HKB
the benefit of the common members, sometimes in separate pieces, parcelled by the community to separate families from time to time with wood and willow land retained for communal use.
It is pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring to declare that the exploitation of landed property is responsible for the existence of master and servant. Who is the owner of private landed property in the entire Orient where the land is possessed by the community or the State and the word landlord is not to be found in the language? The Turks first introduced a species of feudalism into the lands which they conquered. The Greeks in heroic times had a classified system of rank which itself bore witness to a long unknown preceding history, but the land was then cultivated by an independent peasantry. The large possessions of the nobles and leaders of the tribes were the exception and had no permanence. Italy was originally cultivated by small peasant farmers; when in the latter days of the Roman Republic the great holdings, the latifundia destroyed the small farmer-holdings, cattle raising was substituted for agriculture, and as Pliny points out Italy was ruined (latifundia Italiam perdidere). In the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages small farming was the rule and it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what tasks these peasants were obliged to perform for the feudal lords. The Frisians, lower Saxons, Flemings and people from the lower Rhine who invaded the lands of the Slavs to the east of the Elbe and cultivated them did so under very favorable terms of rent but by no means under a species of slavery. In North America, by far the greatest amount of the land is cultivated by the labor of free small farmers, while the great landed proprietors of the South with their slaves and extravagant farming methods destroyed the soil until the land ceased to be productive and the cultivation of cotton travelled ever Westward. In Australia and New Zealand the attempts to artificially establish an agrarian aristocracy by the British government have failed. In short, if we except the tropical and sub-tropical colonies, in which the climate is prohibitive of agriculture by Europeans, it seems that the idea of a great land holding class originally dominating nature by means of the employment of slaves and serfs is a pure product of the imagination. Things are quite otherwise. If one goes to the older countries like Italy the land was not waste originally but the transformation of the agricultural land cultivated by the small farmers into cattle-land utterly ruined the country.
Latterly, for the first time since the growth in the intensity of the population has increased the value of land and especially since the progress in agriculture has made possible the reclamation of poor lands, the greater landlordism has begun to obtain possession of waste and pasture lands and has stolen the old communal lands of the peasants in this country, as well in England as in Germany. And this has not happened without a counter-poise. For every acre of common land which the great landlords in England converted into arable land they have made at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into shooting preserves and mere places for the hunting of wild animals.
We have to consider the declaration of Herr Duehring to the effect that the cultivation of large parcels of land has not come into existence otherwise than through great landlords and their slaves, a declaration which we have seen implies an entire ignorance of history. We have now to see how far at different epochs the cultivation of the soil has been carried on by means of slaves, as in the palmy days of Greece, or by means of tenants, like the socage tenure, since the Middle Ages, and then what has been the social function of the greater landlordism at different periods of history.