1907.] Peasant Class on the Continent. 



561 



of relieving the peasant from debt would be greatly enhanced. 

 But it is clear that the debt must be paid off by the 

 owner himself and from the proceeds of his farm. In order to 

 further this the system of redemption by instalments must 

 be substituted for mortgages, where the capital must be repaid 

 in a lump. This need not entail any dislocation; for the debtor 

 instead of paying 5 per cent, annual interest will pay 4 per 

 cent, interest and 1 per cent, redemption money. But .though 

 all thoughtful agriculturists are in favour of' such a conversion 

 opinions differ as to the method of carrying it out. - ! 



The next point is to devise means by which a repetition 

 of the old state of things can be avoided. This can only 

 be achieved by restricting the freedom to incur debt. How 

 little agreement there is in Germany on the best way of 

 doing this may be gathered from the report of a debate in the 

 Prussian Upper House in 1906, in which every speaker was 

 agreed that something must be done and yet no speaker, not 

 even the Minister of Agriculture himself, believed that the Bill 

 under discussion would produce any notable result. In Austria 

 the situation is better. A policy has been formulated in the 

 proposal that every new agricultural mortgage should only 

 take the form of a consolidated annuity for the redemption 

 of both interest and loan. The thesis is that the peasant 

 needs plenty of cheap easily accessible credit, and that all the 

 radical reforms that have been suggested make that difficult 

 rather than easy. The tendency of the latter would be to 

 drive away the good and industrious holders and to favour the 

 idle and useless. Thus the proposal to abolish distraint would 

 merely penalise the peasant, who has no other security than his 

 holding and the stock on it. 



In view of this difficulty another body of reformers propose 

 to put the power of levying an execution in the hands of a 

 peasants' co-operative society. Such a scheme would put 

 all the peasants under a sort of guardianship, and it is not to 

 be supposed that they would accept it. The next proposal is 

 to restrict by law the amount to which a peasant can incur debts. 

 This also has been rejected by the leading circles in Germany 

 and Austria. It has therefore been suggested that the limita- 

 tion of credit should be optional/ and a law to this effect was 

 passed in the Prussian Lower House in 1906, whereby the owner 



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