g 42.60
Posen 61.22 Silesia 42.14
West Prussia 54.41 Saxony 30.89
East Prussia 41.79 Schleswig-Holstein 18.03

According to the memorial of the Prussian Minister of Agriculture,
published in the bulletin of the Prussian Bureau of Statistics, the
number of middle class farms sank, from 354,610 with 35,260,084 acres,
in 1816, to 344,737 with 33,498,433 acres, in 1859. The number of these
farms had, accordingly, decreased within that period by 9,873, and
peasant property had been wiped out to the volume of 1,711,641 acres.
The inquiry extended only to the provinces of Prussia, Posen (from 1823
on), Pomerania, exclusive of Stralsund; Brandenburg, Saxony, Silesia,
and Westphalia.

What disappears as peasant property usually goes into large estates. In
1885, in the province of Pomerania, 62 proprietors held 118 estates; in
1891, however, the same number of proprietors held 203 estates with an
area of 147,139 hectares. Altogether, there were in the province of
Pomerania, in 1891, 1,353 noble and bourgeois landlords, owning 2,258
estates with 1,247,201 hectares.[172] The estates averaged 551 hectares
in size.

Our eastern provinces give this table of landlords for the year 1888:--

Prince of Hohenlohe-Oehringen 39,365 hectares
Prince of Sigmaringen 29,611 "
Prince of Thurn and Taxis 24,482 "
Prince Bismarck 18,600 "
Prince Radziwill 16,398 "
Duke of Milzinski 13,933 "
Representative Kennemann 10,482 "
Duke Serg. v. Czarnecki 9,263 "
v. Hansemann 7,734 "
Etc., etc., etc.

We see that we here have to do with owners of latifundia of first rank;
and a portion of these gentlemen own also large estates in Southern
Germany and Austria.

According to Conrad,[173] there were in the year 1888, in East Prussia,
547 entails, of which 153 were instituted before the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Entailed land is property that an heir can neither
mortgage, divide nor alienate. The owner may go into bankruptcy through
a dissolute life, but the entail and the income that flows therefrom
remain unseizable. These entails, which only the very rich can
institute, are steadily increasing in number since the last decades. The
547 entails in existence in the eastern provinces of