THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY 225 



system originated simultaneously with settlement, two chief epochs 

 of agrarian history result ; three epochs if the contrary is held : 

 settlement, the development of the manorial system, and the 

 emancipation of landed property. In German agrarian history two 

 forms of personal bondage, an older and a more recent, must be 

 distinguished : the manorial system and estate farming. Indeed, 

 these appear not only successively but simultaneously. In only 

 one part of Germany has the former changed to the latter. 



Now this resulting dualism of the manorial system and of 

 estate farming is identical with the above-mentioned dualism ex- 

 isting in the present agrarian policy of the German Empire. It is 

 well known that a line drawn approximately from the Elbe and 

 Saale divides the empire into two parts of very different rural 

 conditions : in the West are found chiefly small or medium-sized 

 estates, that is, peasant' farms, and only a few large estates ; in 

 the East, chiefly large and very large estates, fewer and almost no 

 small farms, and these larger than in the Southwest. In the 

 eighteenth century, at the beginning of the emancipatory legisla- 

 tion, we find, then, west of this boundary the manorial system 

 only ; east of it estate farming, springing from the former. But 

 this dualism dates back still farther, for that dividing line is 

 approximately the old Slavic boundary of the ninth century ; the 

 German regions east of the Elbe, where the large estate is found 

 in the eighteenth century, form the great territory of colonization, 

 which, in the main, was not won back to Germany and German 

 civilization until the eleventh century, and which has, in conse- 

 quence, a separate agrarian history, about a thousand years later 

 than that of the rest of the country. 



I began with the proud words that the investigation of German 

 agrarian history and agrarian policy of the last thousand years 

 may be for the moment considered as closed ; but it is a general 

 experience in all historical research that the better we become 

 acquainted with the development of the more immediate past, the 

 less secure we feel concerning remoter times, for we no longer 

 content ourselves with the conclusions hitherto accepted, and ask 

 more and more questions of the earliest period which the mea- 

 ger material at hand cannot answer. And so "the first epoch of 



