THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY j;i 



with it ; while the growth of the population and the general eco- 

 nomic progress demand a reduction in the size and an increase 

 in the number of agricultural industries. 



( Hving to this a reaction has recently set in against the agra- 

 rian legislation of the third epoch, a legislation accomplishing 

 nothing but freedom and disintegration. We are standing at the 

 beginning of a new era of agrarian policy, which, following in the 

 wake of the emancipatory legislation, faces the twofold task of 

 what the latter has overdone and what it has failed to do : main- 

 tenance, in its present status, of the freed peasantry ; and im- 

 ment of it where the described historical process before the 

 emancipation, and the emancipation itself, have decimated it so 

 extensively, in the parts of the empire east of the Elbe. And 

 since maintenance is so much easier than restoration, the first 

 task of modern agrarian policy is the maintaining of the peasantry 

 it is endangered, first of all, therefore, but by no means 

 solely, in the Northeast; and the most effective means for pre- 

 venting an increase of debt in the way of hereditary succession 

 is the return to a certain entail in the interest of public policy. 

 the introduction of the intestate right of inheritance for all those 

 s in which the closed farm, in spite of the emancipatory 

 .tion, has remained the rule, because the foundations <: 

 divisibility of the Southwest, the intensive industrial development 

 in the country, are absent. 



An additional and no less important task of the (ierman and 

 ilarly of the Prussian agrarian policy of the present, . 



ntire economic life of the German Km pi re. will he the 



tse of the peasantry in the Northeast, on a large scale, to be 



plished by the state itself through a colonization from within, 



a " Westernizing of the North app calls it. Hut the 



>ed historical course of development enables us to d 

 mine to what limits this new coloni/ation of the Northeast must 

 be confined to bx and capable of living. If the 



of rural policy of the Southwest, the Northwest, and the 



:east appear to us like so many h . p<nhs and stages 



.elnpmcnt. following one another succe .is conditioned 



by the topography of the different regions, it is clear that the aim 



