goal, not the capture and technical development of large forms, but
their break up into numerous small farms. That would mean nothing
less than a willingness to perpetuate the drudgery under which the
agricultural laborers and small farmers now suffer."[229]

But how shall Socialists aid small farmers without increasing the number
of small farms? It might be thought that the nationalization of the land
would solve the problem. The government, once become the general
landlord, could use the rent fund to improve the condition of all
classes of agriculturists, without unduly favoring any, agricultural
evolution could take its natural course, and the most economical method
of production, _i.e._ large farms or large cooeperative associations,
would gradually come to predominate. But the capitalist collectivists
who now control or will soon control governments, far from feeling any
anxiety about the persistence of small-scale farming, believe that the
small farmers can be made into the most reliable props of capitalism.
Accordingly collectivist reformers either promote schemes of division of
large estates and favor the creation of large masses of small owners by
this and every other available means, such as irrigation or reclamation
projects, or if they indorse nationalization of the land in order to get
the unearned increment for their governments, they still make the leases
on as small a scale and revaluations at as long intervals as possible,
and so do almost as much artificially to perpetuate the small farm under
this system as they could by furthering private ownership.

Although there is no necessary and immediate conflict of interest
between wage earners and small farmers, it is evident that it is
impossible for Socialists to offer the small farmers as much as the
capitalist collectivists do,--for the latter are willing in this
instance to promote, for political purposes, an uneconomic mode of
production which is a burden on all society.

Here, however, appears an economic tendency that relieves the situation
for the Socialist. Under private ownership or land nationalization with
long leases and small-scale farms, it is only once in a generation or
even less frequently that farms are subdivided. But the amount of
capital and labor that can be profitably applied to a given area of
land, the intensity of farming, increases very rapidly. The former
self-employing farmer, everywhere encouraged by governme