place him in unshackled proprietorship of two-thirds of his former holding, the lord receiving the remaining one-third in compensation for the loss of feudal dues. Neither Stein nor Hardenberg interfered with the right of the lord to act as judge and police-magistrate within the limits of his manor; and the hereditary legal jurisdiction, which was abolished in Scotland in 1747, and in France in 1789, continued unchanged in Prussia down to the year 1848. [Relative position of the peasant in Prussia and England.] The history of Agrarian Reform upon the Continent shows how vast was the interval of time by which some of the greatest social changes in England had anticipated the corresponding changes in almost all other nations. But if the Prussian peasant at the beginning of this century remained in the servile condition which had passed out of mind in Great Britain before the Reformation, the early prosperity of the peasant in England was dearly purchased by a subsequent decline which has made his present lot far inferior to that of the children or grandchildren of the Prussian serf. However heavy the load of the Prussian serf, his holding was at least protected by law from absorption into the domain of his lord. Before sufficient capital had been amassed in Prussia to render landed property an object of competition, the forced military service of Frederick had made it a rule of State that the farmsteads of the peasant class must remain undiminished in number, at whatever violence to the laws of the market or the desires of great landlords. No process was permitted to take place corresponding to that by which in England, after the villein had become the free copyholder, the lord, with or without technical legal right, terminated the copyhold tenure of his retainer, and made the land as much his own exclusive property as the chairs and tables in his house. In Prussia, if the law kept the peasant on the land, it also kept the land for the peasant. Economic conditions, in the absence of such control in England, worked against the class of small holders. Their early enfranchisement in fact contributed to their extinction. It would perhaps have been better for the English labouring class to remain bound by a semi-servile tie to their land, than to gain a free holding which the law, siding with the landlord, treated as terminable at the expiration of particular lives, and which the increasing capital of the rich made its favourite prey. It is little profit to the landless, resourceless English labourer to know that his ancestor was a yeoman when the Prussian was a serf. Long as the bondage of the peasant on the mainland endured, prosperity came at last. The conditions which once distinguished agricultural England from the Continent are now reversed. Nowhere on the Continent is there a labouring class so stripped and despoiled of all interest in the soil, so sedulously excluded from all possibilities of proprietorship, as in England.