Undoubtedly those freemen were to be envied who felt the advantage of their better position, but only a small portion were so fortunate. Generally, even in the eighteenth century, freemen with little or no land of their own, preferred being received as villeins on some great landed property. When Frederick I. of Prussia, shortly after 1700, wished to free the serfs in Pomerania, they refused it, because they considered the new duties imposed upon them more severe than what they had hitherto borne. And in fact the free peasants were scarcely less burdened with new service than those who had been the villeins of the old time. It is difficult to judge impartially of the human condition which developed itself under this oppression. For such a life looks very different in daily intercourse, to what it does in the statute-book. Much that appears insupportable to us was made bearable by ancient custom. Undoubtedly the kind-hearted benevolence of the nobles, of old families who had grown up with their country-people through many generations, mitigated the severity of servitude, and a cordial connexion existed between master and serfs. Still more frequently the brutal selfishness of the masters was softened and kept within bounds by that prudence which now influences the American slaveholders. The landed proprietor and his family passed their lives among the peasants, and if he endeavoured to instil fear, he also had cause for fear. Easily on a stormy night might the flames be kindled among his wooden farm buildings, and no province was without its dismal stories of harsh landlords or bailiffs who had been slain by unknown hands in field or wood. However much we may admit the goodness or prudence of masters, the position of the peasants still remains the darkest feature of the past time. For we find everywhere in the scanty records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an unhealthy antagonism of classes. _And it was the larger portion of the German people which was ruined by this oppression._[29]