Toward 1880, for Eastern Prussia only, 7,086 estates of
11,065 belonged to non-nobles. They could have been acquired only with
money. Capital was supplanting birth. Today even, in Prussia, five
members of the Ministry, a little more than one-third, are bourgeois not
enjoying the particle von.
The new dominant class encroached upon the ancient in two ways, by
depriving it of its clientele and by acquiring a considerable weight in
the State. "The weight of a social class" is the totality of its means
of action, which it possesses on account of its numbers, its personal
influence, its wealth, and the importance of the interests which it
represents. The clientele of the agrarian nobility was essentially the
peasants, who have continually diminished in number, the attraction of
industrial and commercial employments having caused a great migration to
the interior, to the factories, and the cities.
For many years this phenomenon has been disclosed by statistics and
pointed out by economists and sociologists, but no remedy has been
found. Today, although emigration abroad has much moderated, Germany has
not labor for its tillage. It is obliged to import farm hands and even
cereals.
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