244 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



physiocratic overrating of the latter ; then, springing from the 

 same philosophical root of the law of nature, the ideas of en- 

 lightenment, of the rights of man ; finally, in connection with this, 

 the development of the modern state, with the demand for like 

 political rights for all its citizens. The technical improvements 

 could not be utilized in consequence of the more or less bad con- 

 dition of the peasant and the constraint of his husbandry, due to 

 the mixed lots with forced cultivation of the land and other com- 

 pulsory services. The enlightenment, however, took offence chiefly 

 at personal unfreedom, bondage ; and this was as incompatible 

 with the modern state as the vesting of lords with patrimonial 

 police and judicial powers. 



It was, therefore, a threefold liberation of the peasant that was 

 demanded by the times : the agricultural, the personal, and the 

 political. The peasant should everywhere become the unrestricted 

 and personally free -proprietor of his home and field, with full 

 rights of citizenship. That was the goal of the emancipatory 

 legislation, that the great social question of Germany in the 

 eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. 



The entire emancipatory legislation consists of two parts : the 

 breaking up of the old system of landlordship and labor by the 

 emancipation of the peasants, and the breaking up of the old field 

 system through equal distribution in the broadest sense of the 

 word. The emancipation of the peasant freed him from every 

 master whatsoever, from lord, patrimonial judge, or landed propri- 

 etor ; the distribution of land freed him from his own kind, from 

 his neighbors, from a master even when a neighbor in the field. 

 By far the more important part socially is the emancipation of the 

 peasants, which we will examine more closely. It consists, as 

 above mentioned, first, in the removal of the agricultural depend- 

 ence of the peasant on a master, through the annulment of the 

 forced labor owed to the lord, patrimonial judge, or landed propri- 

 etor, the conversion of all inferior property rights to property, 

 and the discharge of all burdens on the peasant farm ; secondly, 

 in the restoration of the personal freedom of the peasant by the 

 removal of the older bondage and of the more recent hereditary 

 subjection, which the eighteenth century fuses with the former ; 



