Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen · 1895
Schullern’s journal article examines the statistical foundations of proposed legislation to preserve medium-sized peasant farms in Lower Austria. Its immediate subject is an approximately 750-page official inquiry into property transfers during 1883–1893, assembled in support of provincial bills regulating farm division, consolidation, and inheritance. Rather than adjudicating the entire reform programme, Schullern asks what its evidence actually establishes. His central distinction is between indications of declining peasant ownership and proof that fragmentation causes that decline or that the proposed legislation can arrest it. The article moves from the inquiry’s design through its aggregate results and legislative implications to the local observations that Schullern ultimately considers its most valuable material.
This scrutiny rests on a conception of agrarian policy broader than economic efficiency. Legislation must account for existing agricultural conditions, complementary institutions, and popular moral and legal convictions. Schullern regards continuity of family ownership as politically and ethically significant, but this commitment does not release reformers from the obligation to demonstrate their case. Nor can individual measures be assessed independently of the larger programme:
Die Entwürfe können nur kritisiert werden, wenn man sie als integrierende Bestandtheile einer grossen agrarpolitischen Reformation auffasst.
English translation: The drafts can only be critically assessed if they are understood as integral components of a major agrarian-policy reform.
The inquiry records voluntary and forced sales, inheritance-related transfers, prices and areas, subsequent land use, former owners’ livelihoods, purchasers’ occupations, and repeated changes of ownership. Schullern’s criticism begins with the uncertain meaning of its basic unit, the Wirthschaft: the returns do not consistently establish what constitutes a farm. Without the total number and area of peasant holdings, moreover, transfer counts cannot measure the relative prevalence of dispossession. Categories describing the subsequent fate of land overlap, while acquisitions by other medium-sized farms and the separate destinations of subdivided parcels remain inadequately represented. Transfers into large estates and industrial ownership are recorded without corresponding information about land moving back into peasant hands.
His objections extend from property classification to social classification. Dividing purchasers simply into peasants and non-peasants obscures distinctions essential to agrarian policy. Repeated transfers likewise have different implications depending on whether they arose through voluntary sale or enforcement proceedings. These are not merely technical defects: the categories determine which account of rural transformation the evidence can sustain. Schullern nevertheless values a hastily conducted inquiry that supplies rare information, even while regretting the missed opportunity for a more comprehensive investigation.
The totals suggest substantial movement: 1,361 forced sales and 3,702 voluntary sales, alongside 604 inheritance-related cases whose meaning remains uncertain. Forced-sale properties were smaller on average, yet their recorded proceeds per unit of area slightly exceeded those of voluntary sales. This unexpected finding complicates assumptions about foreclosure losses. Schullern offers possible explanations without settling the matter, repeatedly warning of calculation errors and heterogeneous observations. Other results appear more troubling: land passes into large estates and factory ownership, former proprietors become servants or day labourers, and purchasers outside the peasantry acquire a considerable share of the properties. His interpretation is openly conservative: such changes threaten a social group he regards as a support of the existing order. Yet the missing population baseline prevents a definitive measure of their extent.
The decisive legislative question is whether those developments establish the need for restrictions on division and special inheritance rules. Schullern separates five propositions requiring evidence: fragmentation is advancing; it contributes to peasant decline; that decline harms society or the state; fragmentation remains reversible; and the proposed measures can reverse it. The inquiry does not complete this chain. Even its recorded 24,418 Joch of parcelled land say little without a reliable starting area and knowledge of where the parcels went.
Zur zweiten Frage bietet uns die „Beilage“ direct nichts, weil der ursächliche Zusammenhang zwischen den Parcellierungen und dem Verfall des Bauerstandes durch dasselbe nicht nachgewiesen wird.
English translation: On the second question, the “Supplement” offers us nothing directly, because it does not demonstrate the causal connection between parcel divisions and the decline of the peasantry.
Schullern nevertheless treats the evidence as establishing a contraction of peasant ownership. His conversion of transferred acreage into equivalent average-sized farms makes the possible magnitude vivid, but he explicitly identifies the larger estimate as hypothetical. Ownership and cultivation have not been adequately distinguished, and some recorded sellers were never peasants. The article thus holds together a strong diagnosis of social danger and a qualified assessment of the numbers supporting it.
The final section turns to municipal annotations: migration, abandoned farm operations, houses separated from their fields, villa development, usury, foreclosure and subdivision by credit institutions, purchases for private hunting grounds, and sales attributed to game damage. Such details reveal mechanisms concealed by aggregate totals. They also suggest why restoring legal restrictions requires understanding how and why formerly bound holdings actually became divisible. Local reports of indebtedness and falling agricultural returns broaden the explanation beyond inheritance arrangements alone.
Die Einzelheiten sind das, was an dem gesamten Materiale das Werthvollste ist.
English translation: The details are what is most valuable in the entire body of material.
This conclusion gives the article its methodological force. Schullern neither discards imperfect statistics nor treats their accumulation as sufficient legislative justification. Their greatest value lies in identifying processes for further investigation. His argument makes a durable distinction between documenting change, explaining its causes, judging its social significance, and demonstrating the efficacy of a remedy.
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