he farmers should be expropriated, or
that their goods should be confiscated. It is much more probable that
each little farmer would be permitted to work on as he has previously
done. The farmer has nothing to fear from a Socialist regime. Indeed, it
is highly probable," he adds, "that these agricultural industries would
receive considerable strengthening through the new regime."

Socialists generally agree with Mr. A. M. Simons's resolution at the
last American Socialist Convention (1910): "So long as tools are used
merely by individual handicraftsmen, they present no problem of
ownership which the Socialist is compelled to solve. The same is true of
land. Collective ownership is urged by the Socialist, not as an end in
itself, not as a part of a Utopian scheme, but as the means of
preventing exploitation, and wherever individual ownership is an agency
of exploitation, then such ownership is opposed by Socialism."[228]

Exploitation here refers to the employment of laborers, and this is the
central point of the Socialist policy. To the Socialists the land
question and the labor question are one. Every agricultural policy must
deal with both. If we were confronted to-day exclusively by large
agricultural estates, the Socialist policy would be the same as in other
industries. All agricultural capital would be nationalized or
municipalized as fast as it became sufficiently highly organized to make
this practicable. And as the ground rent can be taken separately, and
with the least difficulty, this would be the first to go. Agricultural
labor, in the meanwhile, would be organized and as the day approached
when the Socialists were about to gain control of the government, and
the wages of government employees began rapidly to rise, those of
agricultural and all other privately employed labor would rise also,
until private profits were destroyed and the process of socialization
brought rapidly to completion.

But where the scale of production is so small that the farmer and his
family do the work and do not habitually hire outside labor, the whole
case is different. The chief exploitation here is self-exploitation. The
capital owned is so small that it may be compared in value with the
skilled worker's trade education, especially when we consider the small
return it brings in, allowing for wages for the farmer and his family.
Even though, as owner, he receives that part of the rise in the value of
his land due to the genera