THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY 249 



Northeast, and the state aided in the discharge of these burdens 

 without exacting indemnity in land. 



Where emancipation from patrimonial authority was obtained 

 at all, it did not as a rule come earlier than the year 1848 ; but 

 it was not enacted everywhere. 



It is not possible to describe here further the technical meas- 

 ures enacted in connection with the emancipation of the peasants. 

 These measures were aimed at the removal of the entailed field 

 system of the Middle Ages and the establishment of the rule of 

 general distribution of land in the broadest sense, that is, the 

 abolition of patrimonial jurisdiction, and the gathering together or 

 the redistribution of landed property. Nor is it possible to show 

 how these measures assumed different forms in the different 

 great domains in consequence of the varying rural policy and the 

 tripartite physical division. 



The net results of the entire work of emancipation, as we see it 

 in the second half of the nineteenth century, are, in the main, 

 everywhere the same ; and the effect, particularly where compre- 

 hensive technical reforms were enacted together with those of a 

 legal and economic nature, has everywhere been an extraordinary 

 growth of German agriculture. But the fundamental character of 

 the rural policy of Germany at the end of the eighteenth century 

 has not been altered by the emancipatory legislation : the agrarian 

 dualism then in existence, the great contrast between the Germany 

 east of the Elbe and the Germany west of the Elbe, has not been 

 softened, but, on the contrary, considerably intensified. For in 

 the Northwest a few of the sparse large farms have been broken 

 up ; in the Northeast nowhere, if we leave out of account the 

 parts of Schleswig-Holstein belonging to it. Here, as a direct 

 consequence of the emancipation of the peasants, the number of 

 positions for peasants has been reduced, and the peasant land 

 even further diminished. In the old provinces of Prussia, the 

 principal region of the Northeast, the liberation of the peasants 

 has not only given new impetus to the formation, out of the 

 peasant land, of large estates characteristic of the Northeast, but 



