224 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



and West-Elbean Germany. We now know, also, that this 

 dualism can bear but superficial examination ; that the agrarian 

 development of Germany produced successively three forms of 

 rural organization, the results of which exist to-day side by side 

 in vast regions and constitute the present agrarian character of 

 the German Empire. Indeed, one of these forms is found in 

 two separate districts ; so that, to be exact, we should speak of an 

 agrarian division of three or four parts. Step by step has the 

 path been discovered which led through this period of a thou- 

 sand years from the past to the present. We now know why it 

 is that to-day, in different parts of our country, things look as 

 they do and not otherwise. 



And inasmuch as the government, at least in the largest state 

 of our empire, is on the point of directing this development into 

 new channels, and we are standing on the threshold of a new 

 epoch of agrarian history, the time seems propitious, in the light 

 of all this recent literature, to cast a glance backward over the 

 traversed way and point out the milestones that mark off its course. 



Agrarian history is the history of the soil and its tillers, the 

 history of the rural policy. It has, therefore, always two sides : 

 the field system, that is, the technical definition of the arable land ; 

 and the system of landownership and of labor, in a sense the 

 agrarian organization, or the definition of the rights of the people 

 to the soil and to each other in relation to the soil, hence the 

 legal and social relations of the owners and tillers. If these two, 

 owner and tiller, were not identical, there existed between them 

 a relationship of domination and dependence, a relationship which 

 did not cease until the present period, with the creation here, as 

 in other domains, of the right of free contract. The chief prob- 

 lems of agrarian history are, therefore, first, settlement, with the 

 resulting subjection of the land in the field system ; secondly, the 

 origin of the personal subjection of the tillers, the peasants ; 

 thirdly, the dissolution and abolition of this twofold bondage. If 

 we assume that personal bondage in the form of the manorial 



