hearted benevolence of the nobles, of old
families who had grown up with their country-people through many
generations, mitigated the severity of servitude, and a cordial
connexion existed between master and serfs. Still more frequently the
brutal selfishness of the masters was softened and kept within bounds
by that prudence which now influences the American slaveholders. The
landed proprietor and his family passed their lives among the peasants,
and if he endeavoured to instil fear, he also had cause for fear.
Easily on a stormy night might the flames be kindled among his wooden
farm buildings, and no province was without its dismal stories of harsh
landlords or bailiffs who had been slain by unknown hands in field or
wood. However much we may admit the goodness or prudence of masters,
the position of the peasants still remains the darkest feature of the
past time. For we find everywhere in the scanty records of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an unhealthy antagonism of
classes. _And it was the larger portion of the German people which was
ruined by this oppression._[29]

Men even of uncommon strength and intelligence seldom succeeded in
extricating themselves from the proscribed boundaries by which their
life was fenced in. Ever greater became the chasm which separated them
from the smaller portion of the nation, who, by their perukes, bagwigs,
and pigtails, showed from afar that they belonged to a privileged
class. Up to the end of the seventeenth century these polished classes
seldom entertained a friendly feeling towards the peasant; on all sides
were to be heard complaints of his obduracy, dishonesty, and
coarseness. At no period was the suffering portion of the people so
harshly judged as in that, in which a spiritless orthodoxy embittered
the souls of those who had to preach the gospel of love. None were more
eager than the theologians in complaining of the worthlessness of
the country people, among whom they had to live; they always heard
hell-hounds howling round the huts of the villeins; their whole
conception of life was, indeed, dark, pedantic, and joyless. A
well-known little book, from the native district of Christopher von
Grimmelshausen, is especially characteristic. This book, entitled "Des
Bauerstands Lasterprob"--the exposure of the vices of the peasant
class[30]--never ceased to point out from the deeds of the villagers,
that the lives of the peasantry, from the village justice to the
goo