The German peasant for centuries lost much that was valuable in order to attain a higher condition; his freedom and elevation to citizenship in our State was effected in an apparently indirect way. At the time of the Carlovingians more than half the peasants were free and armed, and the pith of the popular strength; at the time of Frederick the Great, almost all the country people were under strict bondage,--the beasts of burden of the new State, weak and languishing, without political object or interest in the State. Somewhat of the old weakness still clings to them. We shall therefore first take a short review of an earlier period, comparing it with the peasant life of the last two centuries. What the Romans mention of the condition of the German agricultural districts, is only sufficient to give us a glimpse of ancient peasant life. According to their accounts, the Germans were long considered to be a wild warrior race, who lived in transition from a wandering life to an uncertain settlement, and it was seldom inquired how it was possible that such hordes should for centuries carry on a victorious resistance to the disciplined armies of the greatest power on earth. When Cheruskers, Chattens, Bructerers, Batavers, and other people of less geographical note, occasioned terror, not only to single legions, but to large Roman armies, not once, but in continual wars for more than one generation,--when a Markomannen chief disciplined 70,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry after the fashion of legions; when a Roman, after a century of devastating wars between the Rhine and the Elbe, puts before us with great emphasis the powerful masses of the Germans,--we may conclude that single tribes which, with their allies, could sometimes bring into the field more than 100,000 warriors, must have counted a population of hundreds of thousands. And we equally approach to a second conclusion, that such a multitude in a narrowly limited space, surrounded by warlike neighbours, could only exist by means of a simple, perhaps, but regular and extensive cultivation of field products. That the agriculture of the Germans should appear meagre to the Romans, after the garden cultivation of Italy and Gaul, is comprehensible; nevertheless they found corn, millet, wheat, and barley; but the common corn of the country was oats, the meal of which they despised, and rye, which Pliny calls an unpalatable growth of the Alpine country, productive of colic. But in the year 301, the corn which made the German black bread, was introduced as the third article of commerce in the corn bourse of Greece and Asia Minor. And from barley the German brewed his home drink, beer; he also brewed from wheat.