The agriculture of the German peasantry may still be considered as not having, on the whole, reached that point which is necessary for an energetic development of our national strength; nevertheless, we have reason to rejoice in having made great progress in this direction. Intellect is everywhere incessantly occupied in introducing to the simple countryman new discoveries--machines, seeds, and a new method of cultivation. In some favoured districts the agriculture of the small farmer can scarcely be distinguished from the well-studied system of the larger model farms. Nor has the German peasant, in the times of the deepest depression, like the oppressed Slavonian, ever lost the instinct of self-acquisition. For the very qualities which are his characteristics, enduring systematic industry and strict parsimony, are the groundwork of the highest earthly prosperity. There still subsists, however, in wide districts, the old thraldom of the three-course system with rights of common, and all the pressure which this system entails on individuals. Even well-tested improvements are therefore difficult to the countryman; because, with all his perseverance, he is yet wanting in enterprising activity, and because the great scantiness of his youthful instruction and technical education makes it difficult for him to comprehend anything new. Thus the development of the German peasant to greater inward freedom and capacity is steady, but slow. The noble landed proprietor also, from entirely different reasons, frequently neglects to raise the culture of the soil by energy, technical knowledge, and the utmost exertion of his power; and, in like manner, we find in other branches of production--in manufactures, trade, commerce, and political life--a corresponding slowness of progress. It places us still at a disadvantage in comparison with the better-situated countries of Europe. For the position of Germany among the States of Europe is such, that all other progress depends on the development of its own agriculture, that is, on the degree of intelligence and productive power which is perceptible in this primeval manly occupation. We have no command of the sea; we have no colonies, and no subjected countries, to which we can export the produce of our industry. If this circumstance is perhaps a surety for our stability, on the other hand it raises the vital importance which the German countryman and the system of his agriculture exercise on the other classes of the German people.
If therefore it is allowable to compare two very different phases of human development, one may well say that the peasant of 1861 has not yet gained, comparatively with the other classes of the people, the independence and the conscious power which existed six centuries ago in the provinces of Reithart von Reuenthal and Farmer Helmbrecht. And whoever would teach us from the life of the past, how it has happened that the strength of the nation has passed from the rural districts into cities, and that the nobleman has raised himself so much above his neighbour the peasant, must beware of asserting, that this depression of the country-people is the natural consequence of the establishment of a higher culture and more artistic forms of life by the side of the simple agriculture of the lower class. He who follows his plough will seldom be a member of a company which extend their speculations to the distant corners of the earth; he will not read Homer in the original, he will hardly read the work of a German philosopher upon logic, and the easy intercourse of a modern salon will scarcely be enlivened by his wit. But the results of the collective culture, of that which the learned find, which the artist forms, which manufacturers create, must, at a period when the nation is vigorous and sound, when accessible to the simple countryman of sound judgment, be comprehended and valued by him.
Is it necessary that our neighbour the countryman should so seldom read a good book, and still less often buy one? Is it necessary that he should, as a rule, take in no other newspaper than the small sheet of his own district? Is it necessary that it should be unknown to him, and unfortunately sometimes also to his schoolmaster, how an angle is determined, a parallelogram measured, and an ellipse drawn? Whoever would now place a poem of Goethe's in the hand of a peasant woman, would probably do a useless thing, and raise a dignified smile in a "well-educated spectator." Must all that we possess of most beautiful be incomprehensible to half our nation? Six hundred years ago, the poem of Farmer Helmbrecht was understood in the village parlour, and the charm of his sonorous verse, the poetry and the warm eloquence of his language, were appreciated; and the rhythm and measure of those old songs that accompanied the dances of the thirteenth century are just as elegant and artistic as the finest verses now in the poems of the greatest modern poets. There was a time when the German peasant had the same lively susceptibility for noble poetry which we now assume as the privilege of the highly educated. Is it necessary that the peasant of the present day should be deficient in it? The Bohemian village musician still plays with heartfelt delight the harmonious tones produced by the genius of Haydn and Mozart; is it necessary that few other musical sounds should be permitted to the German peasant than the stale measures of spiritless dances? All this is not necessary; something of the same barbarism benumbs our life which we perceive with astonishment in the time of Christian Garve.
What, however, we consider at first as one of the still remaining weaknesses of the peasants, is also the characteristic weakness of our whole culture, which has become too artificial, because it has bloomed in comparatively small and isolated circles of society, without the regulation and ever-increasing invigoration which the collective popular mind would have afforded it by cordial reciprocity and warm sympathy. The peasant's having for so many centuries been a stranger to social culture has, in the first place, made him weak, and also made the culture of the other classes too unstable, over-refined, and sometimes unmanly and impracticable.
CHAPTER II.
THE LIFE OF THE LOWER NOBILITY.
(1500–1800.)
The lot of the German peasant and of the German noble are closely bound together; the sufferings of the one become the disease of the other: the one has been lowered by servitude; the capacity, cultivation, and worth of the other to the State have been impaired by the privileges of a favoured position. Now both appear to be convalescent.
The lower German noble, before the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, was experiencing an important transition; he was about to forget the traditions of the middle ages, and on the point of gaining a new importance at court. The predatory Junkers of the saddle had become quarrelsome, drink-loving landed proprietors.
At the end of the sixteenth century it was still difficult for the sons of the old robber associates to keep the peace. Whilst they were fighting with the pen, and intriguing at the Kammergericht,[37] they were frequently tempted to take forcible revenge; not only the turbulent knights of the Empire in Franconia, Suabia, and on the Rhine, but also the vassals of the powerful princes of the Empire who were under the strong law of the land. Even where they were in the exercise of their rights, they preferred doing it by violence, from pride in their own power. Thus George Behr, of Düvelsdorf, in Pomerania, shortly before the storm of the Thirty Years' War broke upon his province, hired an armed band in order to obtain club law in a private quarrel; he also claimed supreme jurisdiction on his property, in 1628 he caused a former secretary of his family who had forged the seal of his master and drawn a false bond, to be hung on a gallows without any further ado, and at his leisure gave a laconic account of it to his duke.[38]
Much of the old roistering remained in the daily life of the country noblemen; they were still prone, as once in the middle ages, to excite quarrels in the inns and under the village