uted for agriculture, and
as Pliny points out Italy was ruined (_latifundia Italiam perdidere_).
In the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages small farming was the
rule and it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what
tasks these peasants were obliged to perform for the feudal lords. The
Frisians, lower Saxons, Flemings and people from the lower Rhine who
invaded the lands of the Slavs to the east of the Elbe and cultivated
them did so under very favorable terms of rent but by no means under a
species of slavery. In North America, by far the greatest amount of
the land is cultivated by the labor of free small farmers, while the
great landed proprietors of the South with their slaves and
extravagant farming methods destroyed the soil until the land ceased
to be productive and the cultivation of cotton travelled ever
Westward. In Australia and New Zealand the attempts to artificially
establish an agrarian aristocracy by the British government have
failed. In short, if we except the tropical and sub-tropical colonies,
in which the climate is prohibitive of agriculture by Europeans, it
seems that the idea of a great land holding class originally
dominating nature by means of the employment of slaves and serfs is a
pure product of the imagination. Things are quite otherwise. If one
goes to the older countries like Italy the land was not waste
originally but the transformation of the agricultural land cultivated
by the small farmers into cattle-land utterly ruined the country.

Latterly, for the first time since the growth in the intensity of the
population has increased the value of land and especially since the
progress in agriculture has made possible the reclamation of poor
lands, the greater landlordism has begun to obtain possession of waste
and pasture lands and has stolen the old communal lands of the
peasants in this country, as well in England as in Germany. And this
has not happened without a counter-poise. For every acre of common
land which the great landlords in England converted into arable land
they have made at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into
shooting preserves and mere places for the hunting of wild animals.

We have to consider the declaration of Herr Duehring to the effect
that the cultivation of large parcels of land has not come into
existence otherwise than through great landlords and their slaves, a
declaration which we have seen implies an entire ignorance of history