Within the new state, about 150 families owned a tenth of all the land, but half of Czech farmers owned only a half a hectare, and two-thirds Slovak peasant families were landless. In April 1919, Kramář issued a land reform act that limited the amount of land any farmer could own to 150 hectares, thus breaking up all large estates, owned mostly by the German-speaking and Hungarian-speaking nobility. The land was redistributed to smallholders and landless farm labourers. Even Kramář's opponent Masaryk called the land reform act "the greatest act of the new republic", as it stabilised the countryside, creating a class of small farmers who owned the land they worked and contributed to the subsequent political stability of Czechoslovakia in the 1920s. In an attack on the power of the aristocracy, which Kramář viewed as "foreign" because they usually spoke German or Hungarian, all titles of nobility were abolished in the new republic. In an attempt to ward off the appeal of the left, another degree established 8 hours as the maximum that could be worked on a single day, thus giving to one of the key demands of the trade union movement. In May 1919, an anarchist, Alois Šťastný, made an unsuccessful attempt to kill Kramář.