Irish Rural and Social Reform

- George William Russell (AE)

Contents

- The Building Up of a Rural Civilization (1910)

- Cooperation and Nationality (1912)
- The Dublin Strike (1913)
- Ireland, Agriculture and the War (1915)
- Thoughts for a Convention (1917)
- The Economics of Ireland (1920)

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The Building Up of a Rural Civilization

- An Address delivered at the Annual General Meeting of the I.A.O.S., 10th
December, 1909.
By George W. Russell

Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, Middle Abbey Street

1910

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I am not going to propose to you any closely reasoned-out scheme. I am going

to talk to you about ourselves, our movement, and its possibilities. I think we are in a great
movement, a movement which even now seems much greater to those who are outside
it than to those who are in it. It is the men who are outside a crowd who can best measure
its greatness and force. I have watched it from the outside and from inside, and I think that
its greatest need now is vital heat - an ideal to work for, a soul to warm it up. There is a
soul somewhere about it, and a good kind of soul, too; but its body and bulk is more
apparent. I would not exchange our movement for any other in Ireland, but I confess I
have sometimes envied the vital heat displayed at the meetings of other Irish
organisations. You are of all shades of politics, and you all know the white heat you have
got into at Home Rule demonstrations or at meetings protesting against Home Rule. Now
there may be motives of personal profit mingling sometimes with the chorus of acclamation
at such gatherings, but those present are carried beyond themselves by the inspiration of
a great central idea. They lose themselves in their varying ideals of Ireland or the Empire.
 We want to find our ideal - the synthesis of all these co-operative efforts. Butter,
especially when it is good, is a pleasant thing to think about; but you cannot inspire a
national movement by calling out, "Really choicest butter." Eggs, when they are fresh, are
a delightful food; but they will not help much to form national ideals, though they may
occasionally help to mar them - at election times. So we are driven from the actual
character of our rural industries to consider the men who carry them on. It is in our men
and in the object of their great endeavours we must find our ideal. I take it you are nearly
all farmers. I have always believed that farmers are the great stable human element in the
life of a nation.
There are certain elemental virtues which I believe are found more commonly in
the country than in the town. I believe, for instance, that farmers are, on the whole, the
most honest class; I do not mean to say they have not little tricks of their own; we are
living in no Island of Saints today - but there is no general dishonesty. We don't put
margarine into our butter in the country; they do that in the great cities. We don't label our
eggs as "Fresh laid British;" our neighbours across the Channel do that for us. I don't
believe there is a single farmer's creamery in Ireland which could be approached to share
in a fraud or agree to make illicit profits by blending its produce with adulterants; and I
don't believe in the great cities to which we sell that you could find six grocers one of
whom, at least, would not be ready to jump at such a proposal. Ask the Earl of Carrick how
many genuine importers of Irish produce there are in Glasgow among all the hundreds who
profess to cater for our countrymen who live there. His answer, I am sure, would bring
home to everyone the truth of what I say when I assert that the primitive social virtues
flourish better in the country than in the town.
Indeed, this has been noticed by every historian of society. And it is because
rural life fosters best these great simple virtues, because the country is the fountain of
healthy life, that every thoughtful man looks with grave apprehension on this gigantic
development of city life in modern times with its accompaniment in the rural exodus. The
countryside has a long memory, but it is not much given to the reading of history; and the
countryman today is suffering from forces which have always been in operation, but which
have been acting with more intense energy during the last half century. The problem of
how to keep a rural population happily contented on the land has been too suddenly
presented to the world for any complete answer to be made.
The rural exodus assumed an urgent aspect only within the last fifty years, and
at first it was difficult to disentangle temporary causes from those which steadily and
inevitably operate. In Ireland it began after the famine; and if the cause was transitory, it
was quite sufficient to explain the flight from rural Ireland for a considerable number of
years. But it does not explain the continued flight from the land which goes on today in
Ireland as in England or Europe, and even in the United States, which has admitted many
millions from Europe, but whose agricultural population has remained stagnant during the
half-century in which people were swept from the land in Europe. The American cities
received them, but comparatively few found their way to the land. The man born on the
land, once he sets foot in the cities, seems rarely to want to return. Why is there this
migration from rural districts? Why this dislike to life on a farm? Why, in half a century,
should rural life seem in danger of breaking up? The beast replaces man in Ireland; the
deer forest in Scotland; the game preserve in England; and, in rural America, the
machine, with a dozen men to guide it, replaces a hundred who have given up the fight.
History, so far back as we can see, can show nothing like this. It is a new problem, and
to solve it properly we must disentangle the temporary causes from those which steadily
and inevitably operate until a remedy is found.
The thoughts of the world have been too much with their cities, and they have
never sent out the missionaries of civilisation into the countries. There has been no rural
civilisation, no really well-organised system of rural society offering to men and women an
alternative life equally attractive with that offered in the multitudinous activities of a great
city. Civilisation has passed the farmer by; for in States with great cities political power,
owing to the easy organisation of opinion among city populations, is almost always used
to benefit the city populations. This is true today, even when the daily paper comes to the
farm and tells the man on the farm what is being done against his interests; and it must
have been still more true in ages when the countryman heard little or nothing of what fate
was being decreed for him. He was oppressed by forces he could only dimly analyse. He
heard of wonderful things at the centre of life, but he had no part in them. Civilisation, in
historical times, has been a flare up on a few square miles of bricks and mortar. Outside
the cities there have always been the same countrysides of little houses, the same neglect
of culture, the same want of education, the lack of organised intellectual, political, and
economic power which set up a barrier between the countryman and his access to the finer
things in life.
The farmers have suffered more as the cities increased. The city is always
wresting from the country its arts and its industries, and those which it cannot convey to
the town it tries to control. Weaving, spinning, and many other employments have gone
irrevocably from the home to the factory. A crowd of keen-witted business men have come
with offers to the farmer. They will make his butter for him, sell his stock for him, market
his produce for him, manufacture his bacon for him, bake his bread for him, and wherever
the farmer has given way and yielded to these insidious offers, he has become poorer than
before, his intellect less active, and the countryside has grown more lifeless and deserted.
So long as travel was difficult, dangerous, and expensive, all this did not lead to
a rural exodus. Before railway and steamship had put a girdle round the world, at the time
of the wonder-tales, when westward of Ireland was Hy-Brazil, and eastward of England
were countries where there were Anthropophagi and men whose heads did grow beneath
their shoulders, the countryman, unless exceptionally oppressed, remained where he was,
and tried to make himself happy with rustic sports and prosperous by communal
organisations and mutual aid. But the powers that were over him mistrusted his clan-
system and communal organisations, and broke them up. They neglected the education
of countrymen and concentrated on the townsman. One rural industry after another was
stolen from the country, and after that came the capitalist from the town to control
agriculture - the last thing left. They have got bacon in Ireland; they almost succeeded in
getting butter; the sale of live stock and farm produce is nearly altogether out of the
farmers' hands.
This sort of thing - or something equivalent to it - has been going on, not in Ireland
alone, but in almost every modem state; and when the train began to hurry swiftly across
the land, and the steamship across the sea, and fares were cheap, the long pent-up
disgust with their lot broke out among the countrymen, and the rural exodus began. The
world, so vast and vague in its girth to the ancients, has been dwindling through the
centuries, and it has now collapsed to the size of Ireland one hundred years ago. A man
can go nearly half round the world now in the time it would have taken him one hundred
years ago to travel from Kerry to Antrim. He can easily find out all he wants to know about
distant lands and the life of their cities. The world is all spread out before the agricultural
labourer and before the farmers' sons and daughters to choose where they will live; and
more and more they elect to live the city life - indeed there is often no choice.
The farm labourer does not see why he should labour from dawn to dusk for ten
or twelve shillings a week, when he could earn twice that sum in a town and work for
shorter hours at a less exhausting occupation, cheered, too, in his work by the presence
of a hundred others in his work room. The atmosphere of life and activity is an endless
wonder to the man bred in the silence of the fields. The world is spread out before the
countryman, and in this competition for population the life which is most attractive will win.
We hear the cry of "back to the land" continually, but for one who goes back, a thousand
go away. The life which offers most, which seems most alluring and attractive, will win;
and Small Holdings Acts, Land Acts, Peasant Proprietorships, and like remedial measures
only touch the fringes of the problem. Why, in the New England States outside New York,
a couple of years ago, there were 26,000 derelict farms once held by freeholders. They
had everything we are trying to give our Irish farmers, and where are they now? The cities
nodded and beckoned to the children of the farm, and they went, as they are going and will
go here, in spite of Small Holdings, Land Acts, Labourers' Plots, and the rest, if the miracle
is not wrought and the countryside made a place where a man can enjoy the fullest and
freest development of his intellectual, social, and economic powers. Can this miracle be
wrought? It is this question I will try to answer.
The miracle to be wrought is the creation of a rural civilisation. Civilisation implies
some measure of luxury and comfort. It can only be attained when the community is
organised and has strength to retain some surplus of wealth beyond what is required for
the bare necessaries of life. The organised industries, the organised communities, are
always wresting any surplus from the unorganised. It is the recognition of this which has
made labour parties arise, a portent in the modern world, conscious of the limitless power
they may use, and with limitless desires, too, growing as the vistas unfold and they see that
the earth and the fullness of it may be theirs. The force of that Labour Party may be with
you in some things, in temporary alliances, but in fundamental things it will be against you.

A fundamental thing is the price of food. In ancient Rome, the class

corresponding to our modem trades' unions, as they learned their power, could only be
appeased by a policy which is famous historically. It was "Free bread and circuses." They
ruined the agriculture of the ancient world. The cry for cheap food, which I may say is a
quite natural cry, has had effects on our legislation. It led to the Free Trade policy. The
organised town population shifted some of its burden on to the unorganised farmer by
inviting the world to compete with the farmers of its own country. Another fundamental
thing is taxation. The same forces which led the State to open the ports to foreign wheat
are beginning their attack on the land. The land taxes in the Budget are the beginning.
It is quite candidly avowed by the people who have forced that legislation that their aim is
the nationalisation of the land, and the means by which this is to be brought about are
simple - a gradual increase of taxation until the land can bear no other rent than the tax the
State imposes.
 The Socialist Labour combination in England, a party which is pushing its way
rapidly in England, and which wins a greater number of constituencies at every general
election, and which has enough votes in other constituencies to extract pledges from
members of other parties, this Socialistic Labour Party wants the land nationalised in just
that way. They have a belief that all land is owned by Dukes, and they are trying to shift
the burden of taxation off their own shoulders on to those who own the land. If the Tariff
Reformers come in, these same trades unions will use all their influence - and it is a great
one - to prevent any import duties on the food they eat, and I tell you that when an
organised town population make out some kind of a cry about the wealthy classes wanting
to tax the poor man's bread and meat, it engenders a kind of elemental mob savagery
before which any State will give way. So here again, this organised town population will
want to ease its burden, and very natural it is, too. But, if you farmers are to live under a
system of protection which is only for the manufacturer, and excludes the farmer, you will
be as badly hit by the new Protection as you were by the old Free Trade.
I am pointing out these things to you because I want to convince you of the
necessity of a farmers' trades' union. You have seen how the city capitalist has come into
the country and tried to wrest from you the control of butter, eggs, bacon, the marketing
of your live stock, trying to push you back simply into the position of manual labourers on
the land. I have tried to explain to you how these huge city populations with their organised
life have affected you, and are likely to affect you - and I have not told you half. And I want
to know are you not going to make a fight for the good old ancient life of the farmer? Will
you not make some stand against these forces which are quickening their life and will act
against you. To meet them requires a quickening of your own life.
The business mind of the country must be organised to counter the business mind
of the town, the political forces of the farmers must be organised to meet the organised
political forces of the towns - and to meet them intelligently. For lack of this political
organisation our own movement is hampered in many ways. We can get no legislation
through Parliament. We exert no force there. There is not a single Irish member of
Parliament to whom we could appeal to get the Thrift and Credit Banks Bill passed, giving
our agricultural banks the same powers which have made agricultural banks useful and
famous institutions on the Continent.
We represent almost one hundred thousand farmers, and our movement has no
political influence. It was only a month ago that an attempt was made by Irish members
to prevent the extension to Ireland of a clause in the Development Bill, which allowed the
Commissioners to devote part of the funds under their control to subsidise the teaching of
the principles of agricultural co-operation. We had the old lie trotted out - that the I.A.O.S.
is a trading body, and that it had its shops everywhere. How long is this sort of thing to
continue? I say once farmers realised this vast silent insistent pressure which is pushing
them more and more into an inferior position, it would not last a year - not six months.
The Press will not help you now. There are some honourable exceptions, but in
the main the Press is trade-controlled - even the country Press. Farmers do not advertise.
The trader does, and I tell you as a journalist that one advertiser who pays twenty-five
pounds to a paper will, as a rule, have more influence over the policy of a newspaper than
a hundred of its readers would have. The Press will never advise you, never help you,
never point out to you the best way out of your difficulties. What assistance has our
movement received in the fifteen years of its struggle? It has been lifted on, it is true, but
it was by kicks. We are a hundred thousand now, and they begin to keep silent, but they
will never point out to you frankly the thing to be done. They will do no thing which will lose
them an advertisement. If you control trade and advertisements, they will be on your side.
A dog will always fawn on the hand that feeds it.
If you have followed me so far, you will see how many things conspire to make
you support that resolution standing in the name of Dr. Morrison, not merely to pass it here,
but to force it on your members in the country, and to make them act in its spirit. I think
every farmers' society in Ireland should have a public policy committee as well as a
business committee. There is no use starting separate societies to talk. Use your
business organisation and let your political action be confined solely to pushing an
agricultural policy. It would be fatal to our movement if other questions like Home Rule or
the Union were introduced. We want to urge our agricultural policy on Home Rulers and
Unionists alike, and cannot afford to antagonise either party. It is a trades union to
promote the interests of agriculture and the business of farming which you require. And
to that it should confine itself altogether, because here farmers of all politics can agree, and
anything more would split you up.
This has been a policy adopted by French farmers with great success and they
have at present in their Parliament over three hundred deputies pledged to promote the
interests of the farmers' associations. They form for this purpose an agricultural party
which includes members of all parties. They can get any legislation they want since they
pledged their deputies. I think legislation is the least important thing, but sometimes it
becomes necessary, and trying to keep an expanding movement within the bounds
prescribed by old enactments is like trying to keep a big man clothed with garments which
fitted him when a boy. The man would have an immoral nakedness of shin and arm, and
his stomach would probably appear between his short trousers and his short waistcoat.
For want of purchasing powers now I believe some of our credit societies are, in spite of
the law, developing an immoral and illegal business in seeds and fertilisers. They are
dressed in the legislative garments of twenty years ago. We want new powers, and we
must get them. If we show we have power ourselves, we will get all the powers we want.
Unto them who have is given.
But political action is the least important thing for us. The great thing for our
movement to have is an ideal of its own to work towards. Better have no legislation at all
than have our eyes perpetually fixed on Westminster until the powers and possibilities of
the State assume monstrous and unnatural proportions in men's minds, and what men can
do for themselves without State aid sinks into insignificance. But our self-help movement,
the mutual aid given by men to each other, opens up infinitely more noble and inspiring
vistas - and more profitable vistas, I may add. It is not what the State has done or can do
which inspires, but the infinitely higher possibilities, which arise through the voluntary co-
operation of men to wring from nature and life the utmost they can give.
So I say that what we should propose to ourselves as the object of all our work
is the building up in Ireland of a rural civilisation, something which the world has not yet
seen, because, as I said before, its civilisations have been a flare-up on a few square miles
of brick and mortar. Babylon and Nineveh were built so high because they sucked up the
wealth of nations. Ancient Rome was a whirlpool drawing humanity into it. The farmer was
starved that it might feast. Babylon was great, but does anybody suppose there was any
Babylonian grandeur in the heart of the farmer? He was probably under the whip of an
overseer growing grapes to make the Babylonian King drunk. New York is a great city, with
its magnificence of forty-two story buildings, but is the heart of the New England farmer
forty-two stories high on the outskirts of so much magnificence? Ask the owners of the
twenty-six thousand derelict farms in the New England States.
The fact is that farmers have allowed the control of their industry to slip out of their
hands, and they are squeezed because the organised industry always unloads its burden
on the unorganised. If farmers are to retain a surplus of wealth beyond the bare
necessaries of life, if they are ever to see in rural districts any of the comforts and luxuries
of the city, they must make it their steady, persistent, and fundamental policy to work
towards complete control over the manufacture and sale of all the produce of the
countryside, its live stock, its crops, its by-products and the manufacturing businesses
connected with these, so that they can act in their own interests through their own agents
in distant markets, and push their produce with the energy of self-interest. I say that this
policy is not against the interests of the towns, for anything which increases the wealth of
farmers increases their power of consumption and makes the countryside a better market
for the articles which the townsman produces. In the practical working out of this policy it
will turn our societies, which are, as a rule, specialised for one purpose, into general
purposes societies. It will mean that the dairy society will become an agricultural society,
have its agricultural store, its credit or banking department, its poultry department and other
branches specialised for the sale of whatever other produce the district may cultivate.
This gradual gathering up of business into the hands of farmers' societies will
mean that there will finally be one large well-equipped business firm doing the business
hitherto done by a dozen or two dozen small and miserably inadequate concerns. I
calculate that this gathering up in one large concern of the agricultural business in a district
equal to the area served by a creamery would mean that the association would do a
business of anything between fifty to one hundred thousand pounds every year. It could
work more economically than the dozen small men who supply agricultural requirements,
trade in eggs, or what not. It would make large profits for its members, and it could afford
to pay for the best business capacity in the country to direct its operations. It could
promote village and home industries for the women by starting lace, embroidery, and toy
making, employ its own carpenters and shoemakers, make its own harness and saddlery,
and employ local labour permanently, in the summer time in the fields, in the winter at
other work.
And it is only by some such method of filling up the often vacant and unemployed
hours of the agricultural labourer that farmers will be able to retain labour in the future.
Labour will, in future, be less and less tied to the district which does not fully employ it.
Labour is becoming mobile, an army to be marched where it pays it best to have its
quarters. The Labour Exchanges which will be set up next year, and which will extend their
offices into agricultural districts, are intended to help on the mobility of labour, to make it
easy for the labourer to go here, there, anywhere he can get good wages. Will you, who
cannot now give permanent employment, keep labour? I say you will not. You are losing
labour as it is, and you will lose it more unless you can employ it permanently; unless you
can compete with the city, it will go to the city. It is by the organisation of rural life, by the
creation of varied employments, you will be able to do this.
One of our societies at Enniscorthy, I am informed, employs thirty people in
productive work; sometimes the number has been higher. What it has done can be done
elsewhere. Out of the profits of such great rural co-operative societies as I advocate many
things can be done for the people in the district without the members feeling the cost.
Village halls and recreation rooms could be built, rural libraries started; the hedges might
be made to bear fruit rather than thorns; and as the process went on, with something
attempted and done year by year, our village and rural life would grow beautiful, and we
would make a countryside no one would willingly desert for the city. The alliance of the
local societies with huge federations would make the farmers' position strong in the
economic world; and the power to organise rural opinion and to act for common purposes
would give them immense political influence, and a sane political influence too, because
men engaged in business enterprises are not given to advocate wildcat schemes. Their
agricultural policies would rise out of the necessities of trade, and would have that sanity
which springs from industrial training and familiarity with large business undertakings. I
believe it is by advancing in this direction the prosperity of rural Ireland will be secured, and
that we will best serve the interests of Ireland as a whole, securing the approval of the
manufacturer and the well-being of the labourer.
I look myself to the social and human results of this complete organisation of rural
life and industry as the best result. The struggle for existence sometimes produces the
hero, but a more usual product is the petty rogue. I have always felt it was a forlorn hope
preaching honesty to the grocer in a society where his neighbour sends his sugar, dusts
his pepper, adulterates his butter, sells cheaper, and gets the trade. We should aim at
creating a social order where the struggle for existence will give way to a brotherhood of
workers; where men, dependent on the success of their united endeavours for their own
prosperity, will instinctively think first of the community, and secondly of themselves.
To aim at the creation of a nobler social order in Ireland than we have had in the
past might well give us all inspiration and energy, and make us feel that our movement
occupies no mean place amongst those movements which are trying to regenerate our
land. I would say, indeed, that all other movements, however necessary, are external and
hollow compared with any movement which deals with life itself and tries to create
conditions in which a higher humanity will be possible, and sets that before it as its aim.
We talk a great deal of blather about a united Ireland, but in practice most of us find it
difficult to put up with the people about us. I live in Rathgar, but I cannot say my heart
overflows with affection to my neighbours there because we live in the same latitude and
longitude. I have truly affectionate feelings towards the workers in the I.A.O.S., because
we have the same aims and objects and are in the same organisation. If we can get the
farmers and labourers in country districts into the same associations, and the associations
into union with national federations, we will have a united Ireland, and we may realise in
Ireland Whitman's splendid dream for America, where he cried -

