246 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



units as compared with manufacturing, mining, transportation, 

 etc. The only apparent exceptions are evidently in those regions 

 where the weather and the seasons are singularly stable and mo- 

 notonous ; that is, on certain grain farms in the semiarid West. 

 Even there, however, large-scale farming is successful only 

 where the agriculture is of a very low grade. But in addition to 

 these difficulties, the farm manager has certain temperamental 

 difficulties to contend with, difficulties less easily understood 

 than those already mentioned, but important nevertheless. Men 

 who work on farms are, as a rule, more individualistic than men 

 who work in urban industries. Men who long for human com- 

 panionship, who dislike working in isolation, who herd easily, 

 do not as a rule remain on farms, if there is a chance for them 

 to get work in a town. Inasmuch as the towns are drawing up- 

 on the farms for their workmen, it generally results that the 

 men who stay on the farms are those to whom the lure of the 

 city is least attractive. They are the most individualistic, - 

 the most impatient of rules, of restraints, of discipline ; in a 

 word, they are harder to manage in gangs. This considerably 

 increases the difficulty of directing large numbers under one 

 management in farming, and gives a corresponding advantage 

 to the small farmer in competition with the very large farmer. 



The supreme advantage, however, of the medium scale of 

 production over the large scale is that the work is performed by 

 those who have a direct, personal interest in the result. There 

 are, therefore, no perplexing labor problems, no questions of the 

 hours of labor or of the relation of employer to employee, to 

 be solved. Even if large-scale farming were technically a little 

 more efficient, these social advantages would be on the side of 

 medium-scale production and would enable it to hold its own 

 in competition with large-scale production. Where there are 

 large numbers of wage-earning agricultural laborers, a class feel- 

 ing is almost certain to develop among them, and an organized 



