ia. Enormous tracts of land are bought in lump
by rich men, and what cannot be bought outright is leased. Access to the
valleys, manors, hamlets and even houses is thus barred by these new
masters, and stubborn owners of separate small holdings are driven by
all manner of chicaneries to dispose of their property at any price to
these wealthy owners of the woodlands. Old farmlands, on which numerous
generations have been supported for thousands of years, are being
transformed into wilderness, in which the roe and the deer house, while
the mountains, that the noble or bourgeois capitalist calls his own,
become the abode of large herds of chamois. Whole communities are
pauperized, the turning of their cattle upon the Alpine pastures being
made impossible to them, or their right to do so being even disputed.
And who is it that thus raises his hand against the peasant's property
and independence? Princes, noblemen and rich bourgeois. Side by side
with Rothschild and Baron Mayer-Melnhof are found the Dukes of Koburg
and Meiningen, the Princes of Hohenlohe, the Prince of Lichtenstein, the
Duke of Braganza, Prince Rosenberg, Prince Pless, the Counts of
Schoenfeld, Festetics, Schafgotsca, Trautmannsdorff, the hunting
association of the Count of Karolysche, the hunting association of Baron
Gustaedtsche, the noble hunting association of Bluehnbacher, etc.

Large landed property is everywhere on the increase in Austria. The
number of large landlords rose 9.5 per cent. from 1873 to 1891, and that
means a considerable decrease of small holders: land cannot be
increased.

In Lower Austria, of a total area embracing 3,544,596 yokes, 521,603
were taken up by large estates (247 owners), and 94,882 yokes by the
Church. Nine families alone owned, in the middle of the eighties,
157,000 yokes, among these owners was the Count of Hoyos, with 54,000
yokes. The area of Moravia is 2,222,190 hectares. Of these, the Church
held 78,496, 3.53 per cent.; 145 private persons held 525,632, and one
of these alone held 107,247 hectares. Of Austrian Silesia's area of
514,085 hectares, the Church owned 50,845, or 9.87 per cent.; 36
landlords owned 134,226, or 26.07 per cent. The area of Bohemia is
5,196,700 hectares: of these the clergy owned 103,459 hectares; 362
private persons owned 1,448,638. This number is distributed among Prince
Colloredo-Mansfeld with 58,239 hectares; Prince Fuerstenberg with
39,814; Imperial Duke Waldstein with 37,989; Prince Lic