Social statistics in general, and economic statistics in particular, have made enormous advances over the course of the last two or three decades. A whole series of questions—and moreover, the most fundamental questions—concerning the economic structure of contemporary states and its development, which were previously resolved on the basis of general considerations and approximate data, cannot now be worked out with any serious rigor without taking into account the mass data collected across the entire territory of a given country according to a single definite program and compiled together by specialist statisticians. In particular, questions of agrarian economy, which provoke especially heated disputes, demand an answer founded upon precise and mass data, all the more so since in European states and America there is an increasingly established custom of conducting periodic censuses that encompass all agricultural enterprises in a country.

In Germany, for example, such censuses were conducted in 1882, 1895, and most recently in 1907. The significance of these censuses has been pointed out many times in our literature, and one can scarcely find a book or article devoted to the economy of contemporary agriculture that does not contain references to German agricultural statistics. Concerning the most recent census, considerable uproar has already been raised both in German and in our literature. Mr. Valentinov, I recall, in the *Kievskaya Mysl*{120} last year beat the big drum about the fact that this census allegedly refuted Marxism and Kautsky's views, proving the viability of small-scale production and its victory over large-scale production. Recently in the *Ekonomist Rossii*{121} Professor Vobly in an article: "Tendencies in the Agrarian Evolution in Germany" (No. 36 of 11 September 1910) refuted, on the basis of the 1907 census data, the applicability to agriculture of "the schema worked out by Marx with respect to the development of industry," and argued that "small enterprises not only do not perish in their struggle against large ones in the sphere of agriculture; on the contrary, each new census records their success."

We therefore believe it would be timely to examine in detail the data of the 1907 census. True, the publication of the materials from this census is not yet complete: three volumes have appeared, containing all the census data[54], while the fourth volume, devoted to "a presentation of the census results as a whole," has not yet been published, and it is unknown when it will appear. But there are no grounds for postponing the study of the census results until the publication of this concluding volume, inasmuch as all the material is already available, its compilation has been done, and the literature is already making broad use of it.

Let us note only that to pose the question in the way it is ordinarily posed—limiting oneself almost exclusively to a comparison of the number of farms of various (in terms of size) dimensions and the quantity of land they possessed in different years—means to go about the matter in a completely incorrect manner. The real disagreements between Marxists and opponents of Marxism on the agrarian question are rooted far more deeply. If one's aim is to achieve a complete clarification of the sources of disagreement, one must turn first of all, and above all, attention to the question of what are the fundamental features of the capitalist structure of contemporary agriculture. It is precisely on this question that the data from the German census of 12 June 1907 are especially valuable. It is less detailed on certain questions than the previous censuses of 1882 and 1895, but on the other hand, for the first time it provides data of unprecedented richness regarding wage labor in agriculture. And the employment of wage labor is the chief distinguishing characteristic of any capitalist agriculture.

Therefore we shall attempt first of all to provide a general picture of the capitalist structure of contemporary agriculture, relying principally on the data from the German census of 1907 and supplementing them with data from the best agricultural censuses of other countries, namely: Danish, Swiss, American, and the most recent Hungarian. As for the fact that strikes the eye most of all upon first acquaintance with the census results and about which there is the most talk—namely, the decrease in Germany of the number of large (in terms of agricultural land area) farms and the quantity of land they possessed—we shall turn to its examination only at the end of our work. For this is one of the complex facts that is a function of a whole series of others, and it is impossible to understand its significance without first having clarified several questions that are far more important and fundamental.