250 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



positively encouraged and accelerated it, in spite of the temporary 

 check received through the protection given the peasants by 

 Frederick the Great. This has been due partly to the repeal of 

 the law enacted for the protection of the peasants, so far as it 

 affected that part of them excluded in 1816 from its operation, 

 and partly to the rule of indemnity in land. In solving the peasant 

 problem of that time, therefore, it has created simultaneously the 

 question of rural labor. 



Many of the regulated farmsteads, which could not in after 

 times maintain themselves, were bought up by the great estates. 

 Moreover, the restoration of free transfer of land in Prussia was 

 by no means complete. It halted before the estates in tail and 

 the rights of creditors of mortgaged farms. Encroachment on the 

 large estate was, therefore, rendered impossible, although de- 

 manded by the general agricultural development and the growth 

 of the population. The license of parceling out the land was in 

 reality available only for the peasant property, which had, up to 

 the time of the legislation concerning estates held in perpetuity 

 with fixed rentals, been steadily reduced in the Northeast by 

 selling the land undivided or by parceling it out to small farmers. 



On the other hand, the introduction of the right of free divisi- 

 bility and of the Roman common law of heredity, bestowing equal 

 rights on all children, together with the right of encumbrance, has 

 led, in nearly all the branches of rural life, to an ever increasing 

 burdening of the peasantry with the hereditary indebtedness re- 

 sulting from the division of the land. It has not brought about an 

 actual division of the land, nor an indebtedness as high as that 

 prevailing in the case of the large estates ; but this indebtedness 

 rises, at least in the Northeast, to alarming proportions. 



The conviction of the importance of a numerous thriving 

 peasantry for the state and for political economy is stronger to- 

 day than at the time of the emancipation. The peasants are im- 

 portant not only from the financial, military, and social point of 

 view, but from the physical, in their relation to public health and 

 the renewal of the urban population. The present agrarian crisis 

 has shown that the peasant industry has greater power of resistance 

 than the large enterprise, or that it is at least able to compete 



