728 THE RURAL COMMUNITY 



Finally, the peasant was dependent upon the rural productive com- 

 munity into which the half-communistic settlement had placed him 

 two thousand years ago. He could not manage as he wanted, but as 

 the primeval rotation of crops prescribed. This remained so up to 

 the dissolution of these half-communistic bonds. But also after the 

 abolition of all this legal dependency the peasant could not become a 

 rationally producing little agriculturist as, for instance, the American 

 farmer. Together with the village and its characteristic contrast 

 to the individual settlement of the American farmer, numerous relics 

 of ancient communistic conditions of forest, water, pasture, and even 

 arable soil, which united the peasants extraordinarily firm and tied 

 them to the inherited form of husbandry, survived the liberation of 

 the peasants. But to these relics of the past which America has 

 never known, certain factors are added nowadays whose effects also 

 America will one day experience, the effect of modern capitalism 

 under the conditions of completely settled old civilized countries. 

 The limited territory causes there a specific social estimation of the 

 ownership of land, and the tendency to retain it, by bequest, in the 

 family. The superabundance of labor forces diminishes the desire to 

 save labor by, the use of machines. Where now by migration into the 

 cities and foreign countries the working forces become limited and 

 dear, there, on the other hand, the high price of the soil by purchase 

 and hereditary divisions diminish the capital of the buyer. To gain a 

 fortune by agriculture is not possible in Europe nowadays. The 

 time in which this will be possible in the United States is ap- 

 proaching its limit. We will not forget that the modern boiling heat 

 of capitalistic culture is connected with heedless consumption of 

 natural material for which there is no substitute. The supply of 

 coal and ore will still last for future times, which it is difficult to de- 

 termine at present. The utilization of new forces, farm-land, here 

 will also soon have reached an end; in Europe it no longer exists. 

 The agriculturist can never hope, as husbandman, to gain more 

 than a modest equivalent for his work. He is, in Europe, and also 

 to a great extent in this country, excluded from participating in the 

 great chances of speculative business talent. 



The strong blast of modern capitalistic competition rushes, in 

 agriculture, against a conservative opposing current, and it is exactly 

 rising capitalism which, in old civilized countries, increases the 

 counter-current. The use of the soil as investment of capital, and the 

 sinking rate of interest in connection with the traditional social 

 valuation of rural soil, push the price of real estate to such a height 

 that the price of farm-land is always paid partly au fonds perdu, so 

 to say, as enLre, as entrance fee into this social stratum. Thus 

 capitalism causes the increase of the number of idle renters of land 

 by the increase of capital for agricultural operation. Thus peculiar 



