It is only when we understand this difference in the condition of the social relations in Germany and in England that the scope and intention of our novel can be apprehended.
It would be a mistake to suppose that our remarks are only applicable to the eastern provinces of Prussia.

If, perhaps, they are less harshly manifested in the western division of our kingdom, and indeed in Western Germany, it is in consequence of noble families being fewer in number, and the conditions of property being more favorable to the citizen class.

The defective principle is the same, as also the national feeling in regard to it.

It is easily understood, indeed, how this should have become much stronger since 1850, seeing that the greater and lesser nobility have blindly united in endeavoring to bring about a reaction--demanding all possible and impossible privileges and exemptions, or compensations, and are separating themselves more and more widely from the body of the nation.
In Silesia and Posen, however, the theatres on which our story is enacted, other and peculiar elements, though lying, perhaps, beneath the surface, affect the social relations of the various classes.

In both provinces, but especially in Posen, the great majority of noblemen are the proprietors of land, and the enactment under Hardenberg and Stein in 1808-10, in regard to peasant rights, had been very imperfectly carried out in districts where vassalage, as in all countries of Slavonic origin, was nearly universal.