Third: Of the exact position of the remaining groups it is very difficult to speak with anything like assurance. In an earlier chapter we have noticed the persistence of the small farm in America, and the fact that a class of small farmers forms a very important part of our population. As already observed, the economic condition of the small farmer is very often little, if any, superior to that of the laborers he employs. Elsewhere, I have shown that the actual income of the small farmer is not infrequently less than that of the hired laborer.[120] This is just as true of the small dealer, and the small manufacturer. But mere poverty of income, companionship in misery, the sharing of an equally poor existence, does not suffice to place the farmer in the proletarian class, as many Socialist writers have shown.[121] The small farmers constitute a distinct class. They are not, as the small dealers and manufacturers are, mere remnants of a disappearing class. The class is a permanent one, apparently, as much so as the class of industrial wage-workers. As a class it is just as essential to agricultural production as the industrial proletariat is essential to manufacture. It is thus a class analogous to the industrial proletariat, and Kautsky has well said that the small farmer is the "proletariat of the country." The exploitation of the small farmer is not direct, like that of the wage-worker by his employer, but indirect, through the great capitalist trusts and railroads. It also happens that these derive their chief income from the direct exploitation of the wage-workers, so that the small farmer and the wage-worker in the city factory have common exploiters. As they become conscious of this, the two classes will tend to unite their forces in the one sphere where such unity of action is possible, the sphere of political action.
This is also true, in some degree at least, of a considerable fraction of the one million five hundred thousand workers included in the professional and agent classes, and of the two million employers, the small dealers and manufacturers being included in this enumeration. That there is such a considerable fraction of each of these two classes whose interests lead them to make common cause with the proletariat is not at all a matter of theory or speculation, but of experience. These classes are represented very largely in the membership of the Socialist parties of this country and of Europe.