own the plot of land, which his lord kindly allowed him to cultivate in his few spare moments. [Sidenote: The Middle Classes.] The mass of the population of Central and Eastern Europe was purely agricultural, and in its poverty expected naught but the bare necessaries of existence. Trade, commerce, and manufactures were therefore practically non-existent. This meant that the cities, and consequently the middle classes, formed but an insignificant factor in the population. In the West of Europe, on the Rhine, and more especially in France, where the agricultural classes were more independent, more wealthy, and more civilised, existence demanded more comforts, and a well-to-do and intelligent commercial and manufacturing urban element quickly developed to supply the demand created. Commerce, trade, and the concentrated employment of labour produced a prosperous and enlightened middle class, accustomed for generations to education and the possession of personal freedom. With wealth always goes civilisation and education, and as there was a larger middle class in France and Western Germany than in Central and Eastern Europe, the peasants in those parts were better educated and more intelligent. [Sidenote: The Upper Classes.] The condition of the upper classes followed the same geographical distribution. The highest aristocracy of all European countries was indeed, as it has always been, on much the same intellectual and social level. Paris was its centre, the capital of society, fashion, and luxury, where Russian, Austrian, Swedish, and English nobles met on an equality. But the bulk of the German and Eastern European aristocracy was in education and refinement inferior to the bulk of the French nobility. Yet they possessed an authority which the French nobility had lost. The Russian, Prussian, and Austrian nobleman and the Hungarian magnate was the owner of thousands of serfs, who cultivated his lands and rendered him implicit obedience. The French nobleman exacted only certain rents, either copyhold quit-rents or feudal services, from the tenants on his ancestral estates. His tenants were in no sense his serfs; they owed him no personal service, and resented the payment of the rent substituted for such service. The patriarchal feeling of loyalty to the lord had long disappeared, and the French peasant did not acknowledge any subjection to his landlord, while the Prussian and Russian serf recognised his bondage to his master. [Sidenote: Why France experienced the Revolution.]