timate of the rural population that has hitherto prevailed among
the Socialists of most countries may be seen from the following language
of Kautsky's:--

"We have already seen how the peasant's production [that of the
small farmer] isolates men. The capitalists' means of production
and the modern State, to be sure, have a powerful tendency to put
an end to the isolation of the peasant through taxation, military
service, railways, and newspapers. But the increase of the points
of contact between town and country as a rule only have the effect
that the peasant farmer feels his desolation and isolation less
keenly. They raise him up as a peasant farmer, but awake in him a
longing for the town; they drive all the most energetic and
independently thinking elements from the country into the towns,
and rob the former of its forces. So that the progress of modern
economic life has the effect of increasing the desolation and
lonesomeness of the country rather than ending it.

"The truth is that in every country the agricultural population is
economically and politically the most backward. That does not imply
any reflection on it; it is its misfortune, but it is a fact with
which one must deal."[223]

Not only Kautsky and Vandervelde, but whole Socialist parties like those
of Austria and Germany, are given to the exploitation of the supposed
opposition between town and country, the producer and the consumer of
agricultural products. At the German Socialist Congress of 1911, Bebel
declared that to-day those who were most in need of protection were the
consumers of agricultural products, the workingmen, lower middle classes
and employees. He felt the day was approaching when the increased cost
of living would form the chief question before the German people, the
day when the German people would raise a storm and tear down the tariffs
on the necessaries of life as well as other measures that unduly favor
the agriculturists--while the proposal of socialization would come up
first in the field of agriculture.

While, in view of the actual level of prices in Germany, there is no
doubt that even the smallest of the agriculturists are getting some
share of the spoils of the tariffs and other measures Bebel mentions,
there can also be little question that in such a storm of revolt as he
predicts the pendulum would swing too far the other way, and