EVIL OF POWER TO MORTGAGE 113 



they occupied but did not own it ; and the object of 

 that legislation was, in fact, the substitution of allodial 

 for feudal tenure. That was eventually accomplished 

 successfully, and the Prussian peasant became absolute 

 owner of his lands, while the noble held his lands free 

 of any peasant liens thereon. But the power of mort- 

 gage was granted from the beginning ; in fact, the 

 method adopted for freeing the peasant was that of 

 commuting his dues into a rent-charge or annuity, 

 which might be capitalized at eighteen or twenty 

 years' purchase, this amount being advanced by a 

 rent-charge bank which took a mortgage on the land 

 as its security. Add to this that the land banks of 

 Prussia established for nobles had, since 1770, set an 

 example of the mortgage habit, so that the German 

 peasant, hard pressed for working capital, for taxes, 

 and for maintenance, readily adopted the same, with 

 the result that Prussia, which at the beginning of the 

 century had but an infinitesimal mortgage debt, had 

 in 1893 a mortgage debt on " landed estates and peasant 

 holdings of about £500,000,000, the debt having " in- 

 creased by £45,000,000 since 1886" (Commercial, 3, of 

 1894); while the statement of objects and reasons to 

 a Bill of 1894 for the establishment of Chambers of 

 Agriculture states that one object of the new Chambers 

 is to assist Government in initiating legislation in- 

 tended to relieve the oppressive indebtedness of agri- 

 cultural land in the kingdom and to organize rural 

 credit. It is obvious, then, that while the abolition of 

 serfage and feudal dependence resulted in a free 

 peasantry, the ability to mortgage the land without 

 let or hindrance has resulted in the reimposition of 

 dependence in a much more objectionable form — viz., 

 the dependence of the peasant on the Jew usurer — 

 with the further result that the great agrarian problem 

 now is not the liberation of the serf, but the freeing of 

 the freed peasant from the bondage of usury, to which 

 end statesmen, publicists, economists, and agricul- 