"Come, I will make the Continent indissoluble;

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the shores of America;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms around each other's necks,
By the love of comrades, by the manly love of comrades."

If we can make inseparable societies with their arms round each other's necks,
working for the same ends, and inspired by the same ideals, we will have a United Ireland.
The unity which depends only on our living in the same latitude and longitude will never
come to much. It seems to me to be mainly blather. You and I, I hope, are bent on
realities.

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Co-operation and Nationality

- A Guide for Rural Reformers from this to the Next Generation
By George W. Russell (AE)

Maunsel & Co., Ltd., Dublin

1912

To Sir Horace Plunkett, Father Thomas Finlay and Robert A. Anderson, three good
comrades. I dedicate this meditation over the outcome of their work in Ireland.

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Contents

I. The Problem of Rural Life

II. Past and Present Conditions
III. Need for an Agricultural Revolution
IV. The Rise of Agricultural Co-operation
V. Building up a New Social Order
VI. Town and Country
VII. Organized Communities and Political Life
VIII. The Creation of Citizens
IX. Women on the Land
X. Union of Men and Women Workers
XI. Farmers and the State
XII. Ideals of the New Rural Society
XIII. Life Finding its Level

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Chapter I

The Problem of Rural Life

I have heard people speak as if Ireland were a freak, as if our national problems
were absolutely unique, and we could learn little or nothing from other countries.
Agricultural co-operation, for example, might suit farmers in other lands, but it was either
too high or too low for us. The creamery system was a disastrous departure from our
ancient methods of butter-making. We would starve our children if milk and eggs could be
sold at higher prices, for it would make these wholesome articles too costly a luxury for the
home. All this and much more has been gravely urged.
It was natural enough, when the majority of the people were trying to show how
impossible government from Westminster was, that every cause, reasonable or
unreasonable, should be urged to emphasize our unique character and the hopelessness
of other people understanding us sufficiently to let us develop happily. Anything which
would show our problems were not unique seemed to destroy an argument for self-
government, and it looked as if we might at last shape ourselves into a national freak which
would justify, not self-government, but control by the Commissioners for Lunacy. Luckily
it is now being recognized that there are stronger arguments for and against self-
government than the exhibition of our people as freaks, and we can learn many things from
other countries without injury to our Irish pride. We are gradually being won back to
humanity, and men are learning that the problems of rural life in Ireland are not so very
different in character from those which statesmen have to solve in Europe or America.
We can see now that people migrate from rural Ireland for reasons nearly identical
with those which make the Italian peasant emigrate, or make the American cultivator leave
his farm and go to the cities. It is admitted that inefficient government is one of the causes
here, but it would be as easy to prove there is inefficient government everywhere.
Government is inefficient because statesmen have not yet agreed upon the remedy for
rural depopulation. There is no general agreement even among those who personally are
affected by the changes which are going on, and the truth about these or any other
subjects must become almost a platitude before governments will accept it, or foster a new
idea.
The problem of how best to keep a rural population happily contented on the land
has been too suddenly presented to the world for any complete answer yet to be made.
It only assumed an urgent aspect within the last half century, and at first it was difficult to
disentangle temporary causes from those which steadily and inevitably operate. In Ireland
it began after the famine, and if the cause was transitory it was quite sufficient to explain
the flight from Ireland for a considerable number of years. But it does not explain the
continued flight from the land which goes on today in Ireland, as in England or Europe, and
even in the United States, which has admitted many millions from Europe, but whose
agricultural population has remained stagnant during the half century in which these people
were swept from the land in Europe. The American cities received them, but comparatively
few found their way to the land.
The man born on the land once he sets foot in the cities seems rarely to want to
return. Why is there this migration from rural districts? Why this dislike to life on a farm?
Why in half a century should rural life seem to be in danger of breaking up? The beast
replaces man in Ireland, the deer forest in Scotland, the game preserve in England, and
in rural America the machine with a dozen men to guide it replaces a hundred who have
given up the fight. History so far back as we can see shows nothing like this. It is a new
problem, and to solve it properly we must disentangle the temporary causes from those
which must steadily and inevitably operate until a remedy is found.
 The thoughts of the world have been too much with the cities, and they have never
sent out the missionaries of civilization into the country. Wealth has shot out its offshoots:
here and there a villa, a castle, a palace; but these were rural exotics, and the countrymen
had no part in them. There has been no fine civilization, no really well organized system
of rural society. Civilization has passed the farmer by. Babylon and Nineveh sent up their
towers to heaven, but the farmers on Chaldean plains toiled in the same way before the
cities were built, while they were in their glory and long after they were heaps of ruins.
Rome had its palaces along the Tiber, and it held the ancient world in fee, but, if it had any
effect on the ancient Italian farmer, it was to injure his interests by the gathering of political
power into the hands of those who dreaded the outcry of the Roman populace, and
sacrificed all other interests to please the mob which swarmed so perilously close to the
gates of its dictators' palaces.
In a country of great cities political power, owing to the easy organization of opinion
among city populations, is almost always used to benefit the city populations. This is true
today, even when the daily paper comes to the man in the farm and tells him what is being
done against his interest in the town, and it must have been still more true in ages when
the countryman heard little or nothing of what fate was being decreed for him. He was
oppressed by forces he could only dimly analyze. He heard of wonderful things at the
centre of life, but he had no part in them. Civilization in historical times has been a flare-up
on a few square miles of brick and mortar. Outside the cities there have always been the
same mean houses, the same implements of labour, the same ignorance, want of
education, the same oblivion of the finer things in life.
The farmers have generally suffered more as the cities increased. The city is
always wresting from the country its arts and industries. Weaving and spinning and other
employments are gone irrevocably from the home to the factory. A crowd of keen-witted
business men have come with offers to the farmer. They will make his butter for him, sell
his stock, market his produce, manufacture his bacon, buy his requirements, even bake
his bread for him, and wherever the farmer has yielded and given way to these insidious
offers he has become poorer than before, his intellect less active, and the countryside has
grown more lifeless and deserted.
So long as travel was difficult, dangerous and expensive, all this did not lead to a
rural exodus. Before a girdle had been put around the world, when for the ignorant
countryman to leave his country was to adventure among fancied giants, anthropophagi,
and men whose heads did grow beneath their shoulders; when to venture across the seas
was perhaps to be washed down by the gulfs or to be lost to humanity upon the Happy
Isles, the countryman, unless exceptionally adventurous or exceptionally oppressed,
remained where he was as long as he could and endured his fate, and tried to make
himself happy with rustic sports, and prosperous by communal organization and mutual
aid. But the powers that were over him mistrusted his communal organizations and broke
them up, and they then educated him for rural life by a system which was a very inferior
replica of the education of a townsman, or else they neglected his education altogether;
and when the train began to hurry swiftly across the land and the steamship across the
sea, and fares were cheap, the long pent-up disgust with their lot broke out among the
countrymen and the rural exodus began.
The world, so vast and vague in its girth to the ancients, has been dwindling through
the centuries, and it has now collapsed to the size of Ireland one hundred years ago. A
man can go nearly half round the world now in the time it would have taken him at the
beginning of last century to travel from Kerry to Antrim. He can easily find out all he wants
to know about distant lands and the life of their cities. The world is all spread out before
the agricultural labourers and before the farmers' sons and daughters to choose where
they will live, and more and more they elect to live the city life. The farm labourer does not
see why he should labour from dawn to dusk for twelve shillings a week, when he could
earn twice that sum in a town, and work for shorter hours at a less exhausting occupation
in an atmosphere of life and activity which is in itself an endless wonder and attraction to
one bred in the silence of the fields. The world is spread out before the countryman, and
in the competition for population the life which is most attractive will win.
We hear the cry of "Back to the land" continually, but for one who returns a
thousand go away. The life which offers most, which seems most intense and most
alluring, wins, and small holdings acts, land acts, peasant proprietorships, and like
remedial measures, touch only the fringe of the problem. Why, in the New England States
there are at the present time about twenty-six thousand derelict farms once held by free-
holders. They had everything and more than everything we are trying to give our Irish
farmers, and where are they now? The cities nodded and beckoned to the children of the
farm and they went, as they are going, and will go, in spite of small holdings, land acts,
labourers' plots, and the rest, if the miracle is not wrought and the countryside made a
place where a man can enjoy the fullest and freest development of his spiritual, intellectual
and social powers. Can the miracle be wrought? It is this question I will try to answer.

------------

Chapter II.

Past and Present Conditions

The miracle to be wrought is the creation of a rural civilization. Civilization implies

some measure of luxury and comfort. It can only be attained when the community is
organized and has strength to retain some surplus of wealth beyond what is required for
the bare necessities of life. The organized industries, the organized communities, are
always wresting any surplus from the unorganized. It is the recognition of this which has
made labour parties arise, a portent in the modern world, conscious of the limitless power
they may use, and with limitless desires too growing as the vistas unfold, and they see the
earth and the fulness of it may be theirs.
Farmers who are assuredly labourers are as yet for the most part unorganized, no
vista has unfolded before them, and no goal is in sight. The feet run swiftly only when the
mists are dispersed and the end of the path is clear. Because the farmer is more isolated
by the nature of his employment than any other class, he is the last to be organized, and
his industry has suffered more in modern times than any other. Mutual aid, co-operative
action - clan or communal - were instinctive with ancient rural communities. This was the
true foundation on which alone a rural civilization could be built up, for it gave strength and
power to retain a just proportion of the wealth the community produced. But when the
State broke up the clan or communal system, the small farmer became a pathetic figure
in the modern world. He was like a small cockleshell of a boat suddenly cut adrift from an
ocean liner and left powerless at the mercy of the waters. He was no longer a part owner
of the land he tilled, but a tenant labouring on it by another's permission.
Then the manufacturer began in the towns to produce cheaply and on a large scale
many things previously produced by rural or home industries, which when carried on in the
country made life more varied, intelligence more active, and therefore more satisfied. The
country man began to find his activities confined within rapidly narrowing limits. Hordes of
keen-witted business men began to handle his produce, they occupied all the roads to the
markets, they did his business for him, fixed the prices for his stock and crops, and saw
to it that riches should not prove hereafter a stumbling block at his entrance into the
kingdom of Heaven. Those who brought his requirements into the district had the same
watchful care over his chances of future happiness. He was doubly saved. I do not say
that these forces acted with conscious enmity to the farmer. They were mostly efforts to
help him, as well intentioned as the elephant who, seeing some motherless chickens, said,
"I will be a mother to the poor little things," and lay down on them to keep them warm.
Tragi-comic legend thought it unnecessary to develop the further history of that clutch. The
Irish elephants have lain down heavily on the farmers and have obliterated many of the
brood they were intended to rear.
I know it will arouse vehement protest when I say that farmers in Ireland have
suffered as much from middlemen as from landlords, though they were quite right in
striving first of all for security of tenure of the land they cultivated. It was quite clear to the
farmer how much of his income went to the landlord while he had no means of calculating
the toll levied off him by the middlemen who bought and sold for him. The small farmer
who came from a remote parish, and drove his pigs for miles into a fair, had no means of
knowing how much he was docked of the true value of his stock by the gang of jobbers
who met in a hotel the night before and fixed a price. He might occasionally learn that
eggs were sold at one and sixpence a dozen in the town while he was getting eightpence
for them, and that paid not in cash but in high-priced tea and sugar; but how was he to
know that the difference in the price received by the producer and the price paid by the
consumer did not represent fairly the cost of collection and distribution?
The uncertainty of the small farmer's income left him an easy victim to the sharp-
witted business man with money to lend or credit to give, and in Ireland many a small
farmer's bones have been picked clean by this fraternity. I have heard people with secure
incomes crying out against the frequent borrowing of the farmer. They wonder that the
virtue of paying as one goes is not worldwide. But an income which depends largely on
the state of the weather yawns with empty gulfs; it has so many cracks, gaps and
fluctuations that the virtue in question, no matter how bravely it struggles, often goes under.
A farmer is not like a government official whose income, so long as he does not
misbehave, arrives as surely as the full moon, differing only from the moon in that it waxes
and never wanes. The farmer's income is subject to all kinds of buffets, now a storm
reduces it to a moribund condition, now a sudden inrush of foreign produce lurches up
against it and makes it weak and dizzy; and it is subject to systematic squeezing by
middlemen. The shout of the hungry townsman to producers in distant countries is:
"Come to us! The more in our market the better," and the solitary protest of the home
farmer to keep them away is lost amid the folding of the hills.
 Credit is an absolute necessity to the small farmer, and over three-quarters of our
Irish farmers are men of this class. In their necessity they seek credit wherever they can
get it easiest. Demand creates supply, and in response to the demand for agricultural
credit there arose in Ireland during the last century whole hordes of credit-giving
freebooters. There were the trust auctioneers in the north, the butter merchants in the
south, and private loan offices in the towns, and the gombeen man nearly everywhere, but
always found with certainty in the poorest districts, where the thinner the farmer the stouter
was the trader.
All these agencies of credit presented the fairest front. They "always helped the
poor farmer in his need," but they wanted a good deal more than the farmer, and they took
it. Nothing could be more reasonable and benevolent than the theory of the trust
auctioneer, that under his system, where credit was given to the purchaser for four months,
the poor farmer was enabled to buy a cow and pay at leisure. Yet see this benevolent
system in operation! A number of men want money. They drive their beasts into the
auctioneer's yard; one of these men offers the cattle for sale as if they were his, and the
others bid them up to a good round price. The auctioneer pays cash with a discount of five
or seven percent off to the supposed seller. He gets promissory notes due in four months
from the supposed purchasers with five or seven percent added on, and he sees that the
names on the bills are good enough to secure him. There are auction fees at five percent.
Then the men drive the cattle home to the sheds they left in the morning, and they divide
the money between them, which was what they really wanted. They have four months to
scrape up cash to meet the bills. The philanthropist has his discount, interest, and auction
fees as his reward for "helping the poor farmer."
In Ulster this system has ruined many, and it is coming downwards into the midlands
like the growth of a swift disease. Men in necessity auction off anything, their fields, their
future crops, their grazing, anything which can be auctioned. A father sells it and a son or
neighbour buys it in. I know of one cow on which over seventy pounds was raised in a
month after journeys north, south, east, and west. But that cow, after hearing great bidding
in the trust auctioneer's premises "about it and about," was like Omar Khayyam in his
search for truth, for it "evermore came out by the same door wherein it went."
In the south of Ireland the butter merchants wore the same affable air as the trust
auctioneer. In the spring a small farmer's thoughts turn naturally to credit, and whom
should he appeal to but his patron the butter merchant? He borrowed from him, and he
was accommodated with a loan from which the moderate interest of ten percent was first
abstracted. The farmer was pledged to sell all the butter he produced through the season
to this butter-buyer. At one time, before the creamery system began, the Cork butter
merchants held all Munster in fee. They paid the tied producer three shillings per cwt. less
than the export price which the free farmers received, and graded his butter as they listed.
They grew to be great and wealthy citizens, and they said Ireland was being ruined when
the farmers began to build creameries of their own and sold their butter illegitimately in the
English market themselves. They still carry on a paying business though it is dwindling in
dimensions. The higgler repeats the system on a smaller scale.
The private loan offices in Ireland are like such offices everywhere. The loan fund
societies are little better. I bring no charge against the large banks, whose interest is
moderate enough, except this, that the system of three or four months' bills is unsuitable
to the farmers' industry, and the towns in which their branch offices are situated are often
a long distance from the farm, and the farmer is put to heavy expenses bringing in his
sureties, treating them according to ancient custom, giving them a dinner and keeping
them in good humour so that they will renew if required. These expenses, taken together
with the interest, often made a loan cost twenty or thirty percent. If a man is buying young
pigs it may be seven months before they will be ready for sale, and an inelastic system of
credit which forces expensive renewals does not really help the borrower, but cripples him.
However, these large banks, if unsuitable in their methods, are on the whole fair and just
in their charges, and I hope to show later on how they may be tapped by small farmers in
a way less expensive to themselves.
There remains now the one universal credit-giver - the rural trader. I find it difficult
to write calmly of the abuses of the credit system which once prevailed all over Ireland, and
which still prevail in many districts, but especially in the west. Nothing is easier for the
farmer than to run into debt at one of these country shops. He is invited to help himself to
everything the shop contains up to certain well-defined limits. He may be allowed a year
or a year and a half to be behindhand with his payments. The aim is to let him sink into
debt, not so deeply as to imperil the security the trader has, but deeply enough to make
it difficult or impossible for the customer to quickly extricate himself. In fact the idea is to
have tied customers - men who must buy where they already owe money, who are not in
a position to quarrel with prices or the quality of the goods supplied.
When the trader has double functions as middleman, not only supplying
requirements but accepting produce, the system is one of the most effective means of
fleecing the farmer at both ends of his business which could be devised. A large number
of rural traders not only sell to their customers but also buy cattle, swine, butter, eggs, oats,
potatoes, and other forms of farm produce from them. Barter takes the place of cash
transactions. In congested districts this system is responsible for half of the poverty. I
made minute enquiries in Connemara a few years ago. I compared the prices charged
there with the prices charged for goods of the same quality in Galway town. I found out
what allowances in goods were made for produce bartered, and came to the conclusion
that for every shilling's worth of produce the small congested farmer had to dispose of he
received less than half its value.
In the maps of ancient Ireland we see pictures of famous chiefs standing over their
territories - MacSwineys of the Battle Axes and their peers. In maps of modern congested
Ireland pictured in the same way we should find swollen gombeen men straddling right
across whole parishes, sucking up like a sponge all the wealth in the district, ruling
everything, presiding over county councils, rural councils, boards of guardians, and placing
their relatives in every position which their public functions allow them to interfere with. In
congested Ireland every job which can be filled by the kith and kin of the gombeen kings
and queens is filled accordingly, and you get every kind of inefficiency and jobbery. They
are all publicans, and their friends are all strong drinkers. They beget people of their own
character and appoint them lieutenants and non-commissioned officers in their service.
All the local appointments are in their gift, and hence you get drunken doctors, drunken
rate-collectors, drunken J.P.'s, drunken inspectors - in fact round the gombeen system
reels the whole drunken congested world, and underneath this revelry and jobbery the
unfortunate peasant labours and gets no return for his labour. Another enters in and takes
his cattle, his eggs, his oats, his potatoes, his pigs, and gives what he will for them, and the
peasant toils on from year to year, being doled out Indian meal, flour, tea, and sugar
enough to keep him alive. He is a slave almost as much as if he were an indentured
native, or had been sold in the slave market.
There is probably not a community in Europe so backward and wretched as this
Connemara peasantry. There is not a redeeming feature. There is beauty of earth,
mountain, sky and water, but no beauty in life. In Poland, Russia, Roumania, in any of the
wretched peasant communities one hears of, there is still some refinement. You will see
beautiful embroidery on the dresses, and picturesque houses. Life is not so hard that it
has not left men and women some delight in beauty. But in poor Connemara the arts of
life simply do not exist, and it maddens one to think that man the immortal, with all his God-
implanted powers, should exist in such wretchedness, and know of no more expanded life
than is allowed him by the gombeen kings for whom he labours and works unceasingly.
It is hardly worth while being born in Connemara while this system continues. It is the
distant and desert verge of humanity far beyond the borders of civilization.

