Debit and Credit | Page 6

speculations than in the cultivation of his ancestral acres, and the inevitable result ensues that an ever-increasing debt at length necessitates the sale of his estate. Such estates are ever more and more frequently becoming the property of the merchant or manufacturer from the town, or perhaps of the neighboring proprietor of the same inferior rank, who has lately settled in the country, and become entitled to the exercise of equal rights with the hereditary owner. There is no essential difference in social culture between the two classes, but there is a mighty difference between the habits of their lives. The mercantile class of citizens is in Germany more refined than in any other country, and has more political ambition than the corresponding class in England has yet exhibited. The families of public functionaries constitute the other half of the cultivated citizen class; and as the former have the superiority in point of wealth, so these bear the palm in respect of intellectual culture and administrative talent. Almost all authors, since the days of Luther, have belonged to this class. In school and college learning, in information, and in the conduct of public affairs, the citizen is thus, for the most part, as far superior to the nobleman as in fashionable manners the latter is to him. The whole nation, however, enjoys alike the advantage of military education, and every man may become an officer who passes the necessary examination. Thus, in the manufacturing towns, the citizens occupy the highest place, and the nobility in the garrison towns and those of royal residence. This fact, however, must not be lost sight of--that Berlin, the most populous city of Germany, has also gradually become the chief and the richest commercial one, while the great fortress of Magdeburg has also been becoming the seat of a wealthy and cultivated mercantile community.
Instead of desiring landed property, and perhaps a patent of nobility for his children, and an alliance with some noble country family, the rich citizen rather sticks to his business, and prefers a young man in his own rank, or perhaps a clergyman, or professor, or some municipal officer as a suitor to his daughter, to the elegant officer or man of noble blood; for the richest and most refined citizen, though the wife or daughter of a noble official, is not entitled to appear at court with her husband or her father. It is not, therefore, as in England or Scotland, the aim of a man who has plied his industrious calling with success to assume the rank and habits of a nobleman or country squire. The rich man remains in town among his equals. It is only when we understand this difference in the condition of the social relations in Germany and in England that the scope and intention of our novel can be apprehended.
It would be a mistake to suppose that our remarks are only applicable to the eastern provinces of Prussia. If, perhaps, they are less harshly manifested in the western division of our kingdom, and indeed in Western Germany, it is in consequence of noble families being fewer in number, and the conditions of property being more favorable to the citizen class. The defective principle is the same, as also the national feeling in regard to it. It is easily understood, indeed, how this should have become much stronger since 1850, seeing that the greater and lesser nobility have blindly united in endeavoring to bring about a reaction--demanding all possible and impossible privileges and exemptions, or compensations, and are separating themselves more and more widely from the body of the nation.
In Silesia and Posen, however, the theatres on which our story is enacted, other and peculiar elements, though lying, perhaps, beneath the surface, affect the social relations of the various classes. In both provinces, but especially in Posen, the great majority of noblemen are the proprietors of land, and the enactment under Hardenberg and Stein in 1808-10, in regard to peasant rights, had been very imperfectly carried out in districts where vassalage, as in all countries of Slavonic origin, was nearly universal. Many estates are of large extent, and some, indeed, are strictly entailed. These circumstances naturally give to a country life in Silesia or Posen quite a different character than that in the Rhine provinces. In Posen, besides, two foreign elements--found in Silesia also in a far lesser degree--exercise a mighty influence on the social relations of the people. One is the Jewish, the other the Polish element. In Posen, the Jews constitute in the country the class of innkeepers and farmers; of course, they carry on some trade in addition. The large banking establishments are partly, the smaller ones almost exclusively, in their hands. They become, by these means, occasionally the possessors of land; but