Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen, Die österreichische Landwirthschaft in ihren socialen Beziehungen (1900)

Schullern’s contribution to an edited volume is a statistical and legislative sketch of Austrian agriculture as a social institution. Its seven sections move from the agricultural population’s numbers and internal structure through production, prices, and processing industries to legislation and representation. Agriculture matters both as an occupation and as the source of essential supplies; its fortunes also shape industrial demand, employment, and political stability. The central argument is that protecting agricultural livelihoods, especially small and medium holdings, serves society as a whole. Economic improvement belongs within a broader policy of material, social, and ethical advancement.

The demographic opening establishes the scale of this obligation. The 1890 census assigns approximately 13.35 million people—more than half Austria’s population—to agriculture and forestry. Schullern nevertheless stresses that these figures are old, that winter enumeration can obscure seasonal agricultural employment, and that occupational classifications miss subsidiary cultivation. He refuses to treat successive censuses as an uncomplicated developmental series. Agricultural dependence is greatest in several of the poorest provinces, where industrial alternatives are limited. This supports public intervention, although his assumption that their populations cannot initiate improvement themselves reveals the paternalism accompanying his reform programme.

The second section distinguishes independent cultivators, their families, servants, and day labourers, while showing how imperfectly those categories describe rural life. Family workers may appear as wage workers, and day labourers may own tiny plots. Holdings must likewise be understood through their capacity to sustain a household, not acreage alone:

Die Grösse der Güter ist selbstverständlich nicht allein entscheidend für den Wohlstand der Besitzer und Pächter.

English translation: The size of holdings is, of course, not the sole determinant of the prosperity of owners and tenants.

A vineyard can support a family on land that would constitute an insufficient holding under another crop. Sharecropping, outside employment, inheritance customs, and proximity to industry further modify the significance of ownership. Upper Austria supplies comparatively strong evidence of a prosperous middle peasantry; elsewhere, provisional figures and uneven cadastral valuations prevent confident comparisons. Mortgage registrations overstate actual indebtedness through uncancelled or duplicated liabilities, while property taxes disregard debt and therefore compound interest burdens. The missing measure is the relationship between these charges and actual net income.

His account of labour identifies a gradual weakening of patriarchal household service through monetary exchange, education, military service, and changing property arrangements. Servants, workers receiving payments partly in kind, contracted day labourers, and migrant workers occupy different positions between dependence and household autonomy. Separate housekeeping can represent greater social independence without guaranteeing better provision. Cash wages alone cannot establish living standards, particularly where food, lodging, and seasonal employment matter:

Wir haben nicht zu erwägen, ob dieser Entwickelungsgang wünschenswerth ist, wir haben nur festzustellen, dass wir uns heute mitten in demselben befinden.

English translation: We do not have to consider whether this course of development is desirable; we have only to establish that we are presently in the midst of it.

This descriptive restraint coexists with sympathy for stable peasant households and with national-character explanations of labour preferences that remain conjectural.

The production section extends the same insistence on economic context. Cropping systems, forests, livestock, wine, and silk contribute differently to rural livelihoods. Improved rotations, fertilization, and itinerant instruction qualify blanket judgments of agricultural backwardness; fragmented plots and local conditions constrain further intensification. Aggregate output, however, cannot disclose its distribution among social groups. Austria’s grain deficit makes Hungarian supplies politically consequential, while livestock-producing farmers may themselves purchase grain and lose from higher prices. Agricultural interests are thus internally differentiated.

The price discussion complicates the apparent opposition between producers and consumers. Low food prices enlarge purchasing power, but consumers generally also depend on selling products or labour. Agricultural decline could weaken demand for manufactures and drive displaced workers into industrial labour markets:

Ich will nur den einen Grund hervorheben, der mir besonders wichtig scheint, den nämlich, dass der Verfall der Landwirthschaft eine ungeheure Vermehrung des Arbeitsangebotes in der Industrie verursachen müsste, dessen Folgen sich kaum ausdenken lassen.

English translation: I wish to emphasize only the one reason that seems especially important to me: namely, that the decline of agriculture would necessarily cause an immense increase in the supply of labour in industry, the consequences of which can scarcely be imagined.

Schullern therefore treats prices as part of an interconnected social economy, not merely as consumer costs. He also warns that annual averages conceal fluctuations and that persistent local differences cannot be explained by transport costs alone.

Processing industries offer another connection between agricultural security and industrial development. Cooperative dairying can improve returns, while winter sugar production provides supplementary employment that may help smallholders retain their land. Yet export premiums and consumption taxes distribute benefits unevenly. The legislative survey turns to drainage, irrigation, agricultural education, pest control, inheritance, commons, and consolidation. Repeatedly, enabling legislation has achieved little because provincial implementing measures are absent. Schullern favours preserving viable peasant holdings but does not assume that dividing every common resource is desirable. His final section distinguishes private agricultural societies, provincial institutions, the emerging central advisory council, and privileged large-estate representation.

The conclusion joins energetic reform to better inquiry. The essay’s enduring interest lies in this combination: a conservative commitment to rural stability, an account of agriculture’s dependence on the wider economy, and unusually persistent scrutiny of what statistics can actually prove.

Wir können daraus den Schluss ziehen, dass es auch bei uns noch viel zu heilen und zu bessern gibt, dass aber andererseits es doch nicht berechtigt ist, so ohneweiters den Stab über die Mehrzahl unserer Einrichtungen zu brechen, wie das nur zu oft und gerade im eigenen Lande am meisten beliebt wird.

English translation: We can conclude from this that there is still much to remedy and improve among us too, but that, on the other hand, it is not justified to condemn the majority of our institutions out of hand, as is done all too often, and most readily in our own country.