---------

Chapter III.

Need for an Agricultural Revolution

When steam first began to puff and wheels go round at so many revolutions per
minute, the wild child humanity, who had hitherto developed his civilization in picturesque
unconsciousness of where he was going, and without any set plan, was caught and put in
harness. What are called business habits were invented to make the life of man run in
harmony with the steam engine, and his movements rival the train in punctuality. The
factory system was invented and was an instantaneous success. Men were clothed with
cheapness and uniformity. Their minds grew numerously alike, cheap and uniform also.
They were at their desks at nine o'clock, or at their looms at six. They adjusted themselves
to the punctual wheels. The rapid piston acted as pacemaker, and in England, which
started first on the modern race for wealth, it was an enormous advantage to have tireless
machines of superhuman activity to make the pace, and nerve men, women, and children
to the fullest activity possible.
Business methods had a long start in England, and irregularity and want of
uniformity became after a while such exceptions that they were regarded as deadly sins.
The grocer whose supplies of butter did not arrive week after week by the same train, at
the same hour, and of the same quality, of the same colour, the same saltness, and in the
same kind of box quarreled with the wholesaler, who in his turn quarreled with the
producer. Only the most machine-like race could win custom. After a while every country
felt it had to be drilled or become extinct. Some made themselves into machines to enter
the English market, some to preserve their own markets. Even the indolent Oriental is
getting keyed up, and in another fifty years the Bedouin of the desert will be at his desk
and the wild horseman of Tartary will be oiling his engines.
In Ireland the wild child humanity came under this discipline very slowly. He was in
love with old fashions. For a long time he would have no butter made except in strict
accordance with Gaelic traditions. He skimmed his milk himself, or his wife did, and he or
she pounded away at the churn and were unconcerned about temperatures, and they had
never heard of microbes. There was nothing uniform about the produce, and in a hundred
farms in every parish a hundred flavours originated. They might be all bad, or all good, but
they certainly were never the same. Yet the Irish farmer was manufacturing it for people
who had standardized all their tastes and objected to the slightest change, who wanted
their butter to be as uniform as all the square yards in a roll of wallpaper. The exceptional
excellence of the butter received one week was no compensation for the intolerable flavour
of the next.
Denmark, twenty years before we began, turned itself into a machine, and its
farmers all got up at the same time in the morning and took their milk to creameries, and
cream was separated and churned at the same temperatures. The managers had heard
all about bacteria, and that a microbe became a great grandfather in the winking of an eye,
and they kept their premises as clean as the wards of a hospital, and they turned out butter
so uniform that all the Danish butter might almost have come from the one churning. The
individualist in butter-making was nowhere.
The uniform Briton with uniform tastes revolted against the eccentric variations in
the flavour of butter coming from Ireland, and he paid the Irish middleman or the
wholesaler twenty shillings a hundredweight under the price he paid to the disciplined
Dane. The wholesaler acquiesced, he could do nothing else, but he saw to it that he did
not lose, and he docked the price to the producer in Ireland, unloading his burden on the
unorganized after the fashion of the most powerful. There is always room on top for more
wealth and room at the bottom for more poverty. Bed rock has never been found, but the
organized interests are always making the unorganized conduct extensive investigations
in that direction. The sweated pursue these investigations towards bed rock in the cities,
the small farmer in the country. The young Irish boy and girl growing up felt the occupation
depressing and went to America. They had no interest in inquiry into economic ultimates.
The poultry and egg industry suffered in the same way. There were numerous
relays of middlemen. The higgler went around generally with tea and sugar, and
sometimes, though more rarely, with cash, and collected the eggs. Generally speaking,
the farmer's wife kept them as long as she could, waiting for a rise in price. The higgler
was not indifferent to the satisfaction of selling when prices were higher, and he waited so
long as he thought it was prudent, and sold to the wholesaler in England, who received
grievous complaints from the retailer about the freshness of the eggs and the way they
were packed. Irish eggs grew to have a very bad name, which has only lately been
somewhat refurbished.
A great deal of the collection of eggs was, and still is, carried on by country
shopkeepers. Eggs were bartered for ounces of tea or pounds of sugar, and the egg grew
to be regarded in many districts as part of the currency of the realm. I have myself seen
a child enter a post office, lay down two eggs and ask for a penny stamp. There was little
or no grading, the packing was disgraceful, the eggs were dirty, and their freshness was
too often dubious. So here, as with the butter industry, the retailer in England found his
sense of what was right and reliable and uniform shocked, and he paid for the cases as
one who expected to find a considerable number of the eggs of election quality. In this
business the Danes had also developed a machine-like accuracy, and though farther
removed from the common market, they managed to get their eggs there much fresher
than we did. The Irish producer suffered. The national machinery for distribution of produce
was old and out of date. It moved too slowly for a swift and methodical world. So in these
two important branches of the farmer's business he did badly. He produced badly and
without method. The marketing was inefficient, and as there is always room at the bottom
and nothing to lean up against, the person nearest the market, which was firm and would
not yield, naturally pushed the producer a little further into the abyss, where there was lots
of room.
It must be confessed that every country gets the kind of middlemen it deserves, and
the way the Irish farmer managed his side of the business invited the kind of treatment he
received. If he had sold through his own agents he would very speedily have found what
the requirements of the market were, and would have adapted himself to them. But half
a dozen middlemen, as links between the producer, and the consumer, made a bad
medium for conveying this kind of information, and the Irish farmer struggled on for years
suffering from forces too remote from him for his understanding.
In the marketing of live stock there was the same slackness. The fairs were, and
are still, dominated by rings of dealers, jobbers, "blockers," and "tanglers," whose aim it is
to buy as cheaply as possible. The blockers and tanglers are the jackals of the jobbers,
and the jobbers are the jackals of the big dealers. Irish country people love the excitement,
noise and tumult of a fair. One of our last poets sings of it with exultation:

"The crowds at the fair,

The herds loosened and blind,
Loud words and dark faces
And the wild blood behind."

Why, poet, this was a business assembly. Were you aware that these men were
wrecking their industry by these loose business methods which delighted your eye? We
shall have to keep the poets out of the new Irish Republic as Plato kept them out of his, or
we shall never get our machine to work. The machine, I grant, may never be so
picturesque, but the farmer of the future will compensate himself for the lack of excitement
at the fair by a greater comfort in his home, and the poets must sing of other things. There
will always be love, twilight and the stars.
Irish cattle and swine get to their final destination by devious routes. The first act
in the business is to get the animals out of the farmer's hands as cheaply as possible, and
for this purpose blockers and tanglers exist. They have no money themselves. They are
simply the jackals of the jobbers. When a jobber has made his offer for some cattle which
he wishes to buy, and it has been refused, it is the business of the blockers to remain
beside the farmer and to block other customers. The etiquette of the fair precludes rival
bidding while a man is engaged in bargaining, so the blocker keeps other jobbers off until
the first bidder returns and finds a weary and repentant farmer reduced to submission. His
rent is due, or his instalment to the Land Commission, and he must sell.
The tangler is a variety of the blocker. It is his business to confuse the farmer's
mind as to the real value of his animal. The jobber offers, say, ten pounds, and it is
refused. He winks at his jackals, and one tangler comes up and laughs at the farmer's
price of twelve pounds, and offers eight pounds as all the beast is worth. Tangler
succeeds tangler, and in the end the unfortunate man thinks he must be deceived as to
the merits of his animal, and is glad to sell, perhaps for nine pounds, to the first bidder who
returns at the close of the fair. These jackals often make as much as one pound or two
pounds for their day's work.
Another way in which the farmer suffers is that cattle are generally sold by guess-
work, not by weight, and in calculating value by guess-work the expert beats the farmer.
The jobber sells in turn to the big dealers, who sell again in England, and all these earnings
and profits of blockers, tanglers, jobbers, and dealers are taken off the value of the
farmer's stock. Horses are dealt with in much the same way. Sometimes if there is a brisk
demand there is real competition, and cattle and horses may be sold for their real value,
but, generally speaking, the market is laid out. Pig jobbers regularly lay out the market and
fix prices, and while the farmer knows he is being fleeced he has no remedy. In Ulster,
where pigs are killed before the fair, they must be sold somehow. "The dead must be
buried," as their saying is, and elsewhere where they are sold alive the farmer hesitates
to take the animals back and be at the expense of further feeding, when he is not sure that
the next fair will not see the same gang at work and perhaps with a lower price fixed.
Flax sales are dominated in the same way. The buyers form a ring in the morning
and fiat their ultimatums. Corn and barley are sold by sample, and the producer is nearly
always being fleeced on the excuse that bulk is not equal to sample. If prices go up he
may be paid in full, but if they go down it is generally found that the sample was very
misleading.
Only the merest sketch can be given of the antiquated methods of marketing which
some few years ago prevailed all over Ireland, and which in some branches of the farmer's
business still prevail. There are complications and intricacies which would need volumes
to elucidate. But while I cannot expect the middlemen to recognise the truth of what I have
written, the farmer will verify it; and the fact that these conditions existed, and still exist,
is the motive power behind a revolution in business methods which is going on in Ireland
(which I will describe in other chapters), and which has for its object the giving to the farmer
the complete control of production and marketing, and the elimination of those middle
interests which have acted with such disastrous results on Irish agriculture.
These middlemen did not serve the farmers well. They tricked him at home, and
could not even secure good prices themselves in the markets where they disposed of Irish
produce. Even this year the Department of Agriculture found that sixty percent of the
seeds sold in Ireland were adulterated. To put it briefly, agriculture as a business has been
a house divided against itself. The directors were pocketing the profits as fees, and the
shareholders got decreasing dividends.
I have no enmity to these people at all, but they are an anachronism in the modern
world where industry is drilled and disciplined. I have made these brief sketches of their
methods because I want to show how impossible it is for the unorganized small farmer to
retain any fair proportion of the wealth he creates while forces which he cannot control take
possession of his industry and exploit it. Dual control in agricultural industry is as
impossible to maintain or defend as dual ownership of land. I wish to show how impossible
it is to build up a rural civilization while these loose and wasteful business methods prevail.
While this goes on stagnation or decadence must continue. The farmer will economise
more in labour, he will revert to the cheapest and lowest forms of farming, and labour will
desert the country.
The young people as they grow up will fly from a life which offers them nothing - no
joy, no beauty, no comfort, no hope. Have we not all seen the growing dislike of the land
among the rising generation? How many Irishmen go on the land in the States? Not one
in twenty, not in a hundred, hardly one in a thousand. They have been on the land in
Ireland, and they go anywhere, to any crowded slum, rather than to the fields. God's world,
all the light, the glory, the beauty which the earth puts forth to her children, the dawn over
the hills, the green grass, the odour and incense of flowers, the smell of the turned-up sod,
trees, hills, the multitudinous magnificence of nature - are all being deserted by humanity
because humanity cannot exist on the earth and cultivate it, and maintain thereon an equal
life.
If they remain they are poor, they are ignorant they are beset by hostile forces, they
are enslaved and they give up their inheritance as heirs of the ages and the spoils which
man has ransacked from time. We cry out with Whitman: "Could we wish humanity
indifferent? Could we wish people were made of wood or stone?" The system which has
acted so disastrously to Irish agriculture must be changed, and its agents must disappear.
We need not pity them. A revolution cannot be wrought at once. They will slowly melt into
the new order which will slowly arise, and they will find their place there. The Irish rural
community of the future, I hope, will find a place for all its people.

