The system of this country has attracted instead of repelling population, and with its growth there has been a constant and rapid advance toward freedom. The class of verpachters above described
"Were originally strangers from Mecklenburg, Brunswick, and Hanover, bred to the complicated arrangements and business of a great dairy farm, and they are the best educated, most skilful, and most successful farmers in the North of Europe. Many of them have purchased large estates. The extensive farms they occupy, generally on leases of nine years, are the domains and estates of the nobles, which, before 1784, were cultivated by the serfs, who were, before that period, adscripti glebæ, and who were bound to work every day, without wages, on the main farm of the feudal lord, and had cottages and land, on the outskirts of the estate, to work upon for their own living when they were not wanted on the farm of the baron. Their feudal lord could imprison them, flog them, reclaim them if they had deserted from his land, and had complete feudal jurisdiction over them in his baronial court."—P. 53.
It is, however, not only in land, but in various other modes, that the little owner of capital is enabled to employ it with advantage. "The first thing a Dane does with his savings," says Mr. Brown,[183] British consul at Copenhagen—
"Is to purchase a clock; then a horse and cow, which he hires out, and which pay good interest. Then his ambition is to become a petty proprietor; and this class of persons is better off than any in Denmark. Indeed, I know no people in any country who have more easily within their reach all that is really necessary for life than this class, which is very large in comparison with that of labourers."
To the power advantageously to employ the small accumulations of the labourer, it is due that the proportion of small proprietors has become so wonderfully large. "The largest proportion of the country, and of the best land of it," says Mr. Laing,[184] is in their hands—
"With farms of a size to keep ten or fifteen cows, and which they cultivate by hired labour, along with the labour of the family. These small proprietors, called huffner, probably from hoff, a farm-steading and court-yard, correspond to the yeomen, small freeholders, and statesmen, of the North of England, and many of them are wealthy. Of this class of estates, it is reckoned there are about 125,150 in the two duchies: some of the huffners appear to be copyholders, not freeholders; that is, they hold their land by hereditary right, and may sell or dispose of it; but their land is subject to certain fixed payments of money, labour, cartages, ploughing yearly to the lord of the manor of which they hold it, or to fixed fines for non-payment. A class of smaller land-holders are called Innsters, and are properly cottars with a house, a yard, and land for a cow or two, and pay a rent in money and in labour, and receive wages, at a reduced rate, for their work all the year round. They are equivalent to our class of married farm-servants, but with the difference that they cannot be turned off at the will or convenience of the verpachter, or large farmer, but hold of the proprietor; and all the conditions under which they hold—sometimes for life, sometimes for a term of years—are as fixed and supported by law, as those between the proprietor and the verpachter. Of this class there are about 67,710, and of house-cottars without land; 17,480, and 36,283 day-labourers in husbandry. The land is well divided among a total population of only 662,500 souls."—P. 43.
Even the poorest of these labouring householders has a garden, some land, and a cow;[185] and everywhere the eye and hand of the little proprietor may be seen busily employed, while the larger farmers, says our author—
"Attend our English cattle-shows and agricultural meetings, are educated men, acquainted with every agricultural improvement, have agricultural meetings and cattle-shows of their own, and publish the transactions and essays of the members. They use guano, and all the animal or chemical manures, have introduced tile-draining, machinery for making pipes and tiles, and are no strangers to irrigation on their old grass meadows."—P. 127.
As a natural consequence, the people are well clothed. "The proportion," says Mr. Laing—
"Of well-dressed people in the streets is quite as great as in our large towns; few are so shabby in clothes as the unemployed or half-employed workmen and labourers in Edinburgh; and a proletarian class, half-naked and in rags, is not to be seen. The supply of clothing material for the middle and lower classes seems as great, whether we look at the people themselves or at the second or third rate class of shops with goods for their use."—P. 379.