l increase of population and wealth and not to
his own labor (the unearned increment), his income is less than that of
many skilled laborers.

Two widely different policies are for these reasons adopted by all
reformers when dealing with large agricultural estates and small
self-employing farmers. On this point there is little room for
difference of opinion. But small farmers are not a sharply defined
class. They are constantly recruited from agricultural laborers and
tenants on the one hand, and are constantly becoming employing farmers
on the other--or the process may take the opposite course, large farms
may break up and small farmers may become laborers--for all or a part of
their time. All agricultural reforms may be viewed not only in their
relation to existing small farmers, but as to their effect on the
increase or decrease of the relative proportions of small self-employing
farmers, of employing farmers, and of agricultural laborers.

And here appears the fundamental distinction between the Socialist
program and that of collectivist capitalism as far as the small farmers
are concerned. Socialists agree in wanting to aid those small farmers
who are neither capitalists nor employers on a sufficient scale to
classify them with those elements, but they neither wish to perpetuate
the system of small farms nor to obstruct the development of the more
productive large-scale farming and the normal increase of an
agricultural working class ready for cooeperative or governmental
employment. They point to the universal law that large-scale production
is more economical, and show that this applies to agriculture. Small
farming strictly limits the point to which the income of the
agricultural population can rise, prevents the cheapening of the
production of food, and furnishes a constant stream of cheap labor
composed of discontented agricultural laborers who prefer the more
steady income, limited hours, and better conditions of wage earners.

"Even the most energetic champions of small farming," says Kautsky,
"do not make the least attempt to show its superiority, as this
would be a hopeless task. What they maintain is only the
superiority of labor on one's own property to wage labor for a
strange exploiter.... But if the large farm offers the greater
possibility of lessening the work of the agricultural laborers,
then it would be a betrayal of the latter to set before them as a