Although this is one part of the content of the state concept, there is another, which in the beginning is of much greater magnitude; the idea of economic exploitation, the political means for the satisfaction of needs. The peasant surrenders a portion of the product of his labor, without any equivalent service in return. “_In the beginning was the ground rent._” The forms under which the ground rent is collected or consumed vary. In some cases, the lords, as a closed union or community, are settled in some fortified camp and consume as communists the tribute of their peasantry. This is the situation in the state of the Inca. In some cases, each individual warrior-noble has a definite strip of land assigned to him: but generally the produce of this is still, as in Sparta, consumed in the “syssitia,” by class associates and companions in arms. In some cases, the landed nobility scatters over the entire territory, each man housed with his following in his fortified castle, and consuming, each for himself, the produce of his dominion or lands. As yet these nobles have not become landlords, in the sense that they administer their property. Each of them receives tribute from the labor of his dependents, whom he neither guides nor supervises. This is the type of the mediæval dominion in the lands of the Germanic nobility. Finally, the knight becomes the owner and administrator of the knight’s fee.[F] His former serfs develop into the laborers on his plantation, and the tribute now appears as the profit of the entrepreneur. This is the type of the earliest capitalist enterprise of modern times, the exploitation of large territories in the lands east of the Elbe, formerly occupied by Slavs and later colonized by Germans. Numerous transitions lead from one stage to the other. [F] _Rittergutsbesitz_ is the ultimate molecule of the German feudal system, a non-urban territory, approximating the concept of knight’s fee in the Angevin fiscal legislation; in modern Germanic law, the possession of an acreage, alienable only as an entity, and by recent legislation, alienable to non-nobles, but subject to and capable of certain exceptions in law not inhering in other forms of real estate.--_Translator._