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But it would be the greatest mistake to exagerate or to standardize this rule, and never to admit the free gift of a part of the land expropriated from the neighbourhood.
In the first place, the usual reason against it, pointing to the technical advantage of the big farming, amounts very often to a substitution of the worst opportunism to an undeniable theoretical truth, which is treason to the revolution. The proletariat has no right, whenever the success of the revolution is at stake, to halt because of a temporary decrease of production, just as the bourgeois enemies of slave ownership in North America did not halt because of the temporary falling off of the cotton industry as a result of the civil war of 1863–1866. The bourgeoisie cares only for industrial production as such, whereas the working and exploited population is chiefly concerned with the overthrow of the exploiters and the securing of conditions which would give a chance to the workers to work for their own benefit, and not the benefit of the capitalist. To secure the victory of the proletariat and its stability, is the first and the fundamental task of the proletariat. And there is no safeguard of this stability possible without the neutralisation of the middle peasantry, and without securing the support of a large part if not of the whole mass of the small peasantry.
In the second place not only the enlargement but even the preservation of large production in agriculture requires a fully developed coun-
