Prussia in 1888,
held by 529 persons, 20 of whom were bourgeois, embraced 1,408,860
hectares, or 2,454 hectares on an average. According to the statistical
figures, submitted in the spring of 1894 by the Prussian Minister of
Agriculture to the Agrarian Commission, the entails of Prussia embraced
at that time 1,833,754 hectares with a net income of 22,992,000 marks.
Estimating the holders of entails at 550, each has an unseizable income
of 41,800 marks. Assuming, however, that these entails are concentrated
in one province, it would mean that the whole province of
Schleswig-Holstein, with an area of 1,890,000 hectares, belonged to 550
owners. In 1888 there were in the eastern provinces of Prussia 154
persons--among them 15 ruling Princes (the Kings of Prussia, Saxony,
etc.); 89 Dukes, other Princes and Counts; 40 noblemen and 10
bourgeois--who alone owned 1,830 estates aggregating 1,768,648 hectares
of land. Probably, the property of these persons has in the meantime
increased considerably, seeing that a good portion of the net incomes
from these estates is expended in acquiring new ones. The nobility of
the first and second rank are the principal elements engaged in this
gigantic concentration of landed property; but they are closely followed
by the aristocracy of finance, who, with increasing predilection, invest
their wealth in land, consisting mainly in magnificent woods, stocked
with roe, deer and wild boar, that the owners may gratify their passion
for the hunt. A large number of the baronial manors consist of the
estates of dispossessed peasants, who were driven from their homes and
reduced to day laborers. According to Neumann, in the provinces of East
and West Prussia alone, there were from twelve to thirteen thousand
small holdings appropriated in that way between 1825 to 1859. This
process of dispossessing, proletarianizing the country population by the
capitalist landlords, has the laying waste of the land as a natural
consequence. The population emigrates, or moves to the cities and
industrial centers. Woods and meadows gain upon cultivated lands, the
remaining territories are operated with machinery, that render human
labor superfluous, or that need such only for short periods during the
plowing and sowing seasons, or when the crops are gathered. The rapidly
increasing number of movable steam engines, already mentioned, consists
mainly of engines employed in the cultivation of the land. The decrease
of the