highest production of the country. In the evidence before the Duke of Richmond's Commission, there is a case of a farmer of three acres producing 45 bushels per acre, or about twice the average of the season in those bad years that impoverished the larger farmers. The same body of evidence seems to prove that the small farmer has more staying power--a better capacity of weathering an agricultural crisis--than the large; for he has much less frequently petitioned for a reduction of rent--an advantage which landlords may be expected not to overlook. He enjoys, too, a monopoly of the superior efficiency of interested labour, and as the personal efficiency of the labourer--his skill, his knowledge, his watchfulness, his care--are becoming not less, but more important with the growth of scientific farming, whether in corn raising or cattle rearing, the small farm system will probably continue to hold, if not to enlarge, its place in modern agriculture; and if it is able to do so, it will constitute one of the best buttresses against the social revolution. It remains to mark the spread of socialism in the various countries of Europe and America, and to describe its present position; but this I shall reserve for next chapter. CHAPTER II. THE PROGRESS AND PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIALISM. Socialism being now revolutionary social democracy, we should expect to find it most widely and most acutely developed in those countries where, 1st, the social condition of the lower classes is most precarious, or, in other words, where property and comfort are ill distributed; 2nd, where political democracy is already a matter of popular agitation; and, 3rd, where previous revolutions have left behind them an unquiet and revolutionary spirit--a "valetudinary habit," as Burke calls it, "of making the extreme medicine of the State its daily bread." That is very much what we do find. All these conditions are present in Germany--the country in which socialism has made the most remarkable and rapid advance. Dr. Engel, head of the Statistical Bureau of Prussia, states that in 1875 six million persons, representing, with their families, more than half the population of that State, had an income less than £21 a year each; and only 140,000 persons had incomes above £150. The number of landed proprietors is indeed comparatively large. In 1861 there were more than two millions of them out of a population of 23,000,000; and in a country where half the people are engaged in agriculture this would, at first sight, seem to offer some assurance of general comfort. But then the estates of most of them are much too small to keep them in regular employment or to furnish them with adequate maintenance. More than a million hold estates of less than three acres each, and averaging little over an acre, and the soil is poor. The consequence is that the small proprietor is almost always over head and ears in debt. His