THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY 243 



farm, and the villication ; and in consequence of the dense popu- 

 lation and the good local market no expansion of the small rural 

 enterprise to one of larger proportions producing for a more 

 extended market (be it a peasant farm on a large scale, as in the 

 Northwest, or a farming estate, as in the Northeast), but rather an 

 early beginning of free division, of mobilization, so to speak, of 

 the soil. 



The other two regions, on the contrary, remain for a long time 

 agrarian, with insignificant industrial development, which is limited 

 exclusively to the towns, and causes strict separation between 

 town and country. The first region shows, however, at least the 

 higher commercial development ; hence here the timely develop- 

 ment of the manorial system, which in the third district, in the 

 highland of the Southeast, is barely beginning. Both, however, 

 adhere to the principle of the closed, indivisible peasant farms. 

 The first region, the lowland of Lower Germany, marks the great 

 difference between Northwest and Northeast, a difference of a 

 thousand years, due partly to a historical development and partly 

 also, but less than is usually supposed, to a difference of soil 

 and climate. The Northeast, being the youngest region, remains 

 agrarian the longest, and consequently experiences what from the 

 purely agrarian point of view is the most beneficial change, the 

 natural transformation of the newer manorial system, with which 

 its German history begins, into estate farming, likewise with 

 closed farms. 



Out of this diversity, this threefold or fourfold division of the 

 rural system in the eighteenth century, arises a correspondingly 

 different problem of the shaping of the emancipatory legislation, 

 the freeing of the peasants, and the like, in the eighteenth and 

 nineteenth centuries. 



IV 



There are three causes by which, as early as the eighteenth 

 and still more in the nineteenth century, the varying degrees of 

 dependence and subjection of the masses of the peasant population 

 in Germany were made to appear more and more untenable, and 

 which called forth the first attempts for their removal : first, the 

 technical progress in the domain of agriculture, together with the 



