248 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



larger leasehold peasants that were susceptible of improvement 

 free landowners, although they came into possession of only two 

 thirds, or in some cases of one half of the land formerly tilled by 

 them : the one third, or the other half, as the case might be, 

 became the free property of the owners of the estates as indem- 

 nification. The problem, however, of providing free hired labor 

 in place of the unfree compulsory labor for the large estates that 

 continued to exist was solved by the Declaration of 1816 exclu- 

 sively in the interest of the landed proprietors, by exempting 

 the small peasants, such as the cotters, who were not capable of 

 improvement, from this regulation as well as from that concern- 

 ing the protection of the peasants. They could consequently be 

 oppressed by the proprietors and converted into day laborers. All 

 this is too well known, particularly since the great work of Knapp, 

 to need here more than passing notice. It was left to the year 

 1848 to bring the emancipatory legislation to a conclusion, to 

 complete the regulation, so far as possible, and to accomplish the 

 cancellation of the realty burdens of those peasants, a minority, 

 who enjoyed superior rights to property, and of the regulated 

 peasants settled on crownland. 



In contrast with this, the emancipation of private peasants was 

 already accomplished in the most important region of the North- 

 west, in Hanover, in the thirties. At first it amounted to mere 

 freedom from the private manorial system, while the public right 

 of the state and the particular private right of the peasants, in- 

 cluding inheritance, remained in force. The former was not abol- 

 ished by the Prussian laws until in the seventies ; the latter was 

 replaced by the optional right of inheritance in the law relating 

 to peasant farms. 



In the South (and in Central Germany), however, only personal 

 emancipation resulted at first from the new constitutions, enacted 

 as a part of the general political development. The economic 

 emancipation, on the contrary, was here first set in motion by the 

 Revolution of July, and was achieved, at least in its main features, 

 by the year 1848. The later this process took place, the more 

 thorough and advantageous it was for the peasant. Capitalization 

 of their realty burdens was lower than in the Northwest and the 



