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[XXI.
1.]
[XXII. 1.]
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[XXI.
2.]
....It
too begins to fluctuate, to increase and diminish, to fly from one hand
into another, and no law is any longer capable of keeping it in a few
predestined hands, or, at any event, surrender to the power of the industrial
capitalists.
Finally, large landed property, which has been forcibly preserved in this
way and which has given rise alongside itself to an extensive industry,
leads more rapidly to a crisis than does the division of landed property,
alongside which the power of industry invariably takes second place.
....It is clear from the case of England
that large landed property has cast off its feudal character and assumed
an industrial character insofar as it wants to make as much money as possible.
It yields the owner the biggest possible rent and the tenant the biggest
possible profit on his capital. As a consequence, the agricultural workers
have already been reduced to a minimum, and the class of tenant farmers
already represents within landed property the might of industry and capital.
As a result of foreign competition, ground rent more or less ceases to
be an independent source of income. A large part of the landowners is
forced to take over from the tenants, some of whom are consequently reduced
to the proletariat. On the other hand, many tenants will take possession
of landed property; for the big landowners, who have given themselves
up for the most part to squandering their comfortable revenue and are
generally not capable of large-scale agricultural management, in many
cases have neither the capital nor the ability to exploit the land. Therefore,
a section of the big landowners is also ruined. Eventually wages, which
have already been reduced to a minimum, must be reduced even further in
order to meet the new competition, This then leads necessarily to revolution.
....Landed property had to develop in each
of these two ways, in order to experience in both of them its necessary
decline; just as industry had to ruin itself both in the form of monopoly
and in the form of competition before it could believe in man.
[XXII. 2.]
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[XXI.
3.]
[XXII. 3.]
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