cost of
capital, a double effect will be produced on agriculture. The general
rise in wages will destroy the profits of many farmer employers, and it
will offer to the smallest self-employing farmers the possibility of an
income as wage earners so much larger, and conditions so much better,
than anything they can hope for as independent producers that they will
cease to prefer self-employment. The high cost of labor will favor both
large scale production, either capitalistic or cooeperative, and
national, state, county, and municipal farms. Without any but an
automatic economic pressure, small-scale and middle-scale farming would
tend rapidly to give place to these other higher forms, and these in
turn would tend to become more and more highly organized as other
industries have done, until social production became a possibility. Not
only would there be no need of coercive legislative measures, but the
automatic pressure would be, not that of misery or bankruptcy pressing
the self-employing farmer from behind, but of a larger income and better
conditions drawing the majority forward to more developed and social
forms of production.

In France a considerable and increasing number of the Socialist members
of Parliament are elected by the peasantry, and the same is true of
Italy. In Herve the French have developed a world-famed
ultra-revolutionary who always makes his appeal to peasants as well as
workers, and in Compere-Morel, one of the most able of those economists
and organizers of the international movement who give the agriculturists
their chief attention. The latter has recently summed up the position of
the French Party in a few incisive paragraphs--which show its similarity
to that of the Americans. His main idea is to let economic evolution
take its course, which, in proportion as labor is effectively organized,
will inevitably lead towards collective ownership and operation and so
pave the way for Socialism:--

"As to small property, it is not our mission either to hasten or to
precipitate its disappearance. A product of labor, quite often
being merely a tool of the one who is detaining it, not only do we
respect it, we do something more yet, we relieve it from taxes,
usury, scandalous charges on the part of the middlemen, whose
victim it is. And this will be done in order to make possible its
free evolution towards superior forms of exploitation and
ownership, which b