BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
cultivate his own farm by moonlight. This state of absolute serfdom was general in Central and Eastern Europe, in the greater part of Germany, in Poland and in Russia, and where it existed the artisan class was equally depressed, for no man was allowed to learn a trade without his lord's permission, and an escaped serf had no chance of admission into the trade-guilds of the cities. Towards the west a more advanced civilization improved the condition of the labourers; the Italian peasant and the German peasant on the Rhine had obtained freedom to marry without his lord's interference; but, nevertheless, it was a prince of western Germany, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects to England to serve as mercenaries in the American War of Independence. In France the peasant was far better off."[1]
Besides all this, there was everywhere prevalent in Germany a narrow spirit of particularism, an inability to see the world from any other point of view than that of one's own limited district. Taken as a whole, Germany was inert and unprogressive, feudal in spirit and practice, and everywhere divided against itself. Even where neighboring states lived peaceably side by side, as for the most part they did, there was marked lack of interest in one another's welfare, and a lack of concerted effort toward a common end.
And this contracted, illiberal spirit is precisely what might have been expected from the rulers and the subjects of the petty states that constituted the moribund German Empire. Already, before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Empire, with its ten circles, — including some three hundred separate states, of which fifty-one were free cities, — was little more than a name. "Properly, indeed, it was no longer an Empire at all, but a Confederation, and that of the lowest sort. For it had no common treasury, inefficient common tribunals, no means of coercing a refractory member; its states were of different religions, were governed according to different forms, were administered judicially and financially without any regard to each other."[2]
23
- ↑ Morse Stephens, Europe, 1789–1815, pp. 5, 6.
- ↑ Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, p. 339.
