THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY 

 AND AGRARIAN POLICY 



An Inaugural Address by Dr. Carl Johannes Fuchs, Pro- 

 fessor of Economics and Finance at the University of 

 Freiburg^ in Breisgau 



(Translated from the German by Dr. Francis Kingsley Ball) 



[The inaugural address delivered on March 2, 1898, before the university 

 of this city is here again presented with the omission of introduction and con- 

 clusion, involving a slight modification in the arrangement, and with the addi- 

 tion of bibliographical references and notes. Apart from these changes the 

 address has already appeared in the supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung, 

 Numbers 70 and 71, of March 29 and 30, 1898. It is based on the more com- 

 plete treatment of the same material in the author's articles on agrarian history 

 in the " Worterbuch der Volkswirthschaft," edited by Elster, now in the course 

 of publication by Gustav Fischer at Jena. Preface] 



IT MAY be said with confidence that no other branch of the 

 inquiry into economics, especially into the history of agricul- 

 ture, has been so much advanced during the last ten or twelve 

 years as that of German agrarian history and the history of the 

 older German agrarian policy. The fundamental investigations 

 of George Hanssen have been followed by the works of Meitzen, 

 Inama-Sternegg, Lamprecht, and Gothein, and by those of Knapp 

 and his pupils ; one after another of the great regions of Ger- 

 many and one epoch after another have been explored with regard 

 to their development along the line of agrarian history and agra- 

 rian policy. As a result, the agrarian development of our people, 

 at least during the last thousand years, since the time of the 

 Carolingians, lies clear and distinct before our eyes. We now 

 know how the dualism arose which pervades and infects the 

 economic life and thereby the whole economic policy of modern 

 Germany, a dualism characterized to-day by the terms East-Elbean 



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