THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY 251 



with it ; while the growth of the population and the general eco- 

 nomic progress demand a reduction in the size and an increase 

 in the number of agricultural industries. 



Owing to this a reaction has recently set in against the agra- 

 rian legislation of the third epoch, a legislation accomplishing 

 nothing but freedom and disintegration. We are standing at the 

 beginning of a new era of agrarian policy, which, following in the 

 wake of the emancipatory legislation, faces the twofold task of 

 what the latter has overdone and what it has failed to do : main- 

 tenance, in its present status, of the freed peasantry ; and im- 

 provement of it where the described historical process before the 

 emancipation, and the emancipation itself, have decimated it so 

 extensively, in the parts of the empire east of the Elbe. And 

 since maintenance is so much easier than restoration, the first 

 task of modern agrarian policy is the maintaining of the peasantry 

 where it is endangered, first of all, therefore, but by no means 

 solely, in the Northeast ; and the most effective means for pre- 

 venting an increase of debt in the way of hereditary succession 

 is the return to a certain entail in the interest of public policy, 

 the introduction of the intestate right of inheritance for all those 

 regions in which the closed farm, in spite of the emancipatory 

 legislation, has remained the rule, because the foundations of free 

 divisibility of the Southwest, the intensive industrial development 

 in the country, are absent. 



An additional and no less important task of the German and 

 particularly of the Prussian agrarian policy of the present, affect- 

 ing the entire economic life of the German Empire, will be the 

 increase of the peasantry in the Northeast, on a large scale, to be 

 accomplished by the state itself through a colonization from within, 

 a " Westernizing of the Northeast," as Knapp calls it. But the 

 described historical course of development enables us to deter- 

 mine to what limits this new colonization of the Northeast must 

 be confined to be organic and capable of living. If the three 

 forms of rural policy of the Southwest, the Northwest, and the 

 Northeast appear to us like so many historical epochs and stages 

 of development, following one another successively, as conditioned 

 by the topography of the different regions, it is clear that the aim 



