission then retires, 

 and a farmers' meeting is called to ratify its valuation. If at this 

 meeting any one objects to the value set upon any piece of land, his 

 objection is noted and sent to the general commission, and, if thought 

 to be reasonable, the land is valued anew ; but, if the question is de- 

 cided adversely to the objector, he has still the right to refuse to take 

 the land in dispute, and it can not be forced upon him. If, however, 

 a considerable number of objections are made to the valuation, a new 

 inferior commission is appointed, this time from among the farmers 

 who have objected to the former valuation ; and the decision of this 

 last commission is final, no appeal being allowed. 



The preliminaries having been successfully adjusted, the general 

 commission then allots to each farmer arbitrarily an amount of land 

 equal in value, although perhaps not in quantity, to that he had be- 

 fore his land was taken. Whenever there is pasture-land among that 

 belonging to the village, each farmer receives, after the Verkoppelung, 

 a certain amount of it ; in which case his farm lies in two parts. The 

 average cost per acre of the whole process is about five dollars, and 

 this is assessed on each peasant according to the value of the land he 

 receives. In case any farmer can not pay his share of the expenses, 

 his land is sold, just as it would be for unpaid taxes. 



When a person has land to let, he sends notice to the town crier, 