----------

Chapter IV

The Rise of Agricultural Co-operation

This is only a guide to the next generation, and no one need expect from me
proposals for a new Utopia to be floated at once with a promise of huge dividends of
happiness. I do not believe in the designs of those who say they are building for eternity,
as experience has shown that most of these cuttings from flowers in the mind shrivel at
their first transplanting into time. No country can marry any particular solution of its
problems and live happily ever afterwards. Life is an endless struggle, and every nation
will have perpetually to adjust itself to new conditions. Protection may triumph this
generation on earth, but I foresee in the next generation free trade victoriously appearing
in the heavens and renewing the attack with airships.
I have friends who are socialists, and they firmly believe if the world only married
their particular solution of its problems it would, it must, live happily ever after. But I
mistrust them because they are so logical and unanswerable. They are always telling me
that two and two make four, whereas I have a deep-rooted conviction that a happier
assortment of figures might bring about a more pleasing result. Like the poet who formed
out of three sounds, not a fourth sound, but a star, I would like to shift things about more
loosely in hopes of a sudden star emerging out of human chemicals mixed in less equal
proportions than my socialist friends contemplate in their formula.
I know socialism would be the logical solution of all difficulties if humanity was just
emerging from Eden, but there is no use talking about it in Ireland. When the State
decided on turning tenants into proprietors it set up a barrier against socialism which will
last, I fancy, for a couple of hundred years yet. An Irish farmer would pour down boiling
lead on the emissaries of the State who tried to nationalise his land, the land he sweated
sixty years to pay for. There is no fear of socialism in Ireland. There are other and real
dangers. There is the danger that without a complete reorganization of business methods
in rural Ireland it will slip back gradually into the old order with a new class of landlords.
There is the fear that Michael Mulligan, gombeen man, and his class will begin gradually
to absorb the farms of their tied customers and create a new aristocracy. Indeed they are
doing this already.
The old aristocracies swaggered royally to the devil. They borrowed money at sixty
percent and ruined themselves. The new aristocracy, whose coming I dread, have been
accustomed to lend money at sixty percent, and to ruin others. I prefer the former type,
though I hope no one will accuse me of unduly exalting it. I believe the alternative habit
is the more dangerous of the two, and is less easily got rid of as a family tradition. We are
passing by Scylla, and I wish to point the way past Charybdis. We want a raft which can
be constructed in one generation, and which will be able to float the next past our pressing
dangers into the open sea of the future. We need not with the Utopians take thought of
what the next generation will eat or what it will wear. The unborn may very well be trusted
to look after and feed their unborn.
The second danger, I fear, is that without State socialism we may yet get worship
of the State, and belief in its powers, developed to such an extent that the community will
place itself completely in the hands of the government to the utter destruction of self-
reliance, initiative, and independence of spirit. When a man becomes imbecile his friends
place him in an asylum. When a people grow decadent and imbecile they place
themselves in the hands of the State. That is a real danger in Ireland. "But you are talking
nonsense" many readers will say. "Ireland is, and always will be, against the government."
Ah! There is no eternity about these popular emotions. Ireland was against the
government, and hated it so heartily that it brought around a psychological change which
occurs in races as much as in individuals. If an individual, ignoring the wise warning of the
Gospels, condemns any one over much, what he condemns is meted out to him. If he
says some one is very vain, vanity blooms all over him as he speaks, for the remark implies
that the speaker believes he is stainless so far as this fault is concerned. If he says some
one else is a most irritable person, he grows irritated himself, and so on through the whole
range of emotions.
Any philosopher who studied Irish problems calmly, if such a thing were possible,
and seeing the intense hatred of the Irish of any government they had to deal with, could
have prophesied they were bringing upon themselves the fate of being the most governed
people on the face of the earth. Already one in every forty persons in Ireland is in the
employment of the State, and the demand for more government departments is increasing
with feverish intensity. Within only the last couple of years demands have been made for
a department with a million a year to develop industries. Forestry eagerly claimed a
department all to itself. Next, the railways were to be bought by the State and
departmentalized also. Another demand was for State banking, and the income of the
already existing departments has never been sufficient to satisfy either the departments
or the people. They always ought to be doubled.
The State is rapidly becoming a kind of fetish in Ireland, a fetish which is kicked and
prayed to alternately, the kicking testifying to as much belief as the prayers. We complain
quite justly that we are the most expensively governed people in Europe, and we go on
asking for more expensive government departments. If we got all the things we ask for
those who asked for them would instantly count up the cost, add it to that of already
existing departments to prove still more conclusively that the solar system could not
possibly contain a more expensively governed race, and this would be put forward as a
new reason why still more departments should be founded to balance or redress the
wrong.
Any one who has the misfortune I have of being forced every week to read a great
number of country papers will bear me out when I say that nothing is more common than
the demand in every parish meeting, board of guardians, rural or urban council, for State
aid or State subsidies in some form or other. It is the tragedy of the decline and fall of the
human will in the people we are witnessing, a far worse tragedy than the emigration which
is deplored so much. The will is growing powerless to act without partnership with its fetish
or idol the State.
It all arose from the country keeping its eyes fixed on Westminster, on those distant
political hills from which all aid was to come. Ireland has been for many years in the
position of a man whose lawyers have been long conducting a suit for the recovery of
some property which, they assure him, will speedily become his, and who, trusting in these
promises, lives on his expectations, does nothing to help himself, and at last becomes so
poor that he cannot afford even to pay his lawyers. It would have been a demoralizing
position for an individual. It was disastrous for the country.
Ireland has grown to have so little power of self-help that it cannot even pay its own
advocates. We have two great parties. One has been kept in place by force of foreign
arms. The other has been kept in power by force of foreign dollars. Every eye was fixed
on Westminster, with the natural consequence that the powers and possibilities of the
State assumed monstrous and unnatural proportions in men's minds, and what a man or
country could do for itself without State aid dwindled to insignificance. The country seems
to have acted in the spirit of a drunken Belfast workman whom a friend of mine heard
shouting, "A won't do a han's turn till Ireland's free!"
When we were not appealing to the British Government we were not idle with our
prayers in other quarters. We were the most appealing nation on the face of the earth.
We appealed to God, humanity, Europe, the United States, the Colonies, for pity, for
sympathy, for dollars. We warned America that if she did not come to our rescue our
national aspirations would die out and the responsibility would be on her shoulders. One
felt ashamed of the name of Irishman in the midst of all these tearful supplications. I
received a letter once from an American friend who expressed a view which grows more
and more popular in his country. "Can't the Irish people do something except beg? Can
they do nothing for themselves? Can't they dig or do something? Their policy isn't manly,
and when I think of Joan of Arc I feel it isn't even womanly."
All these appeals to the State would not have done so much harm if the
mouthpieces of popular sentiment had not felt it incumbent on them to discourage any non-
political efforts to promote prosperity. These were described as "drawing a red herring
across the track." If self-help had been fostered as industriously as State aid we might
have arrived at something. But politicians would not admit that it was either possible or
desirable that Ireland should help itself until what they wanted done was done first. Irish
misery and poverty were valuable assets in the campaign. The net result in the psychology
of the Irish people was that they grew less and less self-reliant. The State treated Ireland
as the great big incapable baby it was represented to be. The country became like a
gigantic creche with a whole army of officials guiding, controlling, or spoon-feeding it.
Ireland, in spite of professed hatred of the State, has never been nearer to complete
dependence on it than at the present moment.
While this Westminsterism was rampant, internal social reforms such as other
nations carry out for themselves seemed to have no chance. Fifteen years ago all the
economic wastefulness and inefficiency I have described in previous chapters was at its
height. The farmer's pocket was being picked while he listened to his favourite orator, who
informed him the landlord was the only real culprit. But he felt that the explanation did not
cover everything, and all the elements which make for a complete reorganization of rural
society were in solution waiting to be crystallized, and they began to take form. A scientific
friend tells me that crystallization only takes place when a pure atom of the crystal to be
formed falls into the bath. All the atoms of that element in solution then begin to gather
about it. I am not a scientist and cannot guarantee the truth of this, but it provides me with
an excellent illustration, and I feel sure it is accurate because it is true that to create a
human crystal or co-operative organization, a man with the true spirit of mutuality must first
fall into the society to be organized.
This happened in Ireland when Horace Plunkett returned from America in 1889.
Nature had prepared him for the work he was to undertake by gifting him with every kind
of insidious power to drag people out of their own private and proper work and make them
do his work instead. The apostles did not seem by their previous professions more
unsuitable to turn into divines than the people Horace Plunkett collected and filled with his
own spirit and sent out to organize the farmers. Artists, poets, literary men and clergymen
fell victims to him equally with those who were personally interested in farming. Every
extreme of political belief was represented in his circle. Orangeman met Fenian, the
Church of Ireland clergyman met the Catholic priest. The Ulster Unionist found himself to
his astonishment discussing Irish economics with Munster Nationalists.
Sir Horace Plunkett wanted to keep his work non-political. He had not at that time
realized that to the political powers in Ireland the most poisonous character enmity to them
could assume was to be non-political. He has since learned that lesson thoroughly. Really
sincere believers in the power of the State to make people prosperous either by Acts of
Parliament or by stopping other people from passing such Acts, looked on him with disgust,
for he was the beginning of the reaction from patriotism by proxy. He was the spirit of Sinn
Fein casting a rather misleading shadow before it, because such politics as he professed
were vaguely Unionist. They were a great deal too vague for many of his Unionist friends,
as he found when he began to break down a portion of the Chinese walls between patties,
and the mandarins on one side of the walls and the chiefs of the wild hordes on the other
side made frequent and pointed remonstrances. But I am not concerned with his politics,
which I leave to his biographer, hoping one will not be required for many years yet.
He was something better than a politician. He was a statesman with a creative
mind. He saw rural Ireland completely disorganized, the population melting away, Irish
produce badly marketed, prices falling every year, and science unknown on the farm. In
fact, while the country was fighting for the raw material of prosperity, that is, for the land,
the production, manufacture and business connected with it, where profit or loss mainly
arise, was completely neglected. He did not underrate the one great and notable
achievement of Parliamentarianism, its services to Ireland in bringing about a transfer of
land from proprietor to tenant, but he saw that this, however important as a first step, was
not finally most important.
 The moral advantages of proprietorship were great, but the financial advantages to
be gained by the transfer were incomparably less than the advantages to be reaped by
better farming and better marketing. These finally were most important; and while the
Parliamentarian fought for the land, Sir Horace Plunkett set himself to solve the problem
of how to keep a prosperous community on the land which the State had made up its mind
should be transferred from landlord to tenant.
It was natural enough, while the leaders of the people in the land war were trying
to drive hard bargains for the land, they should view with intense dislike any effort to
increase production or profit at the same time. They thought rents and prices would rise
along with profits. They were wrong, as events proved. Rents steadily fell. The
Government which was to finance the transfer was not going to allow any of its agencies
to increase values and its own future financial liabilities. But this was the beginning of an
enmity which has lasted up to the present date. The country wisely tried to get what it
could from both. It has nearly done with land purchase. It will have done with it in a few
more years. We are here in sight of the end.
But the new movement for the organization of agriculture opens up infinitely more
interesting and complex vistas. It is not the work which is done which excites enthusiasm,
but the work which is yet to be done - the long vistas and the yet unfolded close. It is not
what the State has done or can do which inspires, but the infinitely nobler possibilities
which arise through the voluntary co-operation of men to wring from nature and life the
utmost they can give. There are unsuspected possibilities in agricultural organization,
beginnings which I believe will finally evolve into splendid consummations. But to show
clearly what it is I hope for, I will give some account of the true significance of a movement
which is little understood for all its notoriety, and for all the political warfare which has
raged about it.

---------

Chapter V.

Building Up a New Social Order

The true significance of the movement promoted by Sir Horace Plunkett is that it is
an attempt to build up a new social order in Ireland. A social order of some kind we must
have in rural districts, which will bring men into mutually beneficial relations with each
other, which will create or draw out the highest economic, political and human qualities in
the people, and remind them daily that they are units of a society from which they receive
benefits, and to which their loyalty and affection will naturally flow.
A man is not human in the true sense of the word unless he fits into humanity. A
disorganized society is like a heap of bricks. Bricks may be made, but there is no reason
for their existence unless they are to form part of a building. A social order in rural districts
may take on a great many forms. Every organization makes its own demands on its units;
they get accustomed to it, and character is shaped accordingly. You may have the feudal
system, which prevailed in England for so long, where the owner of broad acres was the
head of his district. It was his hereditary duty to look after the welfare of his tenants, and
they in their turn appealed to him in their troubles; they voted for him and gave him political
power. The feudal system at its best produced good results owing to mutual support.
Noblesse oblige was not without meaning in England.
Another kind of social order existed for long periods in Russia, where land was
placed at the disposal of the village communities. The council of the Mir decided
periodically about its allotment among the members of the commune in proportion to their
families and needs. They grew to recognise no claim to land except that based on the
power of the man and his family to work it; and this system generated its own peculiar
social virtues and ideas of justice, solidarity, and unselfishness. There is the co-operative
system, as we find it in Germany, with associations based on mutual liability, where mutual
trust is engendered based on long experience of each other's character. We have
testimony from many observers to the splendid character created among members of
European communes. Wherever there is mutual aid, wherever there is constant give and
take, wherever the prosperity of the individual depends directly and obviously on the
prosperity of the community about him, there the social order tends to produce fine types
of character, with a devotion to public ideas; and this is the real object of all government.
The forms which a social order may take are many. The best is that which produces
the finest type of human being, with the social or kindly instincts most strongly developed.
The worst thing which can happen to a social community is to have no social order at all,
where every man is for himself and the devil may take the hindmost. Generally in such a
community he takes the front rank as well as the stragglers. The phrase, "Every man for
himself," is one of the maxims in the gospel according to Beelzebub. The devil's game with
men is to divide and conquer them. Isolate your man from obligations to a social order and
in most cases his soul drops into the pit like a rotten apple from the Tree of Life.
Fine character in a race is evolved and not taught. It is not due to copy-book
headings or moral maxims given to the youth of the country. It arises from the structure
of society and the appeal it makes to them. One man in every hundred is a freak, a person
lit up by a lamp from within. He may be a poet, an artist, a saint, a social reformer, a
musician, a politician, a person who has found the law of his own being and acts and wills
from his own centre. As for the other ninety-nine, they are just what the social order makes
them. They would, for the most part, prefer to do what is right, but if it is difficult they will
agree to the wrong. Let one trader in a street adulterate his goods and sell them cheap
and get customers. If unchecked, in five years' time half the traders in his neighbourhood
will be adulterating what they sell in order to compete and live. An experimental test of
honesty was made in Glasgow a couple of years ago by a man who went straight down the
streets and bought butter at every shop. Of fifty-two samples only two were unadulterated.
All the vendors were normal beings simply acting as their neighbours acted. The social
virtues are built up by a social order. With no fine organization of society the ninety and
nine odd persons who have no inner light fall into the pit.
We have not had a social order in Ireland since the time of the clans. Our ancient
aristocracies won their positions by the sword. They drew the sword on behalf of their
clansmen, and the clansmen laboured for the chiefs. The aristocracy which succeeded
them drew their rents on their own behalf, and soon found nobody to support them in
Ireland. The chiefs of the old clans won the right to live on their clansmen by their
readiness to die for their clansmen, and the passionate loyalty of the clansmen to their
chiefs is recorded in many a song and story. Our last aristocracy, for the most part, could
not bear the sight of their tenants, and their tenants shot at them through the hedges when
they got the chance. Ireland has gained nothing in national character by the farce of a
feudal system which existed during the last century. The movement I am writing about is
an attempt to build up a true social order.
A social order should provide for three things, for economic development, for
political stability, and a desirable social life. I will try to show how the co-operative
movement provides for these things, which are truly our most pressing national necessities.
I have already given some account of the disabilities unorganized farmers suffered from
in the profitable pursuit of their industry, how the agricultural interest became, like a
paralytic with no control over his limbs, unable to act powerfully on its own behalf. I am not
going to give any minute description of the various kinds of rural associations promoted by
the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Nearly everybody is by this time more or less
familiar with the work of creameries, agricultural, poultry, flax, home industry, and credit
societies. The dairy societies have released the farmer from the bondage to the butter
merchant and proprietor, and given back to him the control of the processes of
manufacture and sale.
In the credit societies farmers join together, and, creating by their union a greater
security than any of them could offer individually, they are able to get money to finance
their farming operations at very low rates. The joint stock banks lend money to these
societies on wholesale terms, letting them retail it again among their members. Generally
speaking, it has been found possible to borrow money at from three to four percent, and
to lend it for productive purposes at the popular rate of one penny a month for every pound
employed. The trust auctioneer's methods, the gombeen man's methods, cannot stand
this competition.
The poultry societies collect the eggs of their members, they grade and pack them
properly, and market them through their own agencies. The flax societies erect or hire
scutch mills and see that the important work of scutching the flax is performed with the
requisite care. The agricultural societies purchase seeds, implements, fertilisers, feeding
stuffs, and agricultural requirements for their members. Many of them hold thousands of
pounds worth of machinery too expensive for the individual farmer to buy. The societies
buy their requirements at wholesale prices and insure good quality. The home industries
societies have made hopeful beginnings with lace, crochet, embroidery, and rug-making
to provide work for country girls. About one hundred thousand Irish country people are
already members of co-operative societies, and their trade turn-over this year will be close
on three million pounds. The total trade turn-over of the movement, from its inception to
the present, is over twenty-five million pounds. I mention these figures because the
modern mind is indisposed to attach much importance to social reforms where their
importance cannot be instantly translated into an equivalent in the universally intelligible
language of money.
Now, what is really most interesting in the character of the Irish co-operative
movement is not that its promoters have started associations like those I have mentioned.
All over Europe similiar associations have been in existence for many years. What is really
interesting is the way in which the Irish social reformers are developing and adapting to
Irish needs methods of combination which have long been familiar to Continental farmers.
The societies in Ireland are losing their specialised character, their limitation of objects to
this purpose or that, and are more and more assuming a character which can only be
described by calling them general purposes' societies. The successful dairy society begins
to take up the work of an agricultural, poultry, or credit society in addition to the work for
which the farmers were originally organized in the district. It is gradually absorbing into one
large well-managed association all the rural business connected with agriculture in each
parish. The societies are controlled by committees elected by the members, and in a
decade or so, instead of the dislocation and separation of interests which has been so
disastrous in its effects, instead of innumerable petty businesses all striving for their own
rather than the general welfare, there will be in each parish one large association able to
pay well for expert management, with complete control over all processes of purchase,
manufacture and sale, and run by the farmers with the energy of self-interest.
These district associations are rapidly linking themselves on to large federations for
purchase and sale, which again are controlled by representatives of the societies, and
through these the farmers are able to act powerfully in the market. They become their own
middlemen. All the links between production on the farm and sale to the consumer are
getting connected into one system, and that controlled by the agriculturist. These
societies, their federations, and the I.A.O.S. form the nucleus, and a very strong nucleus,
for a vast farmers' trade union, ready to protect their interests, to help them socially,
politically and economically.
This formation of a farmers' trade union has become absolutely necessary in
modern times. Every industry is organized - engineers, bricklayers, carpenters, dock
hands, masons, boilermakers - all have their trade unions. Run through all the trades; for
every one of them there is a trade union, and we all know what they have done for the
workers. The distributive stores in the towns are trade unions of consumers, which protect
them against middlemen, and sometimes against manufacturers. The trade unions look
after the interests of their members, and all these bodies, as they grow strong and insist
powerfully on their own rights, have a natural tendency to squeeze the unorganized, and
relegate them to the ranks of the sweated.
It has been the action of some of these powerfully organized bodies which has had
much to say to the decay of agriculture. The workers in the towns clamoured for cheap
food. Let it come from anywhere, they must be fed. The manufacturers backed them up
because they knew there were two alternatives to be faced. The purchasing power of
money, its capacity to buy bread and meat, had to be increased, or else wages had to be
raised and profits eaten into. They preferred to increase the purchasing power of money,
and all the business skill and organizing power of Great Britain was used to flood the
market with corn and beef, with fruit, and farm and dairy produce. It mattered not at all to
them that, in the face of this competition, agriculture rotted away outside their own cities,
and that the farmers in distant countries broke up more virgin soil, while at their own doors
the land went back to nature, and the all-conquering grass crept up with its battalions of
thin green spears to the very outskirts of the towns. It was immediately easier to invite the
world to send its supplies of food than it was to develop the natural prodigious food-
producing capacity of the fields about them. The farmers were unorganized. They had no
trade union, no powerful voice to plead in their behalf, and today the deer forests in
Scotland, the game preserves in England, the deserts of grass in Ireland, are gigantic
illustrations of the desolation and decay which falls on the industry when men work alone
and are not united to protect their interests.
 By the very nature of agriculture it needs this protection more than any other
industry. It is the basic human occupation. Let it fail, and humanity must disappear, and
the birds of the air and the beasts of the field war for the lordship of the planet. Our
princes and captains of industry, and all they control, the high-built factories and titanic
mills, might all disappear without man disappearing; but cut away man from the fields and
fruits of the earth and in six months there will be silence in the streets, and in half a century
the forests will be butting at London and leaning their shoulders against the houses to
overwhelm them.
Agriculture separates its workers, while the factories and mills bring their workers
together. Because of this isolation of the workers in the field, because each man has his
plot of earth to till, and because he is made more or less solitary, there is all the more need
for organization. Legislatures work their will and enact their laws, and these become part
of the social order, and have the army and police to put them in force long before the
farmer has heard of the law, long before he can make any protest. Markets are occupied
and the ways to them blocked before the unorganized farmer can take action. He is
squeezed out perpetually by the acute business man, and made more and more a hewer
of wood and a drawer of water. The tendency of this oppression is to take the higher, more
intellectual, and more profitable departments of agricultural production out of the farmer's
hands and reduce him to the position of a manual labourer.
It is the natural rebellion of farmers against such a destiny which has brought about
their organization over Europe and their fierce battles with trusts in America. But these
associations, while primarily called into being by the necessity of self-defence, have higher
aims, and the creators of these associations all the world over have ever mingled the idea
of protection with splendid dreams of the building up of a rural civilization. They soon
realised that with the union of men to help each other came the promise and potency of
a progress inconceivable before; that with more economic business methods, with
cheapness in purchase, combination in sale, with science in the farm and dairy, with
expensive machinery co-operatively owned, and with the complete control of their own
industry, farmers could create and retain a communal wealth which could purchase for
them the comforts and some of the luxuries of civilization.
It is no unrealisable dream, but a perfectly practical programme, which offers
farmers, as the result of organization and loyal co-operation with each other, not only
political power and economic prosperity, but also a more intellectual and enjoyable social
life. We will yet see the electric light and the telephone in rural districts, and the village hall
with a pleasant hum of friendship in it. Ireland, while it is a late comer among the nations
into the field, has already developed the most complete programme. The promoters of the
co-operative movement here have thought out a whole system, have made an imaginative
co-ordination of isolated methods of organization, and, profiting by the experience of
Europe, are beginning their ideals where their pioneers concluded theirs. We had greater
need in Ireland to think intensely and passionately on these subjects, because the
Continental nations never neglected agriculture nor treated it with the scornful contempt
and neglect of the English-speaking peoples. We were lucky, too, in Ireland in having a
statesman to guide us in our work, a man who could think round his problem, see three
sides to it, its length, its breadth, its thickness, who wanted better farming, better business,
and better living in Ireland, and knew how all these might be obtained.
 The opposition to this work of agricultural organization had its origin in the little
country towns which, for the most part, produce nothing, and are mere social parasites.
Of course there are country towns in Ireland which are manufacturing centres and justify
their existence. We have our linen mills in Ulster, and here and there we come across
towns which produce and create wealth and give employment. But we are forced to ask
ourselves whether most of our Irish country towns really serve the country well? Do they
create any social life for the surrounding rural districts other than that based on the facilities
for a social glass? Do they attract people with any other lure than that one might indicate
by saying, where there is a whiskey bottle in the centre, there half a dozen will gather about
it?
Our small Irish country towns, in their external characteristics, are so arid and
unlovely that one longs for a lodge in some vast wilderness as a relief from the unbearable
meanness. Better look out on boundless sand and boundless sky, on two immensities,
than on these mean and straggling towns, those disreputable public houses, those
uncleansed footways like miry manure yards. For if one has a soul and any love for beauty
he must feel like an anarchist if he strays into an Irish country town, and must long for
bombs to wreck and dynamite to obliterate. If we examine into the internal economy of
these excrescences on the face of nature, we find for the most part they are absolutely
non-productive. They create no wealth, they generate no civic virtues, certainly they
manifest none. They are mainly the channels through which porter and whiskey run from
breweries and distilleries into the human stomach; and whatever trade there is is
distributive only.
There is no intellectual life in them. Hardly a country town has a book-shop. Here
and there you will find a yellow assortment of ancient penny novelettes or song-books in
a window, with the dead flies of yesteryear still unswept from the paper, or a row of
sensational tales in gaudy colours, the sensational tales of twenty years ago, and a few
sixpenny reprints. If this business of reading is to be catered for it ought to be done well.
If we cannot give the best, we had much better have no reading at all. Better the ignorance
of great literature - which left the Gaelic poets centuries ago to their own resources, their
own traditions and folk tales, out of which came songs as natural and sweet as the songs
of the birds - than these dust heaps of cheap prints, without high purpose, and glimmering
all over with the phosphorescence of mental decay. Nearly every country in the world
supplies its own literature except Ireland, whose appetite for reading Irish books would not
supply one single literary man in Ireland with an income sufficient for him to live as
comfortably as a sergeant of Constabulary. Towns ought to be conductors, catching the
lightnings on the human mind and distributing them all around their area. The Irish country
towns only developmental bogs about them.
We have grown so accustomed to these arid patches of humanity that we accept
them in a hopeless kind of way, whereas we should rage and prophesy over them as the
prophets of ancient Israel did over Tyre and Sidon. And, indeed, a lordly magnificence of
wickedness is not so hopeless a thing to contemplate as a dead level of petty iniquity, the
soul's death in life, without ideas or aspirations. The Chaldeans - they who built up the
Tower of Heaven in defiance of Heaven - had so much greatness of soul that the next thing
they might do would be to turn it into a house of prayer; but lives filled with everlasting
littleness fill one with deep despair and madness of heart. We want pioneers of civilization
to go out into our country districts with a divine passion in them, the desire of the God-
implanted spirit, to make the world about them into some likeness of the Kingdom of Light.
There are no barriers in our way except ourselves and our own supineness. The
men in any rural district, united together, could make the land they live in as lovely to look
on as the fabled gardens in the valley of Damascus. They could have fruit trees along the
hedgerows, and make the country roads beautiful with colour in spring. This has been
done in many a rural commune on the Continent, and there is no reason why it should not
be done here. Only let us get our men together, get them organized, and one improvement
will rapidly follow another. For all great deeds by races, all civilizations, were built up by
the voluntary efforts of men united together. Sometimes one feels as if there were some
higher mind in humanity which could not act through individuals, but only through
brotherhoods and groups of men. Anyhow, the civilization which is based on individualism
is mean, and the civilization based upon great guilds, fraternities, communes and
associations is of a higher order. If we are to have any rural civilization in Ireland it must
spring out of co-operation.
I have shown, I hope clearly, within the limits of the space at my disposal, how the
organization of the farmers in societies and federations enables the will of the rural
population to have free play with its own problems, as the will of a healthy man directs the
motions of the body, and he is enabled to perform efficiently his work in the world. The co-
operative movement is an organization of the rural interests to enable it to meet the
organization of the urban interests; but, lest it should be supposed that this concentration
of rural energies would adversely affect the towns, I will deal with this question later, and
also show how agricultural organization provides a solution for many national problems
which are a cause of deep anxiety to those whose interests in life are not exhausted by the
solution of their personal problems, but who also think of the destinies of the nation to
which they belong.

