the working classes should cry out for the immediate
re-establishment of guilds and Mediaeval privileged trades' corporations.
Yet from the manufacturing districts, where the modern system of
production predominated, and in consequence of the facilities of
inter-communication and mental development afforded by the migratory
life of a large number of the working men, a strong nucleus formed
itself, whose ideas about the emancipation of their class were far
clearer and more in accordance with existing facts and historical
necessities; but they were a mere minority. If the active movement of
the middle class may be dated from 1840, that of the working class
commences its advent by the insurrections of the Silesian and Bohemian
factory operatives in 1844, and we shall soon have occasion to pass in
review the different stages through which this movement passed.

Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry,
which with its appendix of farm laborers, constitutes a considerable
majority of the entire nation. But this class again sub-divided itself
into different fractions. There were, firstly, the more wealthy
farmers, what is called in Germany _Gross_ and _Mittel-Bauern_,
proprietors of more or less extensive farms, and each of them
commanding the services of several agricultural laborers. This class,
placed between the large untaxed feudal landowners, and the smaller
peasantry and farm laborers, for obvious reasons found in an alliance
with the anti-feudal middle class of the towns its most natural
political course. Then there were, secondly, the small freeholders,
predominating in the Rhine country, where feudalism had succumbed
before the mighty strokes of the great French Revolution. Similar
independent small freeholders also existed here and there in other
provinces, where they had succeeded in buying off the feudal charges
formerly due upon their lands. This class, however, was a class of
freeholders by name only, their property being generally mortgaged to
such an extent, and under such onerous conditions, that not the
peasant, but the usurer who had advanced the money, was the real
landowner. Thirdly, the feudal tenants, who could not be easily turned
out of their holdings, but who had to pay a perpetual rent, or to
perform in perpetuity a certain amount of labor in favor of the lord
of the manor. Lastly, the agricultural laborers, whose condition, in
many large farming concerns, was exactly th