242 According to _v. d. Goltz’s_ Enquête, the earnings of workmen by the piece, compared with the wages paid workmen by the day in summer, is especially high in middle Franconia (16.5:10); in the Leipzig circle of the German empire (16.6), in the Braunschweig plain (16.8), within the jurisdiction of Hildesheim (18.1), of the Bavarian Palatinate (18.6), in Rhenish Hesse (23.2), especially low in Stettin (13.2:10), in Stralsund (12.4), in Schleswig Holstein (12), in Osnabrück, (11.7.) 243 According to _v. Flotow_, Anleitung zur Fertigung der Ertragsanschlage, I, 80, four days of serf labor are equivalent to only three of a free day laborer. According to _v. Jacob_, Ueber die Arbeit Leibeigener und freier Bauern (1815), 21, two day laborers are equal to three serfs, and one farm horse is equal to two employed by serfs. It is as impossible to obtain accurate general estimates here, as in the case of slave labor. As a rule, hope is not only a more humane but a sharper spur to action. But if force is employed at all, there is no doubt that the greater it is, the more effectual it is. Wherever the right of corporal punishment has been taken from the masters, the technic value of serfdom has uniformly decreased. In the English West Indies, formerly, philanthropic masters who treated their negroes with unwonted gentleness, obtained from them, as a rule, very poor economic results. While each of the slaves expressed the greatest indignation at the idleness of the others when they had “so good a master,” they were all equally and excessively lazy. The weekly production of a plantation sank rapidly under this system from thirty-three hogsheads to twenty-three, and finally to thirteen. _Math. Levis_, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1834; Edinburg Review, XLV, 410. For the same reason, the negroes in the Spanish colonies, who were treated much more gently than those owned by other European nationalities produced much worse work. See, however, _Columella_, De Re rust., I, 8. 244 According to _Howlett_, The Insufficiency of the Causes to which the Increase of our Poor Rate have been ascribed (1788), piece wages had become usual “a few years ago.” Very recently the trades unions have again restricted the system of piece wages (§ 176).