240 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
Much of this was already breaking down in the eighteenth century.
Still, one found persistent vestiges into the twentieth, especially in areas
where German noblemen could lord it over a Slavic peasantry. In East
Elbean Germany in general, lords continued to administer justice and
collect fees and fines for their trouble; as the saying had it, the power
of the state stopped at the gate to the estate. To be sure, some con
cessions had been made to the appearances of parliamentary democ
racy; but much of this was sham. In Prussia, for example, the most
important of the German states, elections were held in tripartite col
leges that gave hugely disproportionate clout to wealth.
Farther east, in Poland and Russia, the old ways held on longer, in
deed were reinforced by the logic of commercial agriculture and com
parative advantage. From the sixteenth century, the open plains of East
Elbean Europe became a granary and livestock breeder for the urban
centers of the west. The resulting exports (cereals, hides, tallow) stim
ulated land settlement; with one major hitch: scarcity of labor. Land
was far more abundant than people.
Over a hundred years ago, Russian agrarian scholars pointed out
that such disparity was incompatible with large holdings; or as one
theoretical economist, picking up on this tradition, put it, three things
cannot coexist: free land, free labor, and large estates. Why should
peasants sign or stay on as hired labor when they can go off to the fron
tier and farm their own land?^13
This meant that lords in Russia who wanted to cultivate on a large
scale had to fix their workers to the soil. Hence the phenomenon
known as the second serfdom—a progressive reinforcement of the
peasant's obligations, reducing him to near-slave status. This policy
can be tracked through a succession of decrees, each stronger than the
one before, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. These deep
ened the social and political gulf between West and East—the one
moving steadily toward greater freedom, the other to petrified servi
tude. Russia became in effect a huge prison, and with the exception of
some months in 1917 and the few years since 1990, it has remained a
prison ever since. (It remains to be seen whether the current experi
ment in democracy will last. )
Such a system could not work unless no exit. The absence of urban
French, while not enforcing vocational barriers, still used these divisions to determine
political representation in the Estates-General on the eve of 1789. The English had
their own political version, even more summary, in the division of the Parliament into
Lords and Commons.