nts, soon comes
to employ steadily one or more laborers. And it is notable that in every
country of the world these middle-sized or moderate-sized farms are
growing more rapidly than either the large-scale or the one-family
farms. This has an economic and a political explanation. Though large
farms have more economic advantages than small, the latter have nothing
to expend for superintendence and get much more work from each person
occupied. The middle-sized farms preserve these advantages and gradually
come also to employ much of the most profitable machinery, that is out
of reach of the small farmer. Politically their position is still
stronger. They are neither rich nor few like the large landholders.
Their employees are one, two, or three on each farm, and isolated.

Here, then, is the outcome of the agricultural situation that chiefly
concerns the Socialist. The middle-sized farmer is a small capitalist
and employer who, like the rest of his kind, will in every profound
labor crisis be found with the large capitalist. His employees will
outnumber him as voters and will have little hope that the government
will intervene some day to make them either proprietors or possessors
of long-term leases. The capital, moreover, to run this kind of farm or
to compete with it, will be greater and greater and more and more out of
their agricultural laborer's reach. These employees will be Socialists.

We are now in a position to understand the divisions among the
Socialists on the agricultural question. The Socialist policy as to
agriculture may be divided into three periods. During the ascendency of
capitalistic collectivism it will be powerless to do more than to
support the collectivist reforms, including partial nationalization of
the land, partial appropriation of unearned increment by national or
local governments, municipal and cooeperative production, and the
numerous reforms already mentioned. In the second period, the approach
of Socialism will hasten all these changes automatically through the
rapid rise in wages, and in the third period, when the Socialists are in
power, special measures will be taken still further to hasten the
process until all land is gradually nationalized and all agricultural
production carried on by governmental bodies or cooeperative societies of
actual workers.

If the Socialists gain control of any government, or if they come near
enough to doing this to be able to force concessions at the