ook little pleasure in
cultivating their own fields, and were glad to make use of dependents.
It was only shortly before the year 1500, that the German cities
arrived at the conviction that the labour of freemen is the foundation
of prosperity, opulence, and civilisation. But in the country, even
after the Thirty Years' War, the mass of the labourers--more than half
of the whole German nation--were in a state of servitude, which in many
provinces differed little from slavery. It is only in the time of our
fathers that the peasant has become an independent man, a free citizen
of the State: so slowly has the groundwork of German civilisation and
of the modern State been developed.

All earthly progress does not take the straight course which men expect
when improvement begins; thus the position of the German husbandman in
1700 was worse in many respects than a hundred years before; nay, even
in our time it is not comparatively so good as it was 600 years
earlier, in the time of the Hohenstaufen.

The German peasant for centuries lost much that was valuable in order
to attain a higher condition; his freedom and elevation to citizenship
in our State was effected in an apparently indirect way. At the time of
the Carlovingians more than half the peasants were free and armed, and
the pith of the popular strength; at the time of Frederick the Great,
almost all the country people were under strict bondage,--the beasts of
burden of the new State, weak and languishing, without political object
or interest in the State. Somewhat of the old weakness still clings to
them.

We shall therefore first take a short review of an earlier period,
comparing it with the peasant life of the last two centuries.

What the Romans mention of the condition of the German agricultural
districts, is only sufficient to give us a glimpse of ancient peasant
life. According to their accounts, the Germans were long considered to
be a wild warrior race, who lived in transition from a wandering life
to an uncertain settlement, and it was seldom inquired how it was
possible that such hordes should for centuries carry on a victorious
resistance to the disciplined armies of the greatest power on earth.
When Cheruskers, Chattens, Bructerers, Batavers, and other people of
less geographical note, occasioned terror, not only to single legions,
but to large Roman armies, not once, but in continual wars for more
than one generation,--when a Markomannen chief disci