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 they regard such property almost always as a mere subject for speculation, and it is but rarely that the quondam innkeeper or peddler settles down as a tiller of the soil. In Silesia, their chief seat is in Breslau, where the general trade of the country, as well as the purchase and the sale of land, is for the most part transacted. It is a pretty general feeling in Germany that Freytag has not dealt altogether impartially with this class, by failing to introduce in contrast to the abandoned men whom he selects for exhibition a single honest, upright Jew, a character not wanting among that remarkable people. The inextinguishable higher element of our nature, and the fruits of German culture, are manifested, it is true, in the Jewish hero of the tale, ignorant alike of the world and its ways, buried among his cherished books, and doomed to early death; but this is done more as a poetic comfort to humanity than in honor of Judaism, from which plainly in his inmost soul he had departed, that he might turn to the Christianized spirit and to the poetry of the Gentiles.