But the peasantry has yet another enemy: the love of sport among the nobility. As once Karl Marx, the theorist of collectivism, studied in Scotland the expropriation of man from the soil in favour of deer, and in his _Kapital_ exposed the tragic consequences of such excessive sport, so now Rosegger in his home must look on at the depopulating of entire villages. By this means his own birthplace has been nearly ruined. In his first novel, _Heidepeters Gabriel_, he already shows the hopeless struggle of the peasant against the devastation of his fields by game, a struggle which leads to poaching and to prison. And in his novel _Jacob der Letzte_ (1888), which, from an artistic point of view, is perhaps the most complete of his works, the principal character, the last descendant of an old peasant family, who clings tenaciously to the old soil, is beaten and goes under in the struggle. Such a single case becomes for Rosegger an alarming symptom of the universal decline of the free peasantry. "What will come of it?" he asks, when he receives from numerous parts of Germany letters all witnessing to the same facts: "I am no practical teacher of political economy, I am only a poet; but they say that poets are seers, and I verily see that future generations will have to go home to the land again, that only on the land can the social question be peacefully and lastingly solved. Here master and man live on far more friendly footing than in the city, and come humanly nearer together. For twenty-five years I have been preaching in every way the return to natural living. I have built my little house in a peasant village and I live right among the peasants.--I am utterly dissatisfied with the leading spirits of our time: they don't teach us to live, they teach us only to think. One thing we have still to learn--to forget what they have taught us. Our true Mother is the Earth: from her spring our bread and our ideals." The return of the townspeople to nature forms the theme of two later novels, _Erdsegen_ (_The Earth and the Fullness Thereof_, 1900) and _Weltgift_ (_The Poison of the World_, 1903). In the former the editor of a paper pledges himself to live a whole year as farm-labourer in the country. He not only earns his wager, but in the course of the year so richly experiences and realises the blessedness of life on the land that, cured of the fever of city life, he marries a village girl and starts his own farm. This thesis, with its obvious strong purpose, aroused opposition. The chief objection brought forward was that it would be impossible for a thoroughly town-bred person to take such deep root in the country. In reply to this, Rosegger points in the other novel to the fate of a townsman, who, unlike the character in the former book, is too full of the city virus for recovery. The poison of the world has eaten right into him, and he cannot escape his doom.