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Chapter VI.

Town and Country

I have heard people speak as if the organization movement had decreed capital
punishment to the country towns. The moderate mind has so little power nowadays that
men support legislation and movements as if to win meant the winning of the earthly
Paradise at once, and defeat meant instant lapsing back into the ape and tiger. So some
angry townsmen hear of the spread of co-operation among the farmers as if they were
hearing of the march of armed barbarians on their city.
But it is easy to show that the organization of the farmers will not injuriously affect
urban life in Ireland, and that country towns will not disappear. They will dwindle here and
emerge there, and will adjust themselves to the new conditions, and will prosper on the
whole. No human institutions are permanent. Babylon and Nineveh are heaps of ruins,
and Tyre and Sidon are buried deep out of sight. They were centres of a little swirl of
things in their time, and the caravans met there, and the dark-skinned merchants unrolled
their bales in their markets. They were prophesied against because they did not fulfil the
law, and they are only memories. I have prophesied against many Irish country towns for
this sin in them, that they do not produce. As a man who creates nothing sinks into poverty
and oblivion, so the town which creates no wealth only exists as a burden on the
community, and it is bound to disappear. It may have its uses for a time as a centre of
distribution, but if this work can be better done otherwise it has no claims, economic or
social, on the community, and it must vanish, and the country will be the richer for its
vanishing and will lose nothing, for the productive industries will gain and the population
engaged in productive work will increase. But the idea that agricultural co-operation carried
to its uttermost would destroy urban life in this country is a nightmare based on no
economic fact.
If we take Denmark, a typical co-operative country, with endless dairy and
agricultural societies, bacon factories and rural stores, we find the towns are flourishing,
and it is one of the few countries in the old world, perhaps the only one, which has not only
retained but increased its rural population. A country must first of all safeguard its
producers. It depends absolutely on them to create wealth, and they must be allowed to
create it under the best possible conditions they can devise. I do not think it will seriously
be disputed that the main concern of a nation should be for its productive classes. In the
families of the poor the wage-earner has first of all to be kept in health. If he gets ill, then
the family is lost. No matter how others in the family are pinched, the wage-earner must
be maintained in sufficient health and strength to do his work. The family recognize this.
The nation has yet to recognize it, or we should not have had such serious acceptance
here for the last fifteen years of the complaints about the organization of the farmers
affecting distributors injuriously, as if the interests of the wealth-producers were to be set
aside and their progress hindered, and their operations limited to maintain undisturbed a
class which produces nothing at all, not one solitary sixpence to add to the wealth of the
nation.
There are two kinds of towns, the town which exists because it is a centre of
production, and the town which exists because it is a centre of distribution. The first kind
creates wealth, and its decay is a national loss. If new and more economic methods of
distribution cause the town of distributors to decay it is a national gain. I do not see how
any action or inaction on the part of farmers is to prevent the decay of such towns if they
depend solely on their distributive trade. Anyhow some rows of licensed premises, with
a few men spitting at the corners, do not constitute a civilization whose lapsing Ireland
need lament over with too exquisite a pain. Agricultural co-operation helps the productive
urban centres because, as a result of better rural production, there is more wealth in the
country, more economic purchase and greater consumption. Whatever benefits production
increases consumption. Our makers of artificial fertilizers will admit that farmers are better
buyers of fertilizers since they cheapened the cost to themselves by co-operative
purchase. The makers of dairy machinery, steam threshers and other expensive
implements, have found a market among the organized farmers which they had not
previously found among the unorganized. The society is a better and larger buyer than the
individuals who compose it. Good production in the country stimulates production in the
cities.
The farmers and manufacturers are the wealth-creators in a nation, and the system
which most benefits these must be the best system. No Irish town where there is effective
production will suffer by agricultural co-operation carried to its uttermost limits. It will gain
by having a better market for what it produces. As for the towns which depend solely on
distribution, I think they are bound to dwindle. We cannot stay the progress of a nation or
stereotype present conditions simply to enable every person engaged in distributive trade
to preserve his present income.
National progress is not so effected. If the country gains on the whole, and gains
greatly, the new developments will absorb the workers in the dwindling centres. We need
not lament over them. These non-productive country towns cannot hope to remain for ever
as they are, any more than the ground where the Bedouins pitched their tents for a night
can hope to have the hum of human life above it, and the tread of feet upon it for ever. Life
is a flux, and commercial conditions never remain steadfast. Populations are always
shifting, and change from centre to centre as the lndians who move from hunting-ground
to hunting-ground. The world is like a pot of water which is quiet every now and then until
somebody throws something into it and the water begins to effervesce. With the invention
of railways and the cheapening of transport the old quiet has gone, the world has become
like a boiling pot, and it is going to boil more and more, and not the remotest village can
hope to escape the commotion. Everything is going to be melted down and cast into new
shapes.
There will always be plenty of opportunities for the enterprising commercial
individualist to make money in a prosperous productive community. It is not the producers
who should adapt themselves to the middle agencies, but the middle agencies to the
needs of the producers. The most important factor in securing continued national
prosperity is the power of adaptability among the productive classes. Hard and fast lines,
restrictions on trade methods, will soon make a country drop behind. The power to
continuously adjust production to the needs of the market is one of the greatest
advantages of association among farmers. If middle-men are to survive they must adjust
themselves to the producers, and not try to make the continuance of present conditions the
dominating purpose in Irish rural politics.
It may be said we are hoping to substitute an agricultural ascendency for the urban
ascendency; which dominates politics in these islands, that the organized farmers will
increase the cost of living to the townsman, that food prices are already steadily rising, and
will rise still more owing to the creation of an agricultural trust. It is true food prices are
rising, and will rise still more; but the cause of this is due to the neglect of rural life and the
concentration of wealth, intelligence, civilization and political power in the cities, with the
natural result of a rural exodus. The country people have flocked to the centres of life.
There are ever more and more people engaged in urban industries, and fewer in proportion
in rural production. This is the main cause of the rise in food prices, and there will be no
fall until the countryside is organized and the life there made sufficiently attractive for it to
retain its population and restore the balance. I do not think there is any real danger of the
farmer gaining an ascendency; but even if there were, would it not be better tor humanity
than an urban ascendency? Between a choice of terrors, between a ruined countryside
and a hungry city, who would hesitate? I certainly would make my choice for the hungry
city. When the city is hungry the farmer will produce, and nature will get some of her
children back to her breast and will nourish them, and there will be a strong healthy
population there. But if we declare for the ruined countryside, as England has done, the
prosperity of the towns will be only momentary and life will rot away.
 England at present, owing to her neglected rural life, is like a woman exhausted by
long child-bearing, and it can no longer send up to the cities the stream of sturdy rustics
who vitalized its industries for nigh a century. Its city populations grew more and more
feeble, less dependent on themselves and more dependent on the State. I prophesy a rise
in food prices, and, hard as it is, I see in this inevitable rise the chance for the prosperity
of the countryside, and the tilling of the land, and the discomfiture of the grass, and the re-
population of the wilderness, and the reflushing of the veins of humanity with the old divine
vigour got from sun and air, and the smell of the earth and rural labour. Nature, or the
powers who are guardians of humanity, never allow life to stray permanently or hopelessly
from the natural order: and if men will not live the natural life, then with pestilence and
famine in the cities they are scourged back, even as in the parable those who would not
willingly come to the banquet were caught by an iron hand in the highways and forced to
come in. The messengers are already departing on their mission, and those who are
young today will see, before they are middle-aged, the way in which nature guides her
children and keeps them from straying long in paths dangerous to life. Nature has no
intention of allowing her divine brood, made in the image of Deity, to dwindle away into a
crew of little, feeble, feverish city folk. She has other and more grandiose futures before
humanity if ancient prophecy and our deepest, most spiritual, intuitions have any truth in
them.

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Chapter VII.

