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