The arable land is chiefly under rye, of which great breadths are occasionally seen without fences or divisions. Already, where the snow had melted, the surface of these rye-fields was beautifully green. The average yield scarcely exceeds twenty bushels an acre, and it is often very much less. Were the labour and manure expended upon half the land, the profit, as our own experience has shown, would on the whole be much increased. Few root crops are grown, and these only on the low, black, and boggy land. The manures employed are what is made by the cattle and sheep, marl, black earth (moder) from the peaty bottoms, the pine leaves which are collected in the forests, and are known under the name ofwaldstrew(forest straw), and the wood and peaty ashes from their fires. It is common to grow rape for the seed; and then the proprietor, if he has the means, erects a crushing-mill, uses the cake for his cattle, and sells the oil. Of rape-cake it is usual to give about a quarter of a pound a-day to the horses—their other food being oats, pease, and rye, mixed in equal quantities, and given three times a-day with chopped strawad libitum. Of his potatoes the lord makes brandy, and feeds his stock on the refuse which remains in the still. Thus, he is a distiller as well as an oil-crusher, and a distillery in most parts of Germany is a usual appendage to the farm. Only very small, usually waxy, potatoes are retained for table use, the large and mealy ones being given either to the pigs or to the brandy-maker. Then the lakes yield their share of revenue. They are fished in winter, with nets introduced through holes in the ice; and the take from the lakes in this quarter is sent to the market of Berlin. Thus the lord is a fish-merchant also. Some proprietors, again, begrudge the waste of wood ashes upon the land; and as these readily melt into glass, another way of adding to the revenue is to build a glass-house. Hence many small glass-houses are scattered about in the midst of the forests, and another complication is added to the affairs and the manifold accounts of the North Prussian landlord. If he possess a bed of good marl, he burns it into lime with his waste timber, and both sells and uses it. If he find good clay, he makes bricks and coarse pottery. Thus he attempts to develop everything, to turn everything into money. He is the sole capitalist. There is no division of labour. He monopolises all trades and wholesale commerce. He has large concerns, various establishments, numerous servants, intricate accounts, and withal, as we Englanders would expect, it is only one man here and there who makes things yearly better, and finally enriches himself. Thus the Prussian aristocracy are livers in the country, full of affairs, rarely reside in Berlin, and at the most come for a month or two to apartments in a hotel, and attend a few state balls and receptions given by the royal family, and return again to their country habits. Amid the limited society of the unproductive sandy plains these habits not unfrequently degenerate.
Upon this estate two farms were let to tenants. We visited one of them. It was let on a lease for fifteen years, contained 2000 acres of corn-land, and 550 of meadow. The rent was 1800 dollars in money, 200 in kind, and about 500 in taxes—in all, about 2500 dollars, or a dollar (3s.) an acre. The tenant had upon it 800 sheep, 14 cows, 18 draught-oxen, and 10 horses. Twelve families of labourers were lodged upon the farm, and extra labour was employed as required. Everything in the way of stock and implements was defective. The sheep are kept under cover in the winter. They are fed on hay, the breeding ewes receiving, besides, chopped turnips and carrots. The sheep-houses, both here and elsewhere, we found to be warm and comfortable. The lord worked his own land with 64 horses and 76 draught-oxen, and had a yearly increasing flock of sheep, amounting at present to 4500.
The farm labourers are but poorly off. Those who live on the farm (thehausinnen) receive for the man’s wage four silver groschen, and for the woman’s three silver groschen a-day. (Five silver groschen make an English sixpence.) They have a house, for which each of them, the man and woman, must pay two days a week in summer, one day and a half in autumn, and half a day in the three first months of the year. They are allowed also two acres of corn-land, and a third of an acre for a garden. They have pasture for a cow, and are permitted to cut the inferior wood on the heath for fuel, and to gather the pine-needles from the forest for manure. Day-labourers, not resident on the farm, receive 5 silver groschen a-day—the unhappy sixpence of our Irish peasant.
There are on the outside, and here and there indenting the large estate, numerous small properties of from five to eighty acres, formerly belonging to the lord, and many of them owing him still a yearly acknowledgment. These people, though in a sense independent, yet upon such land are generally poor. They keep one or two horses, or two cows, to plough their light sandy soil, from three to thirty sheep, and a few pigs. With a single horse a man will work his farm of forty or fifty acres. Milk is their principal diet, and many never eat meat once a year, unless it be a bit of their own home-fed pork.
In this part of Prussia the people are nearly all Roman Catholics. Most of the traffic is in the hands of Jews. Each sect has its own place of worship and its own school in the village. The Roman Catholic priest is nominated by the lord, and the evangelical minister and the Jewish rabbi must both be approved by him. There are six schools on the estate, which are under government inspection, and of which the salaries of the masters are paid by the estate. Religious instruction is not excluded from the schools, but each denomination has here at least its own school. The sectarian spirit is very bitter, especially on the part of the ignorant Romanists, against the evangelicals, whose church had gone down, but has lately been rebuilt, very much to the dissatisfaction of the dominant party. Hence, though Protestant children are sometimes found in the Romanist school, the contrary is never the case. On occasion of our visit, a grander display than usual was got up by the priest in honour of the English visitors of our host. The village Schüzerei, sixty strong, marched up on the Sunday morning, with music and banners, to escort us to church. The whole population had turned out to see the strangers. The church was crowded to suffocation; and to identify himself with the occasion, the priest got up a religious procession through and around the church. First went so many of the sharpshooters, carrying their muskets; next a party bearing the Virgin and Child under a canopy; then the Herrschaft from the schloss, with lighted candles in their hands; then the priest with the Host under a large canopy, borne by four men; and the procession was closed by the remainder of the armed Schüzer, and by men and women in great numbers from the congregation. Coming out at the west end of the church, it marched northwards round the church, through six inches of untrodden snow; and when the head of the procession again reached the west end, the priest stopped, and with him the people. He then elevated the Host, when down went men and women, all in adoration, kneeling in the cold snow. Our travelling-companion, who had never assisted at a Roman Catholic service, had accompanied the party to church, not knowing what awaited him, and he was indeed mortified when he found himself unintentionally, and from the goodness of his nature, involved in such an act of worship.
While the party were absent at church, we walked to an adjoining round hill for the purpose of enjoying the view, when, in a thin plantation which partially covered it, we stumbled upon the Jewish burying-ground. Scattered among the trees, here and there stood on end slabs of granite and other hard rock, split from the boulder-stones of which we have already spoken; and on the flat faces of these were graven large, beautifully clear, deeply cut, Hebrew characters, bearing, no doubt, the names and commemorating the virtues of the dead, and expressing the love and sorrow of the living. In this far-off region the lonely Hebrew graves, so far from the homes of the once-favoured people, recalled to our minds those distant days when the Euphrates saw them weeping disconsolate, and the oppressor, as now in Poland and its borders, treating them with contumely and despite.
“By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us, mirth. Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her cunning.
“If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”
It is very remarkable to find three millions of Jews settled in this portion of Europe. It may have been that, in former ages, when the Roman Church persecuted them so madly, they found greater peace and safety near the limits of the Eastern and Western churches, where the power of both was somewhat lessened; but certainly, in modern times, the two million two hundred thousand who are subjects of the Czar might readily find a more comfortable home.
Among other things which will amuse the Englishman in Germany, and, if, like ourselves, he refreshes himself at times with a cup of good tea, may perchance annoy him occasionally, is the kind of beverage he will obtain under this name. In the hotels we had often experienced this, and we expected to have our tea weak enough in the schloss also. But a refinement we had heard of, but never met, here presented itself in the form of a tiny bottle of rum, which was handed round with the sugar and cream to give a flavour to the tea! This contrivance for giving the tea some taste and flavour, so much less simple, one would suppose, than adding more of the pure leaf, is common in other parts of Germany besides West Prussia. Here is a humorous passage from a recent work of fiction by a German baroness, which illustrates very graphically the Teutonic notions about tea-drinking.
“At this moment Walburg exclaimed, ‘The water boils!’ and they all turned towards the hearth. ‘How much tea shall I put into the tea-pot?’ asked Madame Berger, appealing to Hamilton.
‘The more you put in the better it will be,’ answered Hamilton, without moving.
‘Shall I put in all that is in this paper?’
Hamilton nodded, and the tea was made.
‘Ought it not to boil a little now?’
‘By no means.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Walburg, ‘a little piece of vanille would improve the taste.’
‘On no account,’ said Hamilton.
‘The best thing to give it a flavour is rum,’ observed Madame Berger.
‘I forbid the rum, though I must say the idea is not bad,’ said Hamilton, laughing.
Hildegarde put the tea-pot on a little tray, and left the kitchen just as her stepmother entered it.
His tea was unanimously praised, but Madame Rosenberg exhibited some natural consternation on hearing that the whole contents of her paper cornet, with which she had expected to regale her friends at least half-a-dozen times, had been inconsiderately emptied at once into the tea-pot!
‘It was no wonder the tea was good! English tea, indeed! Any one could make tea after that fashion! But then, to be sure, English people never thought about what anything cost. For her part, she found the tea bitter, and recommended a spoonful or two of rum.’ On her producing a little green bottle, the company assembled around her with their tea-cups, and she administered to each one two or three spoonfuls as they desired.”[34]
Here our limits compel us to stop. After staying a few days at Tütz we returned upon our steps, again saw our friends at Berlin, thence came to Cologne in one day, to Ghent the second, and to London the third. We fell in with the Peace deputies on their way from St Petersburg, and divers other accidents happened to us which our most patient readers will thank us for passing by.