hat it should _not_ be reformed, unless the town population are
in a majority. "Direct legislation by the people works against these
tendencies of parliamentarism. If the latter strives to place the
political balance of power in the population of the large towns, the
former puts it in the masses of the population, but these still live
everywhere and for the most part in a large majority, with the exception
of England, in the country and in the small country towns. Direct
legislation takes away from the population of the large towns their
special political influence, and subjects them to the country
population."[224]

He concludes that wherever and as long as the agricultural population
remains in a majority, the Socialists have no special reason to work for
direct legislation.

Of course Kautsky and his school do not expect this separation or
antagonism of agriculture and industry to last very far into the future.
But as long as capitalism lasts they believe agriculturists will play an
entirely subordinate role in politics. "While the capitalist mode of
production increases visibly the difficulties of the formation of a
revolutionary class (in the country), it favors it in the towns," he
says. "It there concentrates the laboring masses, creates conditions
favorable to every organization for their mental evolution and for their
class struggle.... It debilitates the country, disperses the
agricultural workers over vast areas, isolates them, robs them of all
means of mental development and resistance to exploitation."[225]

Similarly Vandervelde quotes from Voltaire's essay on customs a sentence
describing the European peasantry of a hundred and fifty years ago as
"savages living in cabins with their females and a few animals," and
asks, "who would dare to pretend that these words have lost all their
reality?" He admits that "rural barbarism has decreased," but still
considers the peasantry, not as a class which must take an active part
in bringing about Socialism, but as one to which "conquering Socialism
will bring political liberty and social equality."[226]

Kautsky says that either the small farmer is not really independent, and
pieces out his income by hiring himself out occasionally to some larger
landowner or other employer, or else, if entirely occupied with his own
work, that he manages to compete with large-scale cultivation only "by
overwork and underconsumption, by barbarism, as Marx says."

"To-day the s