Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/207

 it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what tasks these peasant 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 counterpoise. For every acre of common land which the great