Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/495

Rh fraction of an acre, and no two of which lie together. To remedy the evils of this system, Verkoppelung commissions were created for each province by the state, which also undertook the draining, irrigation, and laying out of roads through the land on which they worked.

Any landholder in a village may, by merely notifying the district magistrate, call a meeting of the farmers to consider whether the land of the village shall be verkoppelt, but, if less than half the landowners respond to the call, or if a majority are against the measure, the caller of the meeting has to pay its legal expenses. If half the landowners respond, and the question is favorably decided, notice is at once sent by the magistrate to the general Verkoppelung commission. This commission decides whether the village meeting did its work in a legal way, and, if the requisite amount of red tape proves to have been used, appoints an inferior commission to see that the roads, canals, and ditches are properly placed, and to be responsible for the honest performance of the work to be done. The first work of this commission is to register the value of the land owned by each farmer; then the land is ditched, and canals and roads are built. After the work is finished, all the land of the village is divided into a certain number of grades, generally eight, the first of which contains the best farming land; the remainder containing continually poorer and poorer land until in the last are placed the mountain pasture-fields. Upon each one of these subdivisions a value is then set by the commission; the total value put upon the land being, of course, equal to the value of all the village land before the Verkoppelung. The commission then retires, and a farmers' meeting is called to ratify its valuation. If at this meeting any one objects to the value set upon any piece of land, his objection is noted and sent to the general commission, and, if thought to be reasonable, the land is valued anew; but, if the question is decided adversely to the objector, he has still the right to refuse to take the land in dispute, and it can not be forced upon him. If, however, a considerable number of objections are made to the valuation, a new inferior commission is appointed, this time from among the farmers who have objected to the former valuation; and the decision of this last commission is final, no appeal being allowed.

The preliminaries having been successfully adjusted, the general commission then allots to each farmer arbitrarily an amount of land equal in value, although perhaps not in quantity, to that he had before his land was taken. Whenever there is pasture-land among that belonging to the village, each farmer receives, after the Verkoppelung, a certain amount of it; in which case his farm lies in two parts. The average cost per acre of the whole process is about five dollars, and this is assessed on each peasant according to the value of the land he receives. In case any farmer can not pay his share of the expenses, his land is sold, just as it would be for unpaid taxes.

When a person has land to let, he sends notice to the town crier,