246 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



state had held the nobility in check since the Middle Ages. If in 

 the West, especially the Southwest, where it was the rule or at 

 least a frequent occurrence that several lords had rights in one 

 peasant, the peasant had to be freed from them all, and this com- 

 plicated the work of emancipation. Nowhere had the peasant 

 come so completely under the unrestricted authority of one lord 

 as in the domain of the estate farming. 



In the Northeast, on the contrary, the chief problem is the 

 elimination of the oppressive compulsory services and the conver- 

 sion of the right of occupation, usually not even hereditary, into 

 property. The personal unfreedom, the newly arisen hereditary 

 subjection, is here not only obligation to pay all kinds of tithes, 

 but an actual wholly personal slavery, consistently developed with 

 a view to securing to the lord the entire available working force of 

 the subject and of his whole family. He is in reality a piece of 

 property of the lord. In addition we here face the problem, in 

 contrast with that of the entire West, of abolishing a thoroughly 

 modern condition : the unfree system of labor of the modern 

 capitalistic management in agriculture on a large scale. 



First of all, it became necessary, if the peasant was to be freed, 

 to find an equivalent for his labor. It was labor, and not money, 

 that engaged the attention of the beneficiary, whose entire eco- 

 nomic existence was imperiled by the removal of this system, 

 since he was not a person living on an income, but a producer, 

 engaged in agricultural enterprise, who was not willing to stop 

 his business immediately. The state was here confronted by an 

 unusually difficult agricultural and social problem, consisting of 

 the dissolution of the large estates or the providing of a free body 

 of workmen in place of the unfree. Politically the task was not 

 made easier, owing to the great significance which, in the young 

 Prussian state at least, army and bureaucracy had in the eyes of 

 the nobility. 



In the Northeast, then, the work of emancipation was doubtless 

 the most difficult, in the Northwest the easiest. It did not begin, 

 however, as might be supposed, where it was easiest, but where it 

 was most urgent, and that was precisely in the Northeast, where, 

 up to the eighteenth century, conditions had steadily grown worse. 



