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18 THE EVOLUTION OF
the Continent, religious or political refugees, and in the earlier era of the industrial revolution by large migrations of unskilled labourers from Ireland.
§ 8. In Germany the same origin of an industrial prole- tariat is plainly traceable. The same survival of the patri- archal farm-family, in which the labourers held a small legal or customary share in the land, cattle, and product of the farm, receiving part of their payment in a share of the harvest, broken up, partly by the agrarian reform of 1811-16, partly by the Schlesian Law of 1845, the enclosure of the common fields, the restriction and gradual disappearance of theslabourers’ rights, and the subsequent conversion of a class of little profit-sharing farmers into hired labourers. The same compelling forces were operative here as half-a-century earlier in England—the growth of more intensive cultivation, use of machinery, diminished winter employment. in agri- culture or in supplementary industries.*
In Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland, in fact throughout Western Europe, the same general movement has been dis- cernible, its pace determined partly by the growth of popula- tion, partly by the size of the estates, and partly by the condition of agricultural arts. The rapid rise of land values in Belgium from the middle of the nineteenth century, together with the decay of village industries, broke up the economy of a distinctively peasant tenure; the same holds alike of the small peasant districts of Central Italy and the larger estates of South Italy. The prevalence of small hold- ings in these countries and in France, though doubtless retarding the adoption of capitalistic agriculture and the displacement of rural population, has not prevented the constantly increasing flow of a redundant labouring prole- tariat into town industrial life. Everywhere a farm-labour- ing class, shaken from its earlier hold upon the land, has been accompanied in its townward trend by the children of the small peasant proprietors who, finding the economic conditions of the old patriarchal farm-family no longer tolerable, seek the better livelihood and larger independence of industrial life.
1 More work for summer, less for winter, resulted from (a) increased arable, diminished pasture, especially reductions of sheep and flax- growing; (8) machine-threshing in place of the hand-flails (y) diminished work in forestry. (Cf. Sombart, ii. 126.) ;