Now, without a horse there can be no farming; and a household with only one horse is liable to go down in the long run.[101] Still these two groups cover at least one-half of the peasantry of to-day.[102] Thus the dissolution of the old peasant family sapped the productive forces of the peasantry at large and prompted the liquidation of independent farming with a considerable minority of the householders. A distinct group of the village is formed to-day by those peasants who for want of live stock with which to till their plots, are compelled either to hire their neighbors to do the work, or to lease their plots and consequently to stop their farming altogether. The bulk of this class is made up of those families in which there is only one adult male worker.[103] Lack of land, lack of live stock and lack of labor power, make it by no means an easy task for a “singleton” to carry on farming, and a good many must needs fail. It becomes plain that small peasant agriculture, based on the labor of the farmer alone, could stand only as long as its basis, the compound coöperative family, held together. The previous economic evolution has demonstrated that the co-operation of three adult workers is required upon an average to constitute a stable peasant household. As the progress of individualism will not stop in presence of the survivals of the patriarchal compound family, so the lacking labor force will have to be supplied by hire. The dissolution of the patriarchal family brings forth, of necessity, the employing farmer. The characteristic feature of this class is that the employer is still the tiller of the soil. The laborer is hired only to help the farmer in his work, the average number of laborers employed varying between one and two to one household, so as to constitute the required coöperation of three working men.[104] For the present this class appears but in small numbers in the Russian village,[105] and this obviously accounts for the little attention paid to the employing farmer in Russian literature, even in the statistical investigations. Still the need of hired labor increases on the larger farms[106] with the division of the compound family, as can be seen from the following table: