On the other hand, the result is the same where the magnate has no usurped regalian powers of the state. In such cases, open force and shameless violation of rights accomplish the same ends. The ruler, far off and impotent, bound to rely on the good will and help of the violators of law and order, has neither the power nor the opportunity of interference.
There is hardly any need of adducing instances. The free peasantry of Germany were put through the process of expropriation and declassification at least three times. Once it happened in Celtic times.[120] The second overthrow of the free peasants of the old German Empire took place in the ninth and tenth centuries. The third tragedy of the same form began with the fifteenth century, in the countries formerly Slavic, which they had conquered and colonized.[121] The peasants fared worse in those lands, in the “republics of nobles,” where there was no monarchical central authority, whose community of interests with their subjects tended to deprive oppression of its worse features. The Celts in the Gaul of Cæsar’s time are one of the earliest examples. Here “the great families exercised an economic, military and political preponderance. They monopolized the leases of the lucrative rights of the state. They forced the common freemen, overwhelmed by the taxes which they had themselves imposed, to borrow of them, and then, first as their debtors, afterward legally as their serfs, to surrender their liberty. For their own advantage they developed the system of followers: i. e., the privilege of the nobility to have about them a mass of armed servants in their pay, called ambacti, with whose aid they formed a state within a state. Relying on these, their own men-at-arms, they defied the lawful authorities and the levies of the freemen, and thus were able to burst asunder the commonwealth.... The only protection to be found was in the relation of serfdom, where personal duty and interest required the lord to protect his clients and to avenge any wrong to his men. Since the state no longer had the power to protect the freemen, these in growing numbers became the vassals of some powerful noble.”[122] We find these identical conditions fifteen hundred years later in Kurland, Livonia, in Swedish Pomerania, in Eastern Holstein, in Mecklenburg, and especially in Poland. In the German territories the petty nobles subjugated their peasantry, while in Poland their prey was the formerly free and noble Schlachziz. “Universal history is monotonous,” says Ratzel. The same procedure overthrew the peasantry of ancient Egypt: “After a warlike intermezzo, there follows a period in the history of the Middle Empire, which brings about a deterioration of the position of the peasantry in Lower Egypt. The number of landlords decreases, while their territorial growth and power increases. The tribute of the peasants is hereafter determined by an exact assessment on their estates, and definitely fixed by a sort of Doomsday Book. Because of this pressure, many peasants soon enter the lord’s court or the cities of the local rulers, and take employment there either as servants, mechanics, or even as overseers in the economic organization of these manors or courts. In common with any available captives, they contribute to the extension of the prince’s estates, and to further the general expulsion of the peasantry from their holdings.”[128]
The example of the Roman Empire shows, as nothing else can, how inevitable this process becomes. When we first meet Rome in history the conception of serfdom or bondage has already been forgotten. When the “modern period” of Rome opens, only slavery is known. And yet, within fifteen centuries, the free peasantry again sink into economic dependence, after Rome has become an overextended, unwieldy empire, whose border districts have more and more dissolved from the central control. The great landed proprietors, having been endowed with the lower justice and police administration on their own estates have “reduced their servants, who may originally have been free proprietors of the ‘ager privatus vectigalis’ to a state of servitude, and have thus developed a sort of actual glebæ adscriptus, within the boundaries of their ‘immunities.’”[124] The invading Germans found this feudal order worked out in Gaul and the other provinces. At this particular time, the immense difference formerly existing between slaves and free settlers (coloni) had been completely obliterated, first in their economic position, and then, naturally, in their constitutional rights.
Wherever the common freemen sink into political and economic dependence on the great territorial magnates, when, in other words, they become bound either to the court or to the lands, the social group formerly subject to them tend in a corresponding measure to improve their status. Both layers tend to meet half-way, to approximate their position, and finally to amalgamate. The observations just made concerning the free settlers and the agricultural slaves of the later Roman Empire hold true everywhere. Thus in Germany, freemen and serfs together formed, when fused, the economic and legally unital group of Grundholde, or men bound to the soil.[125]
The elevation of the former “subjects,” hereafter for the sake of brevity to be called “plebs,” flows from the same source as the debasement of the freeman, and arises by the same necessity from the very foundations on which these states are themselves erected, viz., the agglomeration of the landed property in ever fewer hands.
The plebs are the natural opponents of the central government—since that is their conqueror and tax imposer; while they naturally oppose the common freemen, who despise them and oppress them politically, besides crowding them back economically. The great magnate also is the natural opponent of the central government—an impediment in his path toward complete independence, and he is at the same time also a natural enemy of the common freemen, who in turn not only support the central government; but also block with their possessions his path toward territorial dominion, while with their claims to equality of political rights they annoy his princely pride. Since the political and social interests of the territorial princes and of the plebs coincide, they must become allies; the prince can attain complete independence only if, in his fight for power against the crown and the common freemen, he controls reliable warriors and acquiescent taxpayers; the plebs can only then be freed from their pariah-like declassification, both economically and socially, if the hated and proud common freemen are brought down to their level.
This is the second time that we have noted the identity of interest between the princes and their subjects. The first time we found a weakly developed solidarity in our second stage of state formation. This causes the semi-sovereign prince to treat his dependent tenants as kindly as he ill-treats the free peasants of his territory; in consequence, they will fight the more willingly for him and contribute taxes, while the more readily will the oppressed freemen succumb to the pressure, especially as their share of political power in the state, coincident with the decline of the central power, has become only a meaningless phrase. In some cases, as in Germany toward the end of the tenth century, this was done with full consciousness of its effects[126]—some prince exercises a particularly “mild” rule, in order to draw the subjects of a neighboring potentate into his lands, and thus to increase his own strength in war and taxation, and to weaken his opponent’s. The plebs come to possess, both legally and actually, constantly increasing rights, enlarged privileges of the law of ownership, perhaps self-government in common affairs, and their own administration of justice; thus they rise in the same degree as the common freemen sink, until the two classes meet and they are amalgamated into one body on approximately the same jural and economic plane. Half serfs, half subjects of a state, they represent a characteristic formation of the feudal state, which does not as yet recognize any clear distinction between public and private law; in its turn an immediate consequence of its own historical genesis, the dominion in the form of a state for the sake of economic private rights.
(d) THE ETHNIC AMALGAMATION
The juristic and social amalgamation of the degraded freemen and the uplifted plebs henceforth inevitably tends toward ethnic interpenetration. While at first the subject peoples were not allowed either to intermarry or to have social intercourse with the freemen, now no such obstacles can be maintained; in any single village the social class is no longer determined by descent from the ruling race, but rather by wealth. And the case may frequently arise where the pure-blooded descendant of the warrior herdsman must earn his living as a field hand in the hire of the equally pure-blooded descendant of the former serfs. The social group of the subjects is now composed of a part of the former ethnic master group and a part of the former subject group.
We say from a part only, because the other part has by this time been amalgamated with the other part of the old ethnic master group into a unital social class. In other words, a part of the plebs has not only attained the position to which the mass of the common freemen have sunk, but has climbed far beyond it, in that it has been completely received into the dominating group, which in the meantime, has not only risen enormously, but has been as greatly diminished in numbers.