Organized Communities and Political Life

I have already said that a social order ought to provide not only for economic
development, but for political stability. One would have imagined that the advantages of
an organized agriculture to the nation and its bearing on political life would have been
obvious, but it is strange to find politicians still denouncing the co-operative movement as
anti-national. It is hard to know what they mean by a nation. Our Irish politicians have
attacked or held aloof from every non-political movement which showed signs of vitality.
They have denounced the co-operative movement, held sulkily apart from the Gaelic
revival, and the Industrial Development Associations owe nothing to them. Yet they
profess to act and speak in the name of the nation. What is a nation? It is a single yet
multitudinous being, giving evidences of unity and individual character by the power of
growth from within which it manifests. Its people must show signs of individual life and the
power of growth and movement. A race whose people do not manifest in infinite variety
their power to take united action, to evolve their own ideals of society, culture, and industry,
has no right to call itself a nation at all.
Now, the curious thing about Ireland, when one comes to examine the movements
among its people today, is that the only movements which exhibit the signs of life which
can be fixed upon as evidence of nationality, that is, the power of growth from within, the
power of evolving special ideals of culture, industry and society, are movements which the
politicians denounce or ignore, and which are non-political. The co-operative movement,
the Gaelic League, and the Industrial Development Associations are the only bodies in
Ireland which have evolved ideals of industry, culture, and a social order of their own,
which are Irish. They are creative movements, and apart from them there is actually no
evidence of any kind to prove Ireland is a nationality, a living entity with the power of growth
from within. Other Irishmen cry out for nationality, but these bodies manifest life
themselves. They conform to the biological test of life. The biologist, exploring on the
border-ground between organic and inorganic things, had to fix some test of life, and the
test of life in an organism he has fixed as its power to take up protoplasm, the physical
basis of life, and to change it into living tissue. What life is in itself he does not know, but
an organism is living which can take up the substances which are the physical basis of life
and transform them and use them to build up its own being.
These three movements I have mentioned found Irish people exhibiting in Ireland
no signs of organic life. They found, amid all its changes and political turmoil, that Ireland
had evolved no culture of its own, no social order of its own, that its industrial life was
perishing, and national production was at its lowest ebb. These three movements showed
all the signs of life, and communicated it to the Irish people. They took up the unorganized
Irishman, the undifferentiated protoplasm of nationality, and growth began immediately.
The co-operative movement, with nearly a thousand branches of farmers engaged in
productive co-operation, the Gaelic League, with its ideals of a national culture, the
Industrial Development Associations imparting energy to the manufacturer and leading to
the creation of new factories and mills; these bodies, with their productive and creative
ideals, offer the only evidence Ireland can show of distinct national activity manifesting
itself in works and not in talk. I do not call the actions of our one hundred and two
members of Parliament a sign of national activity. I do call the energetic life displayed by
hundreds of thousands of Irishmen in these three movements a true symptom of national
activity, and if our politicians knew their business they would use the work of these bodies
as their best arguments for the granting of their political ideal. They would refer to them
with pride instead of denouncing them or holding sulkily aloof. Apart from these three
movements, which are non-political, no evidence can be offered that there is in Ireland a
national entity, a race bursting with possibilities of life, evolving new ideals, creating a new
structure of society, new industries, and a new national culture.
I do not know what our politicians think, but they act as if they thought that, given
a constitution and the power of self-government, any group of people may become a
nation, and nothing more is required. Wessex, if given a constitution and self-government,
would become a nation. So will Ireland become a nation, and all will go well with us ever
afterwards. Our unstable national life will become stable. But I think it can be shown that
political stability is not really maintained by any kind of constitution. Those who place their
trust in an aristocracy, a bureaucracy or a democratic system of government, as a means
of insuring national stability, are fetish worshipers.
There are deeps below a constitution where national wisdom or national folly are
generated among the people. It is the character of the social order and its effect on the
daily lives of men and women in a country that we must look into if we are to prophesy
political stability or chronic disorder. It has been said that the model of the pyramid was
the tent of the herdsman, that the wooden hut of the early Greek found a majestic
development in the Parthenon, and that the beauty of Gothic cathedrals recreated the
mystery and gloom always about a people living in the forests. The forms that a race has
around it in its infancy are not forgotten but are carried on with it, exalted and expanded
in its day of national grandeur. Tell me how people work and live in the parishes today,
and I will tell you how in the next generation the councillors of the nation will act and think.
If we have in the country parishes of Ireland a host of unorganized peasant proprietors,
each pushing at trivial agricultural business, each acting alone and never in union with his
neighbours, the energy of self-interest in its lower forms will become the predominant
energy, and this will overflow into rural and county councils, and we shall have frequent
jobbery; and in the region of national politics we shall have the conflict of personalities,
rather than the pursuit of public interests.
We have seen all this in our own time, and we know the cause. For good or ill we
are committed to democracy in Ireland. I, for one, believe that democracy will be finally
justified, even if it has to pass through cycles of anarchy to its justification. Every man has
in him a spark of divinity, and with its bursting into flame, with the discovery of the law of
his own being, kingships and overlordships must disappear. But because we believe in far
off divine events we need not disguise from ourselves the fact that democracy today stands
in peril of change into anarchy. A few more social disorders, a national strike, and there
may be a ruddy laying of the democratic dust.
The great problem before democracy is the evolution of a social order which will
ensure, so far as anything human can be ensured, that the democracy will put forward its
best thinkers, its wisest men of affairs, and that it will develop a respect for the man of
special and expert knowledge. Unless the aristocracy of character and mind replace the
demagogue, whose only talent is his fluency on a platform, and the skill with which he
echoes back to an ignorant crowd the prejudices which populate the otherwise emptiness
of their skulls, our democratic systems of today will be no exception to the ancient law or
cycle of political change formulated by Aristotle. Home Rule will not give us in Ireland any
more sagacious politicians than the Union gave us, unless we have a social order which
will educate the people in the choice of representatives. Every people get the kind of
politicians they deserve, and we must organize the nation so that the people may be more
deserving of, and more discerning of, better qualities in their public representatives than
they are at present.
Unorganized individualism in a country where the small farmers who read little or
nothing form a majority of the population will never lead to this knowledge. The promoters
of the organization of agriculture in Ireland are trying to create in every parish associations
of men to help each other and to do their business together. These associations demand
for their success men of scientific knowledge and business capacity at their head. As the
prosperity of the individual in the association depends largely on the success of the
communal enterprise, he rapidly develops public spirit and a desire for good leadership,
and for the public welfare in which his own is implicated. These qualities in the parishes
will become national attributes. They will permeate local government and national
assemblies, and will bring about political stability and sanity and good government. These
qualities can never be engendered by an unorganized rural community weltering in an
anarchy of individual effort, unable, not having experience of them, to appreciate great
qualities of mind or character or the value of special knowledge in affairs. The parish is the
cradle of the nation, and, as the song in the ears of the child and the intonation of tender
voices and the motion of kindly hands mould mind and spirit and are remembered in age,
so the character of the life in our rural communities and the relations men and women
there have one to another, enlarged and flung gigantically upon the screen, will be the
character of the race as shown in Its legislature and councils and public decrees. If we can
so remodel Irish country life by our associations that the success of the individual will
depend on the success of the community, we will develop economic knowledge, sanity of
judgment, and generate a public spirit which will grow upwards, dominate the whole social
organism, and act mightily in whatever legislature destiny may have in store for us.

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Chapter VIII.

The Creation of Citizens

We have been much more concerned in Ireland with the evolution of a system of
government than the evolution of a social order. We have clamoured for the beneficent
state, when we should have devoted far more energy towards the creation of the intelligent
citizen. Our political movements, which required an army of drilled voters, unanimous and
thinking alike, destroyed national character and individuality. Our non-political movements,
like the rural life movement and the Gaelic revival, which required, above all things,
individual effort and personal initiative, developed national character and intelligence. No
wonder there was a conflict between the political and non-political movements. Irishmen
were expected by the first to give up thinking for themselves and trust their leaders; and
were required by the second, above all things, to act and think for themselves.
A good many years ago I remember reading a book entitled "Concepts of Modern
Physics." The author explained the ideas held by different groups of scientists about the
atom. For one group it was absolutely necessary to imagine the atom as hard, and they
worked on that hypothesis. But another group of scientists, chemists, if I remember aright,
held that the atom was elastic. They could not work except on that hypothesis. A third
group held that the atom did not exist at all, but what was so supposed was only a vortex
in the ether. The Irishman, for the Nationalist politician, had to be hard and unchanging
as the atom of the physicist, or success could not be guaranteed in the political
phenomena he was trying to bring about. For the purposes of the new non-political
movements the Irishman had to be elastic, capable of change and adjustment, or Ireland
could have no future. It is a temptation to add that to the Unionist there were no Irishmen
at all, but only vortices in the political ether. Stallo, in his book, pleaded for a more
metaphysical treatment of the problems of science. He pointed out that the atom could not
be hard at the command of the physicist, elastic at the command of the chemist, and be
non-existent or a mere vortex in the ether to suit Lord Kelvin.
I plead for a more metaphysical consideration of the Irish atom. I would like to
believe all three theories, and think it is not inconsistent to hold them all. I find it hard to
understand Irish history unless there is an incorruptible and unchangeable atom of
nationality in the Irish soul, and I am glad of it. I believe in an elastic mental sphere about
it capable of adjustment and change, and am glad of it, otherwise Ireland would be
incapable of progress or expansion, and would be a dead sea of humanity. I believe in the
eternal relation of the individual soul to the soul of humanity, and that the vortex theory of
the soul - that it is a centre of motion in a continuous divine element - is true, and this will
finally lead us and all other races to the federation of the world.
I understand and sympathise with the fixed passion of the politician for his theory
of an Irish State, but I do not believe he will gain the results he hopes for unless his State
is composed of people who may truly be called citizens; and citizenship in the true sense
is created much more by the non-political movements than by the political movements in
our time. The highest developments of humanity, of civic and patriotic life the world has
known, have been in the small states, in communities no larger than Sligo. The sense of
solidarity is not begotten by people all belonging to one large nation or great empire; but
by union in local enterprises where a personal relationship can exist between the workers,
and where success in labour promotes pride, and responsibilty is provocative of thought,
and experience in control generates wisdom, and we have the intensive cultivation of
business ability and intelligence. The fondest memories of the intellectual man turn back
to Attica, Sparta, the Dorians, Florence, Venice, and the long list of small nations with great
achievements. There was intensive cultivation of humanity. Men were truly citizens in
most of these small communities, and discharged their duties to the community by
personal service, counsel, and speech, and not in our modern fashion by a vote once in
five or six years, which is the destruction of true citizenship and of the sense of
responsibility, and the begetting of bureaucracies.
To the ancient Greeks, as Mr. Lowes Dickenson says in "The Greek View of Life,"
our modern society would have appeared as a mere congeries of unsatisfactory human
beings, held together partly by political and partly by economic compulsion, but "lacking
that conscious identity of interest with the community to which they belong which alone
constitutes the citizen." It is, of course, impossible for every citizen to sit and speak at
Westminster or College Green, and we cannot have the spirit of true citizenship developed
to any extent in these days by participation in political life. Citizenship must be made a
reality by other means in the modem world, and I will try to show how it can be made a
reality.
The Greeks developed the sense of citizenship by political means, and, because
their states were very small, it was easy to kindle that conscious identity of interest with the
community which draws out the best in man and dedicates it to the service of the State.
A man who has the power of one vote among millions of votes, a power which he exercises
once in five or six years, soon loses all consciousness of identity of interest with a
community too vast and complex for his understanding, and which often in its workings
reduces him to poverty. By political means we can now create in but a very few people that
conscious identity of interest. Our co-operative associations in Ireland, gathering more and
more into themselves the activities connected with production, consumption, and
distribution, and even the social activities, as they grow more comprehensive in their aims,
make the individual more conscious year by year that his interests are identical with the
interests of the community. If it succeeds he shares in its prosperity; and it is this spirit of
mutual interdependence and comradeship in life, continually generated and maintained
and inbred into the people, which is the foundation on which a great State, a great
humanity, a beautiful civilization, can be built. The co-operative associations, properly
constituted and organized, alone in modern times are capable of creating this spirit.
Individualism in life or business can never create it.
 I never felt, so far, in any exposition of State Socialism which I have come across,
that the writers had any understanding of social psychology, or by what means life may
react on life so as to evoke brotherhood and public spirit. Understanding of economics
apart from life there often was, and a passion for a mechanical justice, but I, at least,
always feel that humanity under State control would be in a cul de sac. But it is quite
possible to create without revolution, and by an orderly evolution of society within the State,
not controlled by the State, but finally controlling its necessary activities, a number of free
associations of workers and producers which, in the country, would have the character of
small nations, and in the towns, of the ancient guilds, which would, I believe, produce more
beauty, happiness and comfort than the gigantic mediocrity which always is the result of
State activity.
The Co-operative Commonwealth is the fourth alternative to State Socialism, the
Servile State, or our present industrial anarchy; and Irishmen must make up their minds
which of the four alternatives they prefer. They will be driven by the forces working in
society to one or other of these courses. If capital wins we shall have the Servile State,
and an immeasurable bureaucracy to keep the populace in order. If State Socialism wins
humanity will have placed all its hopes on one system, and genius, temperament, passion,
all the infinite variety of human life, will be constrained by one policy. Our present system
is anarchic and inhuman, and the world is hurrying away from it with digust. The Co-
operative Commonwealth alone of all these systems allows freedom and solidarity. It
allows for personal genius and unhampered local initiative. It develops a true sense of
citizenship among its members. Whatever alternative Irishmen choose to promote they
should think long and dispassionately on the prospects for humanity which each offers, and
consider well their varying political, social, and economic possibilities. I have suggested
briefly some of the economic and political considerations arising out of agricultural co-
operation in Ireland, and will turn to consider the social or more human side of Sir Horace
Plunkett's movement.

----------

Chapter IX.

Women on the Land

The object of all religion, art, literature and economics is the creation of perfect
human beings. Religion aims at making the perfect human being by acting on man's
spiritual nature. Art aims at making the perfect human being by acting on his aesthetic
nature; literature by acting on his intellectual nature; while economics aims at perfecting
humanity by using material means and agencies. We can only justify our existence as a
nation by trying to produce human beings in Ireland as nearly perfect as all the agencies
we control can make them. We are all like lost sheep when we forget this central truth, and
make art, literature, economics, or nationality an end in themselves. If our new rural
communities existed solely for the production of wealth, and had no higher aims, they
would deserve all the abuse they have received. But they help not only in the evolution of
the economic man and the citizen, but in the evolution of a more kindly human society.
 The individualist is like a bee trying to amass honey apart from the hive.
Wordsworth described man as a creature moving about in worlds not realized, but he could
be better described as a creature moving about who does not realize himself. The
primitive man with his stone hatchet as implement of slaughter, and his cave dwelling as
home, was bursting with unrealized possibilities, and must have been unhappy, just as a
young man of genius intended by nature to be a poet is unhappy if he has to live behind
a grocer's counter. The primitive man had within his hairy skull the germs of Plato's
philosophy, of Dante's ecstasy, and of Whitman's humanity. He has since partially realized
that he is an intellectual being; but he has not realized that he is a social being, and he is
still unhappy. He has developed his stone hatchet, an early anti-social implement of
slaughter, into thirteen-inch guns, and Dreadnoughts and bomb-dropping airships; and has
increased his anti-social, that is, his anti-human propensities, and because he is anti-
human he is against himself, against the law of his own being, and has no real happiness.
Humanity today is pregnant with unrealized social possibilities even as the primitive
savage was bursting with intellectual possibilities, with unbuilt BabyIons, unsung epics,
uncarven divine Pheidian forms, and mighty machines of war and peace. But man still
remains unhappy because he has not realized that at the root of his being is not intellect
or power, but feeling and affection. Men pass each other with cold eyes, with no thrill of
pleasure in looking on a fellow being. They have not realized that these other beings
whom they pass with blank eyes are as necessary to their spiritual happiness and
completeness as a warm bed and meals are to their physical comfort. The co-operative
community not only provides for economic development and political stability, but leads its
members to discover themselves as social beings. The saving or making of money by co-
operative means are excellent lures drawing man away from his sulky isolation and miserly
doling out of his humanity to himself and his family alone. After half a century of rural co-
operation Irish people will have realized that primarily they are social beings moved by the
affections, that they are incomplete by themselves, and that life is only complete and full
when there is comradeship in labour and recreation.
How much Ireland needs to make this discovery, how much it needs the passion for
humanity, we are just beginning to find out. The children attending country schools are
badly fed. We allow the State to imprison them for long hours and starve their bodies
under the vain pretence of filling up the empty space with mind. Our lunatic asylums are
full, and our standard of living is lower than that in almost any European country. During
long centuries the voice of woman has rarely been heard in Ireland. Our history is a
monotonous record of man's deeds and misdeeds, of man's ideals and passions; and
women, the cherishers of life, have been neglected, and their special needs ignored, and,
in rural districts especially, the hard lot of the women on the farm has turned many a young
girl's heart to the cities of the New World.
A young Irish girl as she grows up today on an Irish farm receives a better literary
education than her mother received. It is an education which tends to make her more
fastidious. Her horizons are wider than her mother's were. She is better able to make
comparisons between the lot of a small farmer's wife in Ireland, and the lot of women in
other countries. There is hardly an Irish country girl who has not girl friends or sisters in
America; and letters from the new world are read and discussed in every parish in Ireland.
Now and then one hears the drift of these confidential documents; and comparisons of a
woman's lot in the States, either as a domestic help, or as the wife of a prosperous worker
there, are continually being made.
An Irish girl sees how hard her mother's lot is. The mother cooks for the household.
She does its washing. She mends and often makes its clothes. She sweats over the
churn. She feeds the calves, the pigs and the poultry. But it is not all household work.
She often labours in the fields. She assists in the heavy toil of binding corn. She helps in
the haymaking. She attends the threshing machine. She weeds the fields. She thins the
turnips. She picks the potatoes, and lifts the root crops. The life of the small farmer's wife
is a life of continual labour indoors and out of doors. Many a young Irish girl must have
looked on the wrinkled face and bent back and rheumatic limbs of her mother, and grown
maddened in a sudden passion at the thought that her own fresh young life might end just
like this, and must have made up her mind that life on an Irish farm was no life for her. The
new world is a lure to draw her on, and the nightmare thought of a life spent in exhausting
toil on the land impels her from behind. We cannot say how many young Irishwomen leave
rural Ireland from just such motives. I know a great many do.
We must make up our minds that these conditions, these emotions and feelings, lie
behind a great deal of Irish emigration before we discuss remedies. Unless Ireland
realizes it is losing a great part of its population for just such reasons it will never attempt
to solve the problem, or think about remedies. It is futile to say that if Irishmen get what
they want Irish-women will have their problems solved at the same time. The disabilities
attaching to the life of an Irish countrywoman will remain unaffected by changes of
government. They seem almost to be an inseparable and eternal part of woman's lot as
wife of a small farmer. But are they inseparable? If we answer that they are, I am certain
that the migration of women from the land will continue and even increase. It is a period
of awakening intensified self-consciousness for women. Women's rights are everywhere
being discussed. They are comparing their share of the world with man's, and are growing
more and more dissatisfied. In Ireland they rarely go on platforms, or form trade unions,
or press for legislation. Irishwomen as a rule are not politically minded. They do not press
for entry into every occupation that man is engaged in. Irish women have already been
employed like men on the land, and do not like it. They want a more womanly and not a
less womanly life, so they do not go on platforms, but pack up their trunks and silently slip
away.

------------

Chapter X.

