turned the conditions of life
throughout the entire German territory.

At the close of the War of Independence, four out of five Germans lived
on the land, two out of three were engaged in agriculture. By 1895 the
agricultural population was only 35.7 per cent. That, supported by
industry and commerce, kept continually increasing. In 1895 it was 50.6
per cent.

This progress of industry and trade indicates the rise of a new class of
the population, that of the capitalists. It seemed at first that their
arrival would result in a dispossession of the nobility. For example,
under the ancien regime the bourgeois could not acquire the property of
the nobles. Toward 1880, for Eastern Prussia only, 7,086 estates of
11,065 belonged to non-nobles. They could have been acquired only with
money. Capital was supplanting birth. Today even, in Prussia, five
members of the Ministry, a little more than one-third, are bourgeois not
enjoying the particle von.

The new dominant class encroached upon the ancient in two ways, by
depriving it of its clientele and by acquiring a considerable weight in
the State. "The weight of a social class" is the totality of its means
of action, which it possesses on account of its numbers, its personal
influence, its wealth, and the importance of the interests which it
represents. The clientele of the agrarian nobility was essentially the
peasants, who have continually diminished in number, the attraction of
industrial and commercial employments having caused a great migration to
the interior, to the factories, and the cities.

For many years this phenomenon has been disclosed by statistics and
pointed out by economists and sociologists, but no remedy has been
found. Today, although emigration abroad has much moderated, Germany has
not labor for its tillage. It is obliged to import farm hands and even
cereals. It no longer produces foodstuffs sufficient for its own
support.

Moreover, the peasant who remains upon the soil is freed
from the landlord, and agricultural production has become
specialized--industrialized. There is the case, for instance, of that
peasant woman who declared that she had not the time to wash her linen
and who sent it to the steam laundry at Karlsruhe. Here is not merely an
economic transformation, but a moral evolution. The agriculturist who no
longer produces in order to consume but in order to sell, and who must
live from the product of his sales, tries to produce as much