st as one of the still remaining
weaknesses of the peasants, is also the characteristic weakness of our
whole culture, which has become too artificial, because it has bloomed
in comparatively small and isolated circles of society, without the
regulation and ever-increasing invigoration which the collective
popular mind would have afforded it by cordial reciprocity and warm
sympathy. The peasant's having for so many centuries been a stranger to
social culture has, in the first place, made him weak, and also made
the culture of the other classes too unstable, over-refined, and
sometimes unmanly and impracticable.

CHAPTER II.

THE LIFE OF THE LOWER NOBILITY.
(1500-1800.)

The lot of the German peasant and of the German noble are closely bound
together; the sufferings of the one become the disease of the other:
the one has been lowered by servitude; the capacity, cultivation, and
worth of the other to the State have been impaired by the privileges of
a favoured position. Now both appear to be convalescent.

The lower German noble, before the beginning of the Thirty Years' War,
was experiencing an important transition; he was about to forget the
traditions of the middle ages, and on the point of gaining a new
importance at court. The predatory Junkers of the saddle had become
quarrelsome, drink-loving landed proprietors.

At the end of the sixteenth century it was still difficult for the sons
of the old robber associates to keep the peace. Whilst they were
fighting with the pen, and intriguing at the Kammergericht,[37] they
were frequently tempted to take forcible revenge; not only the
turbulent knights of the Empire in Franconia, Suabia, and on the Rhine,
but also the vassals of the powerful princes of the Empire who were
under the strong law of the land. Even where they were in the exercise
of their rights, they preferred doing it by violence, from pride in
their own power. Thus George Behr, of Duevelsdorf, in Pomerania, shortly
before the storm of the Thirty Years' War broke upon his province,
hired an armed band in order to obtain club law in a private quarrel;
he also claimed supreme jurisdiction on his property, in 1628 he caused
a former secretary of his family who had forged the seal of his master
and drawn a false bond, to be hung on a gallows without any further
ado, and at his leisure gave a laconic account of it to his d