THE LAND SYSTEM IN PRUSSIA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 47, 16 December 1871, Page 6

THE LAND SYSTEM IN PRUSSIA.

A recent writer says : —The necessity of cultivating small proprietors has been fully recognised by the Prussian Government by forced sales. I am not an admirer of this system, yet it is far better than the concentration of lands in the hands of the few, as in England. It leads to a greater distribution of wealth, and enables the Government to call, with a greater show of justice, upon a larger number to defend the country when in danger. I very much doubt, had it not been for the existence of this system, whether the men of Germany would have fought so well as they did in the recent war. The battalions of our own Cromwell were mostly composed of a class of yeomen now almost unknown. They fought as men only fight who have something to fight for. In Prussia, by the law of 1850, the smallest occupier of peasants' land acquires the proprietorship at twenty years' purchase, the amount being paid to the landlord, not in money, but in rent debentures issued by the authority of the State, and bearing four per cent interest, and gradually redeemable by means of the one per cent difference, which at compound interest extinguishes the principal in a little over forty-one years. The Prussian peasant has, however, two other options ; he may pay less by one-tenth to the State Bank than the rent he formerly paid to his landlord, in which case the purchase debentures take fifty-six years to redeem; or he may, if he can raise the cash, compel his landlord to accept eighteen years' purhhase money of the annual rent. By this means, nearly 100,000 peasant proprietors have- been created in Prussia. Bent debentures to the extent of many millions have been issued to the land owners, and in less than eighteen years more than one-eighth of the debentures issued have been entirely redeemed and extinguished.