It no longer produces foodstuffs sufficient for its own
support.
Moreover, the peasant who remains upon the soil is freed
from the landlord, and agricultural production has become
specialized--industrialized. There is the case, for instance, of that
peasant woman who declared that she had not the time to wash her linen
and who sent it to the steam laundry at Karlsruhe. Here is not merely an
economic transformation, but a moral evolution. The agriculturist who no
longer produces in order to consume but in order to sell, and who must
live from the product of his sales, tries to produce as much as
possible. He hires foreign labor to get from it all that he can. The
impersonal relations of employer and employed replace the patriarchal
traditions. Thus the land owner finds himself caught in the mechanism of
the capitalistic system.
As to the "weight" of the new class, it increased prodigiously during
the years following the war of 1870, thanks to the millions which the
empire could invest in its industries and which allowed it to endow its
commerce and its merchant marine, to complete the network of its roads,
canals, and railways.
The law of concentration of capital was verified on this occasion in a
striking manner.
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