The name is absent

AGRICUbTURE ON THE RHINE.

which the cultivators of the soil were long held in all
the countries of Europe. The transition has been dif-
ferently effected in different countries. In England the
race of small cultivators was so much diminished in the
Wars of the Roses, that the possessions returning into the
hands of the feudal lords were of necessity farmed out
by them in larger parcels. In France the small cultiva-
tors eventually triumphed over the nobility, and in the
French revolution the estates were, by the agency of
confiscations, transferred to new owners, mostly in small
parcels. The German peasant was originally a subfief-
holder, who held his land of a feudal lord on the terms
of suit and service. In the most ancient times the pea-
sant followed his chief into the field. Since the esta-
blishment of standing armies his duties have been con-
fined to agricultural services. He had to work, a number
of days in the week for his lord, either with or without
his team, as the terms of the holding ran. In Austria,
where the labour-rents* (as they have been termed by a
leading political economist) still prevail, the most com-
mon condition is 108 days, with a waggon and team, for
about 36 acres of land. Smaller holdings are saddled
proportionately with horse or manual service. The
period of the Reformation, or rather, the close of the long
struggle in Germany which ended in the erection of a
Protestant kingdom in Prussia, marks the epoch of a
change in the position of the most numerous class of the
inhabitants. It had been usual to leave the holdings in
the same family, and about the close of the seventeenth and
beginning of the eighteenth centuries the claim to inherit
began to be looked upon as unquestionable. The emphy-

* Rev. R. Jones, ‘ On the Distribution of Wealth.’

AGRICULTURE ON THE RHINE.

teusis, or Iiereditary lease on fixed terms, was a point
easily ceded by lords who had no chance of asserting any
other title. The acquisition of such a standing in society
as actual indisputable possession of the soil conferred,
seems to have reconciled the peasants to the continuance
of many of the oppressive forms of feudal ages long after
the necessity for them had passed away. Thus the vil-
lage bond, with its distinctions of dress, modes of tillage,
and other habits, were preserved in Germanybeyond the
period when the discomfort they occasioned had caused
them to be abolished in other countries. To this day every
village is distinguished by the colour to which the men
and women for the most part scrupulously adhere in dress,
by the hat of the males, and the prescribed rather than
the favourite hood of the women. To change the accus-
tomed attire and adopt the costume of the towns is syno-
nymous in Germany with a change of condition. The
peasant who does so becomes a “ burgher,” or townsman,
as he enters on the career of a man of learning, as a
pastor, a lawyer, or an official character. No man in
office, whether a turnpike-keeper (who is here a servant
of the crown) or a bailiff, wears the peasant’s dress, nor
is any innkeeper or shopman so attired. Even the vil-
lage Boniface assumes the frock-coat and short waistcoat
of the townsman, and drops the peasant’s three-cornered
hat where that is customarily worn. IJis wife assumes
the simpler cap and bonnet of Paris or London, unless
custom has preserved a relic of the ancient burgher-
costume in the towns of the neighbourhood. In the
Rhenish district that we have traversed, the influence
of trade has undermined all those primitive distinctions,
and the peasant dresses as he pleases. In the Duchy of

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