they would
suffer unjustly. It is true that the agriculturist produces bread, while
the city worker consumes it, but so also do shoe workers produce shoes
that are consumed by garment workers, and certainly no Socialist
predicts any lasting struggle between producers of shoes and producers
of clothing. It is true also that if the wage earner's condition is to
be improved, some limit must be set to prices as wages are raised. But
the flour manufacturer and the baker must be restrained as well as the
grain producer. Nor do Socialists expect to accomplish much by the mere
regulation of prices. And when it comes to their remedy, socialization,
there is less reason, as I shall show, for beginning with land rent than
with industrial capital, and the Socialist parties of France and America
recognize this fact.

But it is the practical result of this supposed opposition of town and
country rather than its inconsistency with Socialist principles that
must hold our attention. Certainly no agricultural program and no appeal
to the agricultural population, perhaps not even one addressed to
agricultural laborers, can hope for success while this view of the
opposition of town and country is maintained; for all agriculturists
want what they consider to be reasonable prices for their products, and
their whole life depends directly or indirectly on these prices. When
the workmen agitate, as they so often do in Europe, for cheap bread and
meat, without qualifying their agitation by any regard for the
agriculturists, all hope of obtaining the support of _any_ of the
agricultural classes, even laborers, is for the time being abandoned.

The predominance of town over country is so important to Kautsky that he
even opposes such a vital piece of democratic reform as direct
legislation where the town-country population is the more numerous than
that of the towns. "We have seen" he says, "that the modern
representative system is not very favorable to the peasantry or to the
small capitalists, especially of the country towns. The classes which
the representative system most favors are the large owners of capital or
land, the highly educated, and under a democratic electoral system, the
militant and class-conscious part of the industrial working class. So in
general one can say parliamentarism favors the population of the large
towns as against that of the country."

Far from being disturbed at this unjust and unequal system, Kautsky
prefers t