And we see the results of this new economic condition in the character of the populations of those vast cities into which the Industrial Revolution is still gathering the peoples of Europe and America. Among these, the spirit of individual enterprise and initiative is continually choked by the narrow range of their opportunity. Their lives become the melancholy exponents of that theory of the specialisation of industry against which the humanitarians of the age have all inveighed. Serious as it was becoming in the New World, the Labour Question had not yet, in Whitman's time, assumed an aspect so menacing as in the Old. Even to-day the proportion of Americans engaged in agriculture is four times as large as that which rules in Great Britain; and except in the North Atlantic States, the rural population does not seem to be actually losing ground;[662] though its increase is much less rapid than that of the urban districts, into which more than a third of the population is now gathered, as against a fifth at the close of the war, or an eighth in the middle of the century. At the time of Whitman's death nearly three-quarters of the total number of American farmers were the owners of their farms; and it was in these working proprietors, with the similar body of half-independent artisans who were owners of their houses, that he placed his social faith. These were, as we have seen, the men whom he regarded as citizens in the fullest sense.[663] In this view he was doubtless influenced by Mill, whose _Principles of Political Economy_ he seems to have studied soon after its appearance in 1848. Roughly speaking, Mill had supplemented the teaching of Adam Smith, that individual liberty is the one sure foundation for the wealth of nations, by describing the proper sphere of social intervention in industrial matters. His picture of the future industry--the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers selected and removable by themselves--has been quoted as the socialist ideal.[664] And Mill was deeply influenced by the early Socialists.[665] Their activity in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century was so remarkable that it must have come under the notice of Whitman. Robert Owen, intoxicated with what was perhaps a rather shallow conception of the great truth of human perfectibility, had spent his life and wealth in unsuccessful but most suggestive social experiments. No less optimistic were his French contemporaries, St. Simon and Fourier. In striking contrast with them and their doctrinaire systems, Proudhon, the peasant, who presents not a few points of agreement with Whitman, looked forward to voluntarism as the final form of society, and detested alike the theoretic elaboration and the sexual lubricity of his amiable but, on the whole, unpractical compatriots.