Union of Men and Women Workers

It may be irritating to many people to have questions like these raised at a time
when Irish publicists are trying to simplify Irish problems even to imbecility, and to present
a united front in denouncing one evil as the cause of every Irish misfortune, and in
advertising one remedy as all-sufficient to cure them. Life is more complicated than that.
If my diagnosis of a disease in Irish rural life has any truth in it, as I believe it has, the
treatment of it will necessitate a two-fold change in Irish country life, a change in business
and technical methods, and a change in social temper. The co-operative associations,
which substituted the steam separator and the centralizing methods of butter-making for
the home churn over which so many hard-worked wives laboured, indicated the right
direction. The introduction of labour-saving machinery by associations of farmers, and the
hiring of it out to their members, will do much to lessen severe physical labour on the part
of their wives. The change in agricultural economy must be accompanied by a change in
social temper, and our associated farmers must realise that life is not merely concerned
with production, sale, or purchase; and that on them devolves the grand labour of building
up a rural civilization, impelled thereto by a profounder humanity and greater sympathy and
consideration for the weaker sex.
The unsocial isolation of farmers in so many country districts, which is foreign to
Irish, indeed to any human nature, must be broken up. The erection of village halls, which
is going on apace over Ireland, will help in this, and these halls must not be kept, indeed
are not kept, only for the use of men. Something corresponding to the mothers' meetings
or social gatherings of the Granges in the States must be set in motion here, so that
women may meet and discuss their own problems, and educate and encourage each
other, and be emboldened by their union to create public opinion in order that reforms may
be carried out. We know that young girls are going away from the farm, from a life which
offers them little. The State is educating them to greater sensitiveness and fastidiousness.
Their horizons are being widened. They make comparisons between here and there.
They sigh as they look at their mothers, and they decide against rural life; they slip away.
And human life is a chain. People are strung unto each other as link unto link.
Where one goes another goes. The old life has little or no power to hold them. It will
depend greatly upon the efforts of a new Irish organization, the United Irishwomen, the
feminine counterpart of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, in some sense an
offshoot of it, and certainly an ally, whether these conditions can be altered. The advent
of this organization, whose objects are to unite Irishwomen for the social and economic
advantage of Ireland, is one of the most significant events of recent years.
Quietly into the national life of Ireland womanhood has come with its new standard
of values, testing all things as women do by their worth to humanity. Men are for ever
adventuring with hungry minds; women are for ever brooding with hungry hearts over life.
Men are at once abstract and gross, and the poles of their nature are more apart than a
woman's. Men can dream of heavens and principalities and powers and yet be beasts,
and between their abstract ideals and their gross occupations lies a desert where life has
been neglected in Ireland; and that has been because the voice of women, the cherisher
of life above all things, has been unheard in the national councils. What women, the best
women, are concerned with is the character of life. They love strength, health, vitality,
kindness. They desire to see the comfortable home, the strong man coming in and out,
great sons and the laughter and roundness of well-nourished children. Women are the
preservers of life, and because they have had no organized life or union of their own,
because they were unable to make known their desires and needs, life has decayed in
Ireland. The conditions under which children are taught in the schools, the labour of long
hours without sufficient food or none at all, thrust upon very young children whose
attendance is enforced by the State; the neglect of sanitation, the carelessness of the
conveniences of life shown in the construction of cottages at long distances from a water
supply; all these things, the effect of which is to enfeeble and impoverish life, have come
about because men in Ireland have set about the business of the nation without taking
women into their councils, women having had no national organization of their own which
ranged over the whole field of women's work, which would have given their opinions
weight, and forced recognition of them on public bodies and the legislature. This lack of
organization the United Irishwomen will meet. Their aim is "to resurrect the countryside
which the blindness and passions of men have left barren and joyless."
They wish to work with the co-operative associations and to use them wherever it
is possible. It is pleasant indeed to find the committees of societies extending their usual
operations to become agents for women's work, trying to relieve the skilled women workers
from their servitude to agents, almost always local traders, who, if they do not directly
violate the provisions of the Truck Act, give out no work unless they are certain the money
will come back to their own tills. The beginnings of this comradeship in national effort
between men and women will, I think, be recognized by future historians as marking a most
important psychological change in our national character.
With women's organizations spread over Ireland, working on the home, the garden,
the poultry yard, the schools, and making their opinions felt on public boards and the
organizations of men, Irish life will be sweetened and humanized. They will bring into
Ireland the desire for beauty and comfort which are the beginnings of civilization. They will
bring home to the long drugged and long dulled national conscience that the right aim of
a nation is the creation of fine human beings, and not merely the production of national
wealth. Women, however they may err as individuals, are concerned collectively far more
than men about the character and well-being of a race. It is a divinely-implanted instinct
with them, and this instinct must be liberated and let work its will. Owing to our unsanitary
civilization, with its unhealthy rural slums and its crowded city slums, we have become so
unhealthy and ugly, so distorted from the divine image, that beautiful women and shapely
men who ought to be normal are abnormal. All the strings of our being are frayed or
flaccid, or hanging loose, or are too tight, and there is no health in us; and rarely, rarely
do our eyes light up at a beautiful and healthy human being with the perfect modeling and
sweet curves which denote perfect health. Most men and women do not know what it is
to meet a perfectly healthy human being, or the delight perfect health is to the possessor
of it or to the onlooker. Not knowing what it is they do not look for it.
I would like to select half a dozen people of both sexes, beautiful and healthy
persons, and exhibit them in every village in Ireland, and have them lectured on somewhat
as follows: "This is what you have to aim at in bringing up your children. To aspire to have
a nation of people like these is the right aspiration of a great nationality. Its aim ought to
be to beget 'youths, beautiful, gigantic, and sweet-blooded,' and their counterpart in comely
and robust women. To this end should be all your co-operation, dairying, tillage, and
harvesting. It is to this end you should labour and make sacrifices. But if you scrape and
save to leave money to your children after you die instead of giving them illuminated minds
and healthy bodies, you are damnably bad parents, enemies of your race, and of the
human race. Look now at some normal healthy men and women. See how they bear
God's image on them. Somewhat like this was humanity formed by Deity. If you lose the
divine image, and deface it or forget it in money-making and money-grubbing, you are in
rebellion against God, and are enemies of humanity." This may sound fantastical, but
humanity has strayed so far from its divine original and all that it signifies; we have lost,
so many of us, the primal blessings of youth, ecstasy, and beauty, we may yet have to
rouse a shrivelled and hideous humanity to its own ideal by methods like these.
Humanity has been gradually losing vision of the spirit. It may even lose vision of
the form. We have been teaching people to be everything except human beings. We are
shaping them as farmers, as traders, labourers, factory hands, but not so as to be human
in any sense that we might take pride in the thought. Our sole hope in this respect is in the
new women's movement. It may fill up, it desires to fill up, our chilly scheme of rural life
with humanity; to drape the bare walls and outlines with comfortable feminine inventions,
and enrich the national consciousness, and give a new stimulus to those engaged in the
long and often disheartening labour of building up a rural civilization in Ireland. The highest
types of men have endeavoured from time immemorial to bring heaven down to earth.
This has been the aim of the long line of prophets, saints, seers, religious teachers, and
idealists. The highest types of womanhood have always tried to lift earth to heaven. The
work of both is necessary. The stalagmite rising from the floor meets the stalactite
descending from the roof of the divine cavern, and the one ascends and the other
descends until the pillar is joined. This image may symbolize the tendency of all fine
masculine ideals and of all fine womanly desires. The best augury of the future of the
country life movement in Ireland is the friendly comradeship of these organizations of men
and women, each bringing their own special faculties and qualities to the work of building
up a rural civilization.

------------

Chapter XI.

Farmers and the State

The greatest danger the new rural organizations have to face is interference from
the State, straddling quite across the path like Apollyon in Bunyan's tale. When the
reaction against laissez-faire set in, students of political psychology felt it would be severe.
For over half a century the State refused to interfere with the evolution of society. But
anybody who had studied history and science, and had observed how action and reaction
are equal, could have foretold that the policy of letting things alone would have been
followed by the policy of letting nothing alone. The State would endeavour to interfere with
everything, dominate everything, and break up every organization of the people which
threatened effective opposition to, or control over, the actions of the Mandarins. The
Servile State, whose swift coming Mr. Hilaire Belloc deplores, seems to be the objective
of the ruling and official classes. The official idea of an earthly paradise seems to be to
have rows of electrical buttons all round the official armchair, so that when one of these
buttons is touched whole battalions of people can be set in motion. All the children of the
State would go to school at a certain hour, and the Mandarin will pride himself on knowing
at any particular moment what each child in every part of the country is being taught.
Another button is touched, an order issued, and an industry marshals itself in response to
official wisdom. It manufactures, packs, and despatches its goods according to the
regulations of the Mandarin. For those who obey promptly there are rewards, subsidies,
and official smiles. For those who disobey there are no rewards, no subsidies, and official
obstruction in their work.
It is this kind of official earthly paradise which began blossoming in the mind of some
philosophic Irish Mandarins, just about the time when State supervision of every person
with less than one hundred and sixty pounds a year was adopted as a policy by the
oligarchy who rule these islands. As it is difficult just at present to lay hold of urban
industries and urban life, the spread of agricultural co-operation has seemed to our Irish
Mandarins the very thing to begin on. Here were associations which could be drilled and
disciplined so as to yield Mandarins and inspectors the exquisite sensation of being rulers.
They could be bribed into the fold by loans, subsidies, certificates and official smiles. They
could be penalized by withholding information, loans, subsidies, and certificates. Here was
a joyful prospect indeed, a fair and glittering vista leading away to the official earthly
paradise; and it has been the continual aim of some of the Mandarins of the Department
of Agriculture to lay hold of, supervise, and control the operations of the co-operative
societies.
The greater the movement grew the greater became the anxiety of the Mandarins
to control it. They felt it would control them if it was not shackled. Their souls ached with
desire, and they rejoiced at every assault upon its leaders by narrow-minded politicians and
petty trade interests; any attack which would drive the guides of the movement out of
public life would make the societies an easy prey. This desire of the Mandarins for control,
this itch for overlordship over everything which besets the new school of bureaucrats, is the
greatest danger before us in our path to the Co-operative Commonwealth. It has
manifested itself lately in an application by the present head of the Department to the
Development Commissioners for funds to enable him to become the director of agricultural
co-operation in Ireland, and to wrest the leadership of the movement from the man who
created it - a proposition which, I think, is the meanest that ever came out of the mean soul
of a politician. The greatest voluntary movement Ireland has ever seen is in danger of
being eaten up by the State, which Neitzsche rightly called "the coldest of all cold
monsters."
The workers in that movement have laboured with an energy and self-sacrifice
which is one of the great moral glories of Ireland. They have poured out treasures of
intellect, energy, and money lavishly to build up a rural civilization. Catholic and Protestant,
Unionist and Nationalist, have worked together. But all this glow of idealism, this kindly life,
was only possible because the movement was self-controlled. The practical man and the
idealist laboured with equal enthusiasm: the first because the work of the world prospered;
the second because things seen were to him the symbols of a nobler transformation taking
place in the minds of men. If the State, "the coldest of all cold monsters," is allowed by
Irishmen to take control of this work, all the fire of life in it will die out. A State department
is sterilized of all beauty of thought. Whoever enters the service of the State has to keep
his heart under lock and key. His official duty is to organize the undisputed platitude, and
to preach the most material commonplace. We all know these are necessary duties, but
are we to give over our hopes and our ideals also to this benumbing agency? Is Ireland
not to have one activity of its children free from the greed of the Mandarin for control?
Our supine population has allowed the most gigantic State machinery to be set up
over it that the modern world has knowledge of. Is nothing to be exempt? For this thing
is surely true; that if our voluntary workers are dispensed with, and the sole link which
united the associations is their relation to a State department, they will never be able to
resist effectively further encroachments on their liberty by the Mandarins. Their officials
will be bribed by doles, or thwarted with restrictions, until the chilly ideal of the bureaucracy
is attained; until the whole activities of the country are under its control to satisfy its itch
for power, and it can contemplate with satisfaction the soulless mediocrity it has instituted.
I have never dreaded the political attacks on the new rural movement. Most of our
latter day Irish politicians are incompetent for any purpose, even their own special job.
They have never been able to devise a scheme of self-government for Ireland, but look
with a cringing consciousness of their own incompetence to English statesmen to devise
a scheme for them; and to the ministers they declare incapable of governing them, and
who ask what kind of government they want, they answer, like the jarvey to his fare who
asks what he owes, "I lave it to yourself, yer honour." The politicians never had either
power or ability to stop the growth of agricultural co-operation, though they tried their
utmost. The trade objection has been a help rather than a hindrance; but the State, with
its gigantic machinery, its innumerable array of officials, and its power to draw on the public
purse for objects which the public loathe, is a real danger the only danger before us, and
the only one worth thinking about.
I have sometimes despaired in face of the apathy of our country people, and of the
difficulty of educating them. Sometimes I have wondered whether we Irish were a people
who could ever stand on our own legs without State crutches to support us in every action.
That genial American humourist, Professor James, who theorized about psychology,
divided all philosophical systems into two classes. One set of philosophical ideas
originated with, and catered for, the intellectual comfort of people who in the far West, the
region where Blanco Posnett lived and blasphemed, are called "Tenderfoots." The second
set of philosophical ideas originated with and developed the self-respect of people who,
in the region of the Rockies, are called "Toughs." The names explain themselves. Our
politicians and our official classes act as if they believed every Irishman was a Tenderfoot.
The self-help movement has acted on the assumption that Irish people at bottom were
Toughs. The results of work by the Toughs are creameries, bacon factories, co-operative
banks, poultry societies, woollen mills, ship-building, and the like. The best expression of
the Tenderfoot policy can be found in the Parish Committees, which paid men to work on
their own holdings. But the Tenderfoot is far greater in words than deeds. He is always
weeping over the sorrows of Ireland, and asking the State to wipe away the tears with
pocket-handkerchiefs costing a million apiece. The policy of self-help he calls doctrinaire
cant. The Tenderfoot policy triumphed in the Congested Districts Board, whose area was
enlarged a few years ago, until it now embraces one-third of Ireland. I believe that the area
for Tenderfoot operations should have been reduced to about thirty parishes along the
western seaboard.
I do not deny there are occasions when the Tenderfoot theory holds good when
people must be helped first before they can help themselves. Babies are rightly treated
by Tenderfoot mothers, but they will grow up useless little cubs if they are not toughened
off as soon as possible. The worst parishes along the western seaboard, like Carna,
Rossmuck, Carraroe, and Pullathomas I give over to the Tenderfoot politicians and
economists, but I object to giving one-third of Ireland to be demoralized by parish
committees and dole-dealing ofiicials. How is an agent of the self-help movement to go
into a parish which is already made into a ward of the political hospital by officials who
stand around it with their best bedside manner? How is he to preach his wholesome
gospel of self-respect and self-help, when the patient has already a tribe of Mandarins
holding out spoons to him filled with Tenderfoot jelly?
I hold that the whole salvation of Ireland depends on what Irish people can do for
themselves. I think the worst enemies Ireland has today are those who are for ever
supplicating State aid on her behalf. If by nature we are a Tenderfoot race, like the French,
then all our efforts have been misdirected. I have had some doubts myself as to the proper
attribution of Irish people to the class of Toughs or Tenderfeet until this year, when the
movement of organized farmers rose in protest against State interference or political
interference with their work. I am now convinced that there are enough Toughs in Ireland
to carry through the scheme of rural organization, and to keep the Mandarins and
politicians in their proper place; who will see that officials are the servants of the public and
not its masters.
The Eden of the bureaucrat is the hell of the governed. Bureaucracies in no country
have brought contentment. Our rural movement, grown strong and independent, will work
in harmony with the State, and will collaborate with it in schemes mutually agreed on, but
it will resist, and rightly resist, all attempts at domination by Government departments
manned by people of the class Mr. Wells calls "second-rate industrious persons." At least
half our officials, after receiving their appointments, show symptoms of a disease which I
cannot describe otherwise than as an attack of incipient Caesarism. It may be the natural
spirituality of the Irish mind which tries to bring the element of infinity into its occupations.
But that is not the way or the place to grow that lower. Without free communities
developing according to their own desires, carrying out some scheme they themselves
have devised, and for which they accept full responsibility, there can be no progressive life
in Ireland. The aim of the wise statesman will be to foster those independent and self-
reliant movements eager in promoting schemes of self-help. The effect of the policy of our
present public men is to turn the Irish into a race of economic babies, with their lips for ever
nuzzling at the nipples of the State. As the new movement spreads it will put forward its
own public men; and it is possible yet in Ireland, where the farmers at least are
independent, to prevent the organization of the Servile State which seems inevitable in
England, where the last act of the legislature has slipped the noose round some fifteen
million people, and where the noose is likely to be pulled tighter by every succeeding
Parliament.
The founder of the Department of Agriculture gave it such a constitution that in due
time, as the other movement he created expanded, its representatives would overflow into
the Council of Agriculture and the Agricultural Board, and control the Department's policy
and keep it to its proper function which is to supply the farmers with the technical
information they want and not to force on them policies they detest. Experts ought to be
on tap and not on top. The official classes will, I believe, be much happier serving the
public than in setting snares, or inventing schemes, to control industries and movements
they had no part in creating, where their interference would be fatal to any fine idealism or
noble humanity. The country has seen lately how a great national institution can be
degraded in popular estimation by its headship being handed over to an incompetent
economist and bitter partisan. Until the organized farmers can control the institution
created to serve their interests, the less authority over their movement they allow to its
officials the better.
--------------

Chapter XII.

