Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/193

187. By all appearances, then, the mass of the population had arrived at the same old goal after four hundred years.

That proved two things: Firstly, that the social differentiation and the division of property in the sinking Roman empire corresponded perfectly to the contemporaneous stage of production in agriculture and industry, and hence was unavoidable; secondly, that this stage of production had not been essentially altered for better or worse during four hundred years, and therefore had necessarily produced the same division of property and the same classes of population. The town had lost its supremacy over the country during the last centuries of the Roman empire, and had not regained it during the first centuries of German rule. This presupposes a low stage of agriculture and industry. Such a general condition produces of necessity the domination of great proprietors and the dependence of small farmers. How impossible it was to graft either the slave labor of Roman latifundian economy or the compulsory labor of the new large scale production into such a society, is proved by Charlemagne's very extensive experiments with his famous imperial country residences that left hardly a trace. These experiments were continued only by the convents and brought results only for them. But the convents were abnormal social institutions, founded on celibacy. They could do exceptional work, but they had to remain exceptions themselves for this very reason.

Yet some progress had been made during these four hundred years. Although in the end we find the same main classes as in the beginning, still the human beings that made up these classes had changed. The ancient slavery had disappeared; gone were also the beggared freemen who had despised work as slavish. Between the Roman colonist and