RELATIONS OF THE RURAL COMMUNITY 737 



establish a gross culture, and to become agriculturists themselves. 

 And also the important formation of the conditions of the peasants' 

 rights to the soil cannot have been the decisive reason. In the east 

 great numbers of peasants with originally very good rights of pos- 

 session have disappeared; in the west also those with the most 

 unfavorable rights of possession have been preserved because the 

 landlords did not at all want to remove them. 



The decisive question is, therefore: How did it happen that the 

 landlord of the German south and west, although he had ample 

 opportunity of appropriating the peasants' land, did not do this, 

 while the eastern landlord deprived the peasants of their land in spite 

 of the resistance of the power of the state? 



This question can be put into a different form. The western land- 

 lord did not renounce the utilization of the peasants' land as a 

 source of income when he renounced its appropriation. The differ- 

 ence is only that he used the peasants as taxpayers, while the landlord 

 of the east, by becoming Gutsherr, began to use the peasants as 

 a laboring force. Therefore, the question must be asked: Why there 

 one thing, here another? 



As with most historical developments, it is rather improbable that 

 a single reason could be assigned as the exclusive cause of this 

 different conduct of the landlords; for in this case we should chance 

 upon this cause in the sources. Therefore, a long series of single 

 causative factors have been adduced for explanation, especially by 

 Professor von Below in a classical investigation in his work Territo- 

 rium und Stadt. The question can only be, if the points of view can 

 be augmented, especially from economical considerations. Let us 

 see in which points there was difference between the conditions, in 

 which the eastern and the western landlord were when endeavoring 

 to extort from their peasants more than the traditional taxes. 



The establishment of gross operations was facilitated, for the 

 eastern landlords, by the fact that their landlordship as well as 

 patrimonialization of the public powers had grown gradually on the 

 soil of ancient liberty of the people; the east, on the contrary, was 

 a territory of colonization. The patriarchal Slavonian social consti- 

 tution was the edifice invaded by German clergymen in consequence 

 of their superior education, German merchants and artisans in con- 

 sequence of their superior technical and commercial skill, German 

 knights in consequence of their superior military technic, and Ger- 

 man peasants in consequence of their superior knowledge of agricul- 

 ture. Moreover, in the time of the conquest of the east, German 

 social constitution, together with the political forces, had been com- 

 pletely feudalized. The social constitution of the east was, from the 

 very beginning, adapted to the social preeminence of the knight, and 

 the German invasion altered this but little. The German peasant, 



