THE RESULTS OF CONFISCATION
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religious discord, and disabilities arising from Creed have been absent, the legal and social system has shut out the mass of the original inhabitants from rising into the position of landed proprietors. Even the merchants of the cities and the culture of the University are predominantly German.[1] How far apart the races still are was shown some ten years ago during the agrarian troubles, accompanied as they were by excesses on the part of the peasantry and by measures of repression on the part of the government which rivalled anything done in Ireland by either party in 1641 and 1642.[2]
- ↑ If any of the native nobility preserved their lands they were fused so long ago with the conquering Teutonic "barons" that they now form only one caste. The same applies to any descendants of Danish and Sweedish nobility in these provinces.
- ↑ The following extract from the Times' Russian Supplement of December 17th, 1915, is interesting:— "The record of the atrocities in the Baltic provinces was published to the world in a proclamation, printed in six different languages, by the wronged and suffering people. It was but a foretaste of what other German Junkers perpetrated in Belgium last year. "A very curious German publication, published in 1883, also throws further light on the German attitude. It purports to be a correspondence between two German students, one of whom is visiting in Livonia and one in Ireland, and the comparison drawn between the two ancient kingdoms is, in the light of recent events, very instructive. The Irish peasantry are ruled by English landowners, the Letts by German ones. Where the Germans conquer, he says, they reorganize, and the people benefit. Where the English conquer, they sink to the level of the peasantry they misrule. 'Here,' says the writer proudly, 'peasants 300 years under the care of Germans come into their kingdom. Livonia's prosperity is the result of a healthy aristocracy, Ireland is the victim of a desolating robber system.' 'Dem Deutschen,' he proudly concludes, 'aber wurde Livland zur Heimat; j'y fiuis, j'y reste.'"