Ideals of the New Rural Society

For a country where political agitations follow each other as rapidly as plagues in an
Eastern city, it is curious how little constructive thought we can show on the ideals of a rural
civilization. But economic peace ought surely to have its victories to show as well as
political war. I would a thousand times rather dwell on what men and women working
together may do than on what may result from majorities at Westminster. The beauty of
great civilizations has been built up far more by the people working together than by any
corporate action of the State. In these socialistic days we grow pessimistic about our own
efforts and optimistic about the working of the legislature. I think we do right to expect
great things from the State, but we ought to expect still greater things from ourselves. We
ought to know full well that, if the State did twice as much as it does, we shall never rise
out of mediocrity among the nations unless we have unlimited faith in the power of our
personal efforts to raise and transform Ireland, and unless we translate the faith into works.
The State can give a man an economic holding, but only the man himself can make it into
an Earthly Paradise, and it is a dull business, unworthy of a being made in the image of
God, to grind away at work without some noble end to be served, some glowing ideal to
be attained.
Ireland is a horribly melancholy and cynical country. Our literary men and poets,
who ought to give us courage, have taken to writing about the Irish as people who "went
forth to battle, but always fell," sentimentalizing over incompetence instead of invigorating
us and liberating us and directing our energies. We have developed a new and clever
school of Irish dramatists who say they are holding up the mirror to Irish peasant nature,
but they reflect nothing but decadence. They delight in the broken lights of insanity, the
rufiian who beats his wife, the weakling who is unfortunate in love and who goes and drinks
himself to death, while the little decaying country towns are seized on with avidity and
exhibited on the stage in every kind of decay and human futility and meanness. Well, it is
good to be chastened in spirit, but it is a thousand times better to be invigorated in spirit.
To be positive is always better than to be negative. These writers understand and
sympathize with Ireland more through their lower nature than their higher nature. Judging
by the things people write in Ireland, and by what they go to see performed on the stage,
it is more pleasing to them to see enacted characters they know are meaner than
themselves than to see characters which they know are nobler than themselves.
All this is helping on our national pessimism and self-mistrust. It helps to fix these
features permanently in our national character, which were excusable enough as
temporary moods after defeat. The younger generation should hear nothing about failures.
It should not be hypnotized into self-contempt. Our energies in Ireland are sapped by a
cynical self-mistrust which is spread everywhere through society. It is natural enough that
the elder generation, who were promised so many millenniums, but who actually saw four
million people deducted from the population, should be cynical. But it is not right they
should give only to the younger generation the heritage of their disappointments without
any heritage of hope. From early childhood parents and friends are hypnotizing the child
into beliefs and unbeliefs, and too often they are exiling all nobility out of life, all
confidence, all trust, all hope; they are insinuating a mean self-seeking, a self-mistrust, a
vulgar spirit which laughs at every high ideal, until at last the hypnotized child is blinded to
the presence of any beauty or nobility in life.
No country can ever hope to rise beyond a vulgar mediocrity where there is not
unbounded confidence in what its humanity can do. The self-confident American will make
a great civilization yet, because he believes with all his heart and soul in the future of his
country and in the powers of the American people. What Whitman called their "barbaric
yawp" may yet turn into the lordliest speech and thought, but without self-confidence a race
will go no whither. If Irish people do not believe they can equal or surpass the stature of
any humanity which has been upon the globe, then they had better all emigrate and
become servants to some superior race, and leave Ireland to new settlers who may come
here with the same high hopes as the Pilgrim Fathers had when they went to America.
We must go on imagining better than the best we know. Even in their ruins now,
Greece and Italy seem noble and beautiful with broken pillars and temples made in their
day of glory. But before ever there was a white marble temple shining on a hill it shone
with a more brilliant beauty m the mind of some artist who designed it. Do many people
know how that marvellous Greek civilization spread along the shores of the Mediterranean?
Little nations owning no more land than would make up an Irish barony sent out
colony after colony. The seed of beautiful life they sowed grew and blossomed out into
great cities and half divine civilizations. Italy had a later blossoming of beauty in the Middle
Ages, and travellers today go into little Italian towns and find them filled with master-pieces
of painting and architecture and sculpture, witnesses of a time when nations no larger than
an Irish county rolled their thoughts up to Heaven and mixed their imagination with the
angels. Can we be contented in Ireland with the mean streets of our country towns and
the sordid heaps of our villages, dominated in their economics by the vendors of alcohol,
and inspired as to their ideals by the vendors of political animosities?
I would not mind people fighting in a passion to get rid of all that barred some lordly
scheme of life, but quarrels over political bones from which there is little or nothing
wholesome to be picked only disgust. People tell me that the countryside must always be
stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal
souls, and it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had
any unobscured glow. The countryside in Ireland could blossom into as much beauty as
the hillsides in mediaeval Italy if we could but get rid of our self-mistrust. We have all that
any race ever had to inspire them, the heavens overhead, the earth underneath, and the
breath of life in our nostrils. I would like to exile the man who would set limits to what we
can do, who would take the crown and sceptre from the human will and say, marking out
some petty enterprise as the limit: "Thus far can we go and no farther, and here shall our
life be stayed." Therefore I hate to hear of stagnant societies who think because they have
made butter well that they have crowned their parochial generation with a halo of glory, and
can rest content with the fame of it all, listening to the whirr of the steam separators and
pouching in peace of mind the extra penny a gallon for their milk. And I dislike the little
groups who meet a couple of times a year and call themselves co-operators, because they
have got their fertilizers more cheaply, and have done nothing else. Why, the village
gombeen man has done more than that! He has at least brought most of the necessities
of life there by his activities; and I say, if we co-operators do not aim at doing more than
the Irish Scribes and Pharisees we shall have little to be proud of.
A poet, interpreting the words of Christ to His followers, who had scorned the
followers of the old order, made Him say:

"Scorn ye their hopes, their tears, their inward prayers?

I say unto you, see that your souls live
A deeper life than theirs."

The co-operative movement is delivering over the shaping of the rural life of Ireland,
and the building up of its rural civilization, into the hands of Irish farmers. The old order of
things has left Ireland unlovely. But if we do not passionately strive to build it better, better
for the men, for the women, for the children, of what worth are we? We continually come
across the phrase "the dull Saxon" in our Irish papers; it crops up in the speeches of our
public orators, but it was an English poet who said:

"I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

And it was the last great poet England has produced, who had so much hope for
humanity in his country that in his latest song he could mix earth with heaven, and say that
to human eyes

"Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder

Hung betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross."

Shall we think more meanly of the future of Ireland than these ''dull Saxons'' think
of the future of their island? Shall we be content with humble crumbs fallen from the table
of life, and sit like beggars waiting only for what the commonwealth can do for us, leaving
all high hopes and aims to our rulers, whether they be English or Irish?
Every people get the kind of government they deserve. A nation can exhibit no
greater political wisdom in the mass than it generates in its units. It is the pregnant
idealism of the multitude which gives power to the makers of great nations, otherwise the
prophets of civilization are helpless as preachers in the desert and solitary places. So I
have always preached self-help above all other kinds of help, knowing that if we strove
passionately after this righteousness all other kinds of help would be at our service. So,
too, I would brush aside the officious interferer in our co-operative affairs, who would offer
on behalf of the State to do for us what we should, and could, do far better ourselves. We
can build up a rural civilization in Ireland, shaping it to our hearts' desires, warming it with
life, but our rulers and officials can never be warmer than a stepfather, and have no large,
divine, and comfortable words for us; they tinker at the body when it is the soul which
requires to be healed and made whole. The soul of Ireland has to be kindled, and it can
be only kindled by the thought of great deeds and not by the hope of petty parsimonies or
petty gains.
 Now, great deeds are never done vicariously. They are done directly and
personally. No country has grown to greatness mainly by the acts of some great ruler, but
by the aggregate activities of all its people. Therefore, every Irish community should make
its own ideals and should work for them. As great work can be done in a parish as in the
legislative assemblies with a nation at gaze. Do people say: "It is easier to work well with
a nation at gaze?" I answer that true greatness becomes the North Pole of humanity, and
when it appears all the needles of Being point to it. You of the young generation, who have
not yet lost the generous ardour of youth, believe it is as possible to do great work and
make noble sacrifices, and to roll the acceptable smoke of offering to Heaven by your work
in an Irish parish, as in any city in the world. Like the Greek architects - who saw in their
dreams hills crowned with white marble-pillared palaces and images of beauty, until these
rose up in actuality - so should you, not forgetting national ideals, still most of all set before
yourselves the ideal of your own neighbourhood. How can you speak of working for all
Ireland, which you have not seen, if you do not labour and dream for the Ireland before
your eyes, which you see as you look out of your own door in the morning, and on which
you walk up and down through the day?
"What dream shall we dream, or what labour shall we undertake?" you may ask, and
it is right that those who exhort should be asked in what manner and how precisely they
would have the listener act or think. I answer: the first thing to do is to create and realize
the feeling for the community, and break up the evil and petty isolation of man from man.
This can be done by every kind of co-operative effort where combined action is better than
individual action. The parish cannot take care of the child as well as the parents, but you
will find in most of the labours of life combined action is more fruitful than individual action.
Some of you have found this out in many branches of agriculture, of which your dairying,
agricultural, credit, poultry, and flax societies are witness. Some of you have combined to
manufacture; some to buy in common; some to sell in common. Some of you have the
common ownership of thousands of pounds' worth of expensive machinery. Some of you
have carried the idea of co-operation for economic ends further, and have used the power
which combination gives you to erect village halls and to have libraries of books, the
windows through which the life and wonder and power of humanity can be seen. Some
of you have light-heartedly, in the growing sympathy of unity, revived the dances and songs
and sports which are the right relaxation of labour. Some Irishwomen here and there have
heard beyond the four walls in which so much of their lives are spent the music of a new
day, and have started out to help and inspire the men and be good comrades to them; and
calling themselves United Irishwomen, they have joined, as men have joined, to help their
sisters who are in economic servitude, or who suffer from the ignorance and indifference
to their special needs in life which pervade the administration of local government.
We cannot build up a rural civilization in Ireland without the aid of Irish women. It
will help life little if we have methods of the twentieth century in the fields, and those of the
fifth century in the home. A great writer said: "Woman is the last thing man will civilize."
If a woman had written on that subject she would have said: "Woman is the last thing man
thinks about when he is building up his empires." It is true that the consciousness of
woman has been always centred too close to the dark and obscure roots of the Tree of
Life, while men have branched out more to the sun and wind, and today the starved soul
of womanhood is crying out over the world for an intellectual life and for more chance of
earning a living. If Ireland will not listen to this cry, its daughters will go on slipping silently
away to other countries, as they have been doing all the best of them, all the bravest, all
those most mentally alive, all those who would have made the best wives and the best
mothers - and they will leave at home the timid, the stupid, and the dull to help in the
deterioration of the race and to breed sons as sluggish as themselves.
In the new world women have taken an important part in the work of the National
Grange, the greatest agency in bettering the economic and social conditions of the
agricultural population in the States. In Ireland the women must be welcomed into the work
of building up a rural civilization, and be aided by men in the promotion of those industries
with which women have been immemorially associated. We should not want to see
women separated from the activities and ideals and aspirations of men. We should want
to see them working together and in harmony. If the women carry on their work in
connection with the associations by which men earn their living they will have a greater
certainty of permanence. I have seen too many little industries and little associations of
women workers spring up and perish in Ireland, which depended on the efforts of some
one person who had not drunk of the elixir of immortal youth, and could not always
continue the work she started; and I have come to the conclusion that the women's
organizations must be connected with the men's organizations, must use their premises,
village halls and rooms for women's meetings. I do not believe women's work can be
promoted so well in any other way.
Men and women have been companions in the world from the dawn of time. I do
not know where they are journeying to, but I believe they will never get to the Delectable
City if they journey apart from each other, and do not share each other's burdens. Working
so, we create the conditions in which the spirit of the community grows strong. We create
the true communal idea, which the Socialists miss in their dream of a vast amalgamation
of whole nationalities in one great commercial undertaking. The true idea of the clan or
commune or tribe is to have in it as many people as will give it strength and importance,
and so few people that a personal tie may be established between them. Humanity has
always grouped itself instinctively in this way. It did so in the ancient clans and rural
communes, and it does so in the parishes and co-operative associations. If they were
larger they would lose the sense of unity. If they were smaller they would be too feeble for
effectual work, and could not take over the affairs of their district.
A rural commune or coroperative community ought to have, to a large extent, the
character of a nation. It should manufacture for its members all things which it profitably
can manufacture for them, employing its own workmen, carpenters, bootmakers, makers
and menders of farming equipment, saddlery, harness, etc. It should aim at feeding its
members and their families cheaply and well, as far as possible out of the meat and grain
produced in the district. It should have a mill to grind their grain, a creamery to
manufacture their butter; or where certain enterprises like a bacon factory are too great
for it, it should unite with other co-operative communities to furnish out such an enterprise.
It should sell for the members their produce, and buy for them their requirements, and hold
for them labour-saving machinery. It should put aside a certain portion of its profits every
year for the creation of halls, libraries, places for recreation and games, and it should
pursue this plan steadily with the purpose of giving its members every social and
educational advantage which the civilization of their time affords. It should have its
councils or village parliaments, where improvements and new ventures could be discussed.
Such a community would soon generate a passionate devotion to its own ideals and
interests among the members, who would feel how their fortunes rose with the fortunes of
the associations of which they were all members. It would kindle and quicken the intellect
of every person in the community. It would create the atmosphere in which national genius
would emerge and find opportunities for its activity.
The clan ought to be the antechamber of the nation and the training ground for its
statesmen. What opportunity leadership in the councils of such a rural community would
give to the best minds! The man of social genius at present finds an unorganized
community, and he does not know how to affect his fellow citizens. A man might easily
despair of affecting the destinies of a nation of forty million people, but yet start with
eagerness to build up a kingdom of the size of Sligo, and shape it nearer to the heart's
desire. The organization of the rural population of Ireland in co-operative associations will
provide the instrument ready to the hand of the social reformer. Some associations will be
more dowered with ability than others, but one will learn from another, and a vast network
of living, progressive organizations will cover rural Ireland, democratic in constitution and
governed by the aristocracy of intellect and character.
Such associations would have great economic advantages in that they would be
self-reliant and self-contained, and would be less subject to fluctuation in their prosperity
brought about by national disasters and commercial crises than the present unorganized
rural communities are. They would have all their business under local control; and, aiming
at feeding, clothing, and manufacturing locally from local resources as far as possible, the
slumps in foreign trade, the shortage in supplies, the dislocations of commerce would
affect them but little. They would make the community wealthier. Every step towards this
organization already taken in Ireland has brought with it increased prosperity, and the
towns benefit by increased purchasing power on the part of these rural associations. New
arts and industries would spring up under the aegis of the local associations. Here we
should find the weaving of rugs, there the manufacture of toys, elsewhere the women
would be engaged in embroidery or lace-making, and, perhaps, everywhere we might get
a revival of the old local industry of weaving homespuns.
We are dreaming of nothing impossible, nothing which has not been done
somewhere already, nothing which we could not do here in Ireland. True, it cannot be
done all at once, but if we get the idea clearly in our minds of the building up of a rural
civilization in Ireland, we can labour at it with the grand persistence of mediaeval burghers
in their little towns, where one generation laid down the foundations of a great cathedral,
and saw only in hope and faith the gorgeous glooms over altar and sanctuary, and the
blaze and flame of stained glass, where apostles, prophets, and angelic presences were
pictured in fire: and the next generation raised high the walls, and only the third generation
saw the realization of what their grandsires had dreamed.
We in Ireland should not live only from day to day, for the day only, like the beasts
in the field, but should think of where all this long cavalcade of the Gael is tending, and
how and in what manner their tents will be pitched in the evening of their generation. A
national purpose is the most unconquerable and victorious of all things on earth. It can
raise up Babylons from the sands of the desert, and make imperial civilizations spring from
out a score of huts, and after it has wrought its will it can leave monuments that seem as
everlasting a portion of nature as the rocks. The Pyramids and the Sphinx in the sands of
Egypt have seemed to humanity for centuries as much a portion of nature as Errigal, or
Benbulben, or Slieve Gullion, have seemed a portion of nature to our eyes in Ireland.
 We must have some purpose or plan in building up an Irish civilization. No artist
takes up his paints and brushes and begins to work on his canvas without a clear idea
burning in his brain of what he has to do, else were his work all smudges. Does anyone
think that, out of all these little cabins and farm-houses dotting the green of Ireland, there
will come harmonious effort to a common end without organization and set purpose? The
idea and plan of a great rural civilization must shine like a burning lamp in the imagination
of the youth of Ireland, or we shall only be at cross-purposes and end in little futilities.
We are very fond in Ireland of talking of Ireland a nation. The word "nation" has a
kind of satisfying sound, but I am afraid it is an empty word with no rich significance to most
who use it. The word "laboratory" has as fine a sound, but only the practical scientist has
a true conception of what may take place there, what roar of strange forces, what mingling
of subtle elements, what mystery and magnificence in atomic life. The word without the
idea is like the purse without the coin, the skull without the soul, or any other sham or
empty deceit.
Nations are not built up by the repetition of words, but by the organizing of
intellectual forces. If any of my readers would like to know what kind of thought goes to the
building up of a great nation, let them read the life of Alexander Hamilton, by Oliver, which
can be obtained for a shilling. To this extraordinary man the United States owe their
constitution, almost their existence. To him, far more than to Washington, the idea, plan,
shape of all that marvellous dominion owes its origin and character. He seemed to hold
in his brain, while America was yet a group of half barbaric settlements, the idea of what
it might become. He laid down the plans, the constitution, the foreign policy, the trade
policy, the relation of State to State, and it is only within the last few years almost that
America has realized that she had in Hamilton a supreme political and social intelligence,
the true fountain head of what she has since become.
We have not half a continent to deal with, but size matters nothing. The Russian
Empire, which covers half Europe, and stretches over the Ural Mountains to the Pacific,
would weigh light as a feather in the balance if we compare its services to humanity with
those of the little State of Attica, which was no larger than Tipperary. Every State which
has come to command the admiration of the world has had clearly conceived ideals which
it realized before it went the way which all empires, even the greatest, must go; becoming
finally a legend, a fable, or a symbol. We have to lay down the foundations of a new social
order in Ireland, and, if the possibilