ituation of the city proletariat," Kautsky adds, "is
already so superior to the barbaric situation of the older peasants,
that the younger peasants' generation is leaving the fields along with
the class of rural wage earners." There can be no question that small
farms, those without permanent hired labor, survive competition with the
larger and better equipped, only by overwork and underconsumption. But
the unfavorable comparison with city wage earners and the repetition
to-day of Marx's term "barbarism" is no longer justified. Where these
conditions still exist, they are due largely to special legal obstacles
placed in the way of European peasants, and to legal privileges given to
the great landlords,--in other words, to remnants of feudalism.
Kautsky's error in making this as a statement of general application
would seem to be based on a confusion of the survivals of feudalism, as
seen in some parts of Europe, with the necessary conditions of
agricultural production, as seen in this country.

Kautsky himself has lately given full recognition to another factor in
the agricultural situation--the horrors of wage slavery, which acts in
the very opposite manner to these feudal conditions and _prevents_ both
small agriculturists and agricultural laborers from immigrating to the
towns in greater numbers than they do, and persuades them in spite of
its drudgery to prefer the life of the owner of a small farm.

"Since labor in large-scale industry takes to-day the repulsive form of
wage labor," he says, "many owners of small properties keep holding on
to them with the greatest sacrifices, for the sole purpose of avoiding
falling into the serfdom and insecurity of wage labor. Only Socialism
can put an end to small production, not of course by the forceful
ejection of small owners, but by giving them an opportunity to work for
the perfected large establishments with a shortened working day and a
larger income."[227] Surely there is little ground to lay special stress
on the "barbarism" of small farms, if such a large proportion of farmers
and agricultural laborers prefer it on good grounds to "the serfdom and
insecurity" of labor on large farms or in manufacturing establishments.

It is doubtless chiefly because European conditions are such as to make
the conversion of the majority of agriculturists difficult, that so many
European Socialists claim that an existing or prospective preponderance
of manufacturers makes it unnecess