In Roumania,[8] in spite of a liberal constitution modeled upon the Belgian, granting all rights enjoyed by citizens of a free state, the underlying economic, social and, in a measure, political conditions point to a state of things little removed from the medieval forms of life. The main social-economic classes are the large landed proprietors, composed chiefly of the old nobility or boyars, and the peasants, who were formerly serfs. In the hands of the former are concentrated the greater part of the land. Five thousand large landed proprietors together owned nearly half of the cultivable land. Nearly a million of peasants, on the other hand, comprising with their dependents a great majority of the population, together owned a little over two-fifths of the cultivable land.[9]
This situation is an inheritance from the servile system which existed in Roumania until 1864, when it was legally abolished. The freedom granted to the peasants was, however, more formal than real. The land given them being insufficient for their needs, and pasture land especially having been denied them, they were as a rule compelled to lease land or pasture right from their former masters at ruinous rates, often paying by labor on their former masters' estates. Thus the essential feudal services were in the main continued, especially as the lease and labor contracts, generally drawn up in the interests of the landed proprietor, were often usurious and extremely oppressive.[10] In twenty years there was little change from the previous condition of serfdom, so that a law was necessary, in 1882, to permit the peasants to work at least two days during the week on their own land.
Since this period there has been practically little change in this essentially feudal relation of the peasantry to the landed proprietors. As the owners of the great estates are a ruling power in the political life of the country, the greater part of peasants being disqualified from voting through property and educational requirements, the former have been enabled to keep the peasantry in this condition of semi-servitude. The result is a state of ignorance, misery and degradation on the part of the peasantry that is difficult to parallel in another European country. That the peasants are not entirely passive under their wrongs is shown in the repeated uprisings against their masters and in the two great social revolutions of 1888 and 1907, both of which were put down by military force.
Roumania's advent into industry and commerce may be dated from the eighties of the last century, and was initiated by the industrial law of 1887, which sought to create a national industry by means of subsidies, land grants and other favors to undertakers of large industrial enterprises. Since then the growth has been sufficiently rapid to place Roumania as the industrial and commercial leader of the Balkan States. Relatively, however, it is still very backward. Only 14 per cent of the population is urban. The industrial laborers are estimated at no more than 40,000. There are only a few cities. Only the largest—Bucarest—has above 100,000 inhabitants, three other cities have between fifty and seventy-five thousand inhabitants. The chief industrial establishments, such as saw mills, flour mills and distilleries, are concerned mainly in the working up of the raw materials produced in the country. Nevertheless, industrial progress has made for the growth of a small but influential middle class, which divides the control of affairs with the large landed proprietors. Its influence can be traced in the electoral law, which gives the urban classes, constituting the backbone of the liberal party, a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
III. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
Though relatively far advanced along the road of modern civilization, Austria-Hungary, through its prevailing mode of economic and social life, and through its large Slavic populations, belongs rather to Eastern than to Western Europe. Historically, it began its modern career about the same time as Russia, when it abolished, in 1867, the feudal services and dues, survivals of the previous servile institutions. Nevertheless, in its large agricultural population, in the primitive system of cultivation generally in vogue, in the scattered character of the peasant holdings, in the strong contrast between the great landed estates or Latifundia, held chiefly by the nobility, and the small, even minute, estates of the majority of the peasant proprietors, and in the natural economy prevailing in many parts of the Dual Monarchy and constituting the main foundation upon which the life of the peasants rests—in all these characteristics, is reflected the almost medieval economy which existed in the empire before 1848 and which is not yet entirely outgrown.
Industrially and commercially, Austria, far more than Hungary, has indeed made really remarkable progress. Yet in this respect the greatest contrast exists between the various Austrian provinces. Certain of these—Galicia and Bukowina, for instance—are not only the most backward in these pursuits, but their agricultural population is even relatively increasing. Even in the industrially advanced provinces, such as Lower Austria and Bohemia, the transitional nature of the industrial life is evident in the unspecialized character of a larger portion of the town laborers, many of whom are peasants temporarily employed in factories and mines.
The Austrian organization of industry and commerce is a modernized version of the guilds and crafts of medieval Western Europe. How these medieval economic forms with their underlying psychologic forces still live and dominate Austria, especially its Slavic nationalities, is shown by the revival in 1859 of the Austrian guilds, the direct descendants of the medieval Innungen. These were, in 1883, developed in the form of Zwangsgenossenschaften or compulsory trade-guilds, which, in their regulations concerning the Befähigungsnachweis or certificate of capacity, the three orders of master, journeyman and apprentice, the principle of compulsory entrance into the local guild, the workman's passport or Arbeitsbuch, unite the methods of regulating and restricting industry and trade characteristic of the Middle Ages, with modern methods of combination, arbitration, and assistance of members. By the side of these compulsory guilds are to be found the Gewerkschaften, or the modern voluntary trade-unions.
The transition to modern economic and social conditions is, nevertheless, well advanced. This is seen in a decrease of the agricultural classes and an increase of the industrial and commercial classes in the thirty years from 1869 to 1900. Another sign is the fairly strong differentiation of the economic-social classes, in both the agricultural and the industrial groups, which has advanced quite rapidly. The middle class, while neither as large nor as influential as in the countries of Western Europe, has played an important rôle towards hastening this transition.
Politically, the Dual Monarchy occupies a middle ground between absolutist Russia and constitutional England. The court, the nobility and the Roman Church with its strong aristocratic leanings, represent the dominant power in Austria. The economic and social changes of the transitional period have been accompanied by politico-economic struggles which have played a vital part and have cut through and across the racial, national and religious conflicts of this much-distracted conglomeration of peoples. Amid the confusion of parties, with their complexity of programs, may be distinguished the German-Austrian liberals, representatives of the middle class or industrialists, whose historic mission was to create a modern state in Austria, and who carried out, in large measure, their program of constitutionalism, economic freedom and the secular state. Against them were arrayed the powerful forces of the agrarian party or the landed aristocracy—the upholders of the feudal economic-social order of privilege and class distinction, the clericals—the upholders of the idea of the Christian State—and the representatives of the lower middle class, composed chiefly of petty artisans and traders, whose ideal was the medieval industrial organization, largely co-operative and regulated, as opposed to the individualistic and competitive system of the modern era, with its great concentration of wealth, capital and power in the hands of the middle class. That the present structure of Austria is so much of a compromise and crosspatch between modern and medieval economic, social and political forms, and contains so much that is essentially incongruous, is due largely to the successful struggle which the chief parties of the medieval order—the feudal-clericals—the party of the upper classes, and the Christian Socialists—the party of the lower classes—have waged against the growing constitutionalization, industrialization and secularization of Austria—in short, against the transformation of Austria into a modern state.