What then happened? An event of capital importance which everybody knows, but of which we only now begin to see the consequences. It was the radical transformation of Germany from an agricultural to an industrial nation. In its origin this phenomenon dates from before the nineteenth century. By 1848 it had become perceptible. Since 1866, and especially since 1871, it has dominated the entire social evolution of the empire. Here, in fact, is the revolution. It partakes of the character of a tragedy, it has overturned the conditions of life throughout the entire German territory.
At the close of the War of Independence, four out of five Germans lived on the land, two out of three were engaged in agriculture. By 1895 the agricultural population was only 35.7 per cent. That, supported by industry and commerce, kept continually increasing. In 1895 it was 50.6 per cent.
This progress of industry and trade indicates the rise of a new class of the population, that of the capitalists. It seemed at first that their arrival would result in a dispossession of the nobility. For example, under the ancien régime the bourgeois could not acquire the property of the nobles. Toward 1880, for Eastern Prussia only, 7,086 estates of 11,065 belonged to non-nobles. They could have been acquired only with money. Capital was supplanting birth. Today even, in Prussia, five members of the Ministry, a little more than one-third, are bourgeois not enjoying the particle von.
The new dominant class encroached upon the ancient in two ways, by depriving it of its clientele and by acquiring a considerable weight in the State. "The weight of a social class" is the totality of its means of action, which it possesses on account of its numbers, its personal influence, its wealth, and the importance of the interests which it represents. The clientele of the agrarian nobility was essentially the peasants, who have continually diminished in number, the attraction of industrial and commercial employments having caused a great migration to the interior, to the factories, and the cities.
For many years this phenomenon has been disclosed by statistics and pointed out by economists and sociologists, but no remedy has been found. Today, although emigration abroad has much moderated, Germany has not labor for its tillage. It is obliged to import farm hands and even cereals. It no longer produces foodstuffs sufficient for its own support.
Moreover, the peasant who remains upon the soil is freed from the landlord, and agricultural production has become specialized—industrialized. There is the case, for instance, of that peasant woman who declared that she had not the time to wash her linen and who sent it to the steam laundry at Karlsruhe. Here is not merely an economic transformation, but a moral evolution. The agriculturist who no longer produces in order to consume but in order to sell, and who must live from the product of his sales, tries to produce as much as possible. He hires foreign labor to get from it all that he can. The impersonal relations of employer and employed replace the patriarchal traditions. Thus the land owner finds himself caught in the mechanism of the capitalistic system.
As to the "weight" of the new class, it increased prodigiously during the years following the war of 1870, thanks to the millions which the empire could invest in its industries and which allowed it to endow its commerce and its merchant marine, to complete the network of its roads, canals, and railways.
The law of concentration of capital was verified on this occasion in a striking manner. In the famous years 1871 to 1874, which the Germans call the Gründejahre, the foundation years, gigantic industrial and commercial enterprises took a spring which seemed irresistible. A Director of the Deutsche Bank, of the Dresdener Bank, the President of a company for transatlantic commerce, such as the Hamburg-American Line, or of the committee of great electric establishments, enjoyed an influence in the councils of the State far greater than that of a Baron, a Count, or a little mediatized Prince.
What was the aristocracy of birth going to do about it? Struggle desperately? It took that tack at first. Bismarck ranged himself in its support for some time. He was himself an agrarian. But he was not long in installing paper mills on his estates at Varzin. It is said that the Emperor himself possesses porcelain factories. A part of the nobility for a long time tried to adapt itself to the new method of production. It took to it awkwardly and often ended in ruin.
Freytag has described this phenomenon at its beginnings in a romance which is a chef d'oeuvre. A part of the nobility yielded, fell into the hands of the financiers, the money lenders, the managers of agricultural enterprises, sold their lands, and took refuge in the great civil, administrative and military posts. The remainder resisted as well as they could. There was antagonism between their interests and those of the capitalists, between the religious and particularist tendencies on one hand and free thought and cosmopolitanism on the other. The agrarians demanded tariff duties on agricultural products to raise the price of their foodstuffs. The industrials wanted a low cost of living in order to avoid the rise of wages and to compete with better advantage for foreign markets.