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different from that of Portugal or Spain. It is a
misfortune when any class is too self-contained, too
immobile; and the recent progress of the peasantry is due
to its diffusion as a class. But its existence in modern
Finland is a great advantage compared to the social
state of most other countries. To some extent it is
developed from the old village community with its
communal cultivation of land; the “bönder” shared
in this common cultivation, while the large farms
of the gentry and the small plots of the cottiers were
outside the common lands, the former being too
important, the latter too insignificant to form part
of them. But this middle-class does not owe its
existence solely to this ancient method of holding and
cultivating land. A powerful peasant class exists in
those smaller districts of the North which were
divided into isolated farms without villages or common
cultivation and property; and, on the other hand, it
does not exist in countries where the old communal
cultivation of the land was the rule, but where, before
the systematic enclosure and distribution of mixed
farm lands, the possibilities of cultivation favoured the
division of land into very small plots. The condition
of the peasantry is mainly determined by the character
of their agricultural labour, which is again dependent
on natural conditions. In reality, the largest peasant
farmers came into existence precisely owing to this
absence of village communal proprietorship; either
because the old settlement took place on already
existing farms (as Meitzen supposes to have been the case in
Germany west of the Weser, and in the adjacent parts
of Belgium and France, where Teutons, according to
him, entered and settled down in old Celtic farms),
or the first colonisation dates from a time when the
system of common land was falling into disuse, and
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