Anton, in his History of Agriculture in Germany, quotes numerous examples of hereditary leases, which date back to thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries. This contract was also very common in the agricultural colonies founded in Germany in themiddle ages, by Flemish and Dutch cultivators. In Prussia, Saxony, Hesse and the greater part of Germany, the erbpacht orhereditary lease was established on State domains at the beginning of the eighteenth century, short leases being thengenerally condemned. On the other hand, laws of the present century prohibit what is the very essence of this contract, thecreation of an unredeemable rent, regarding it as a remnant of feudalism. Still the hereditary lease, under the conditions ofthe beklem-regt and the aforamento , affords real advantages. A proof of this is the exceptional prosperity which it secures totwo regions, that in other respects have absolutely nothing in common, Minho in Portugal and Groningen in the LowCountries. These advantages are indisputable. The aforamento , imposing indivisibility on the soil, checks excessivemorcellement: it gives full security to the tenant, and so encourages him to effect all necessary improvements, howevercostly they may be. It is, therefore, very superior in this respect to the temporary lease, which takes from the farmer everyguarantee for the future and every motive for the sinking of capital in the land.
These ancient forms of property have been noticed, because modern societies have not yet arrived at a perfect or definiteagrarian organization. The social future is so gloomy that we should seek everywhere, even in the past, for the means ofallaying the danger. Undoubtedly these institutions of primitive times can never spring up again; the ideas, the requirements,and the sentiments of the patriarchal age produced them, and alone could perpetuate them. Now, all this has vanished toreturn no more. Fraternity and the intimate association resulting from it disappeared, first from the village, then from thefamily. In the present day the isolated individual has to face the joint-stock company or the religious community, which takethe place of patriarchal families and communities. What is to prevail finally?Small independent property, such as has existedin France since the Revolution, or latifundia , as at Rome or in England? A very prevalent opinion is that it will be the latifundia , for the same reasons that enable industry on a large scale to crush industry on a small scale; that is to say, theemployment of machinery, the superior information of the large employers, and the all-powerfulness of capital. Inagriculture, however, the triumph of large enterprises is not so decisive; because agricultural labours, being intermittent, donot so well allow of the application of machinery; and because, further, the limited extent of productive land makes the priceof agricultural produce depend on the cost of producing the most expensive.
Yet it is not impossible, that, as many economists believe, the supremacy of capital will lead in the long run to the absorptionof small property by the latifundia , just as small artisans succumb in the competition with giant manufacturers. If the finalresult is destined to lead us once more to an agrarian situation such as existed under the Roman empire, where a fewproprietors of enormous wealth live in pride and luxury, too often accompanied by depravity, while beneath them theagricultural, labourer remains plunged in a state of ignorance and misery, and where envy and hatred are continually settingthe two classes in antagonism and almost in open war: if such is to be the end, we cannot refrain from casting back a glanceof melancholy regret to these primitive epochs, when men, united in family groups by bonds of blood and fraternity, soughtby common toil the means of satisfying their few, ****** wants, as do the Servians of the present day, ignorant, it is true, ofthe luxury, but also ignorant of the bitter cares, the cruel doubts and unceasing struggles which agitate modern societies.
1. For details see the Author's Essai sur l'économie rurale de la Nierlande : and for the contratto di livello , his Etudesd'Economie ruraleLombardie .
2. See Merlin, Rép., I. p. 590. and Aulnier, Traité du domaine congéable .In Denmark there are taxes which last during thelife of the lessee or Faester: they are called Livfaeste . The Faester has to pay the indfastning ( laudemiun ), when he getspossession of the land, and also an annual rent, landgilde . He may neither sub-let nor alienate his right of occupancy. Certainproperties are necessarily subject to the Livfaeste . This obligation is called Faestetvang .
CHAPTER XXI.
THE MARK IN HOLLAND.
In the sandy region of Holland, the Germanic mark still exists; especially in Drenthe, the hunting demesne of the Germanemperors, granted by Otho the Great to the bishop of Utrecht, in 943. Surrounded on all sides by marsh and bog, thisprovince formed a kind of island of sand and heath, on which ancestral customs were preserved in their entirety. Even in ourday, we find the ancient organization of the Saxon mark; the saxena marka ,traces of which are also to be seen in the districtof Westerwolde in Groningen, in the whole of Over-Yssel, in the country of Zutphen, in the Veluwe and even in Gooiland,at the gates of Amsterdam,that is, in all parts of the diluvial sandy region which was occupied by the Saxons m the fourthcentury.
