small farmers and farm tenants to
capitalism. While still in the individualistic form capitalism will
establish, wherever it can, privately owned small farms; when it will
have adopted the collectivist policy, it will inaugurate a system of
national ownership and long leases.

Even the small farmer who hires no labor, and does not even own his
farm, will probably be held, as a class, by capitalism, but only by the
collectivist capitalism of the future, which will probably protect him
from landlordism by keeping the title to the land, but dividing the
unearned increment with him by a system of long leases, and using its
share of this increment for the promotion of agriculture and for other
purposes he approves.

Socialists, then, do not expect to include in their ranks in
considerable numbers, either agricultural employers or such tenants,
laborers, or farm owners as are becoming, or believe they will become,
employers (either under present governments or under collectivist
capitalism).

Only when the day finally comes when Socialism begins to exert a
pressure on the government adversely to the interest of the capitalist
class will higher wages and new governmental expenditures on wage
earners begin to reverse conditions automatically, making labor dearer,
small farms which employ labor less profitable, and a lease of
government land less desirable, for example, than the position of a
skilled employee on a model government farm. All governments will then
be forced by the farming population itself to lend more and more support
to the Socialist policy of great national municipal or county farms,
rather than to the artificial promotion or small-scale agriculture.

For the present and the near future the only lasting support Socialists
can find in the country is from _the surplus_ of agricultural laborers
and perhaps _a certain part_ of the tenants, _i.e._ those who cannot be
provided for even if all large estates are everywhere divided into small
farms, all practicable works of reclamation and irrigation completed,
and scientific methods introduced--and who will find no satisfactory
opportunity in neighboring countries. It must be acknowledged that such
tenants at present form no very large part of the agricultural
population in the United States. On the other hand, agriculturists are
even less backward here than in Europe, and there is less opposition
between town and country, and both these facts favor rural Socialis