Page:Social Justice without Socialism.djvu/37

 boundary that it is. Labor should be enabled to acquire a modest share of capital and to invest it securely. Protection for small investments is urgently needed, and would do much to change a proletariat into an independent working-class. This is an essential feature of the social system we wish for and work for. The man who hereafter shall correspond to Longfellow’s “village blacksmith” will perhaps be the owner of a hundred shares in some corporation. In agriculture small holdings may always survive; but there may be large ones also, and in that case the farmer of the future may have either five acres and a hoe, or forty acres and a mule, or a hundred and sixty acres and a reaper, or an undivided