First comes the period of feudalism.  I here show that feudalism, in all its variations, rests on the one principle of control of landed property, and I also show how at that time, owing to the fact that society’s productive work to a preponderating extent consisted in agriculture, landed property necessarily was the controlling factor, that is to say, the feature conditioning all political and social power and standing.

And I beg you, Gentlemen, to take note with what a strict scientific objectivity of treatment, how free from all propagandist bias, I proceed with the discussion.  If there is any one datum which lends itself to the purposes of that propagandist bias which the public prosecutor claims to find in this pamphlet—­namely the incitement of the indigent classes to hatred of the wealthy—­it is the peasant wars.  If there is any one fact which has hitherto been accepted, in scientific and in popular opinion alike, and more particularly among the unpropertied classes, with, the fondest remembrance, as a national movement iniquitously put down by the strong hand of violence, it is the peasant wars.

Now, unmoved by this predilection and this shimmer of sentiment, with which the science and the popular sense have united in investing the peasant wars, I go on to divest these wars of this deceptive appearance and show them up in their true light,—­that they were at bottom a reactionary movement, which, fortunately for the cause of liberty, was of necessity doomed to failure.

Further:  If there exists in Germany an institution which, as a question of our own times, I abominate with all my heart as the source of our national decay, our shame and our impotence, it is the institution of the territorial State.

Now, the pamphlet in question is so strictly scientific and objective in its method, so far removed from all personal bias, that I therein go on to show that the institution of the territorial State was, in its time, historically a legitimate and revolutionary feature; that it was an ideal advance, in that it embodied and developed the concept of a State independent of relations of ownership; whereas the peasant wars sought to place the State, and all political power and standing, on the basis of property.

I then, further, go on to show how the period of feudalism is succeeded by a second world-historic period.  I show how, while the peasant wars were revolutionary only in their own delusion, there begins almost simultaneously with them a real revolution, namely, that accumulation of capitalistic wealth which arose through the development of industry.  This wrought a thoroughgoing change in the whole situation,—­a change which reached its final act, achieved its legal acceptance, in the French Revolution of 1789, but which had in point of fact for three hundred years been imperceptibly advancing toward its consummation.

I show in detail, which I need not here expound or recapitulate, what are the economic factors that were destined to push landed property into the remotest back-ground and leave it relatively powerless, by making the new industrial activity the great lever and the bearer of modern social wealth.  All this took place by force of the new industrial activity the great lever and the bearer of methods which they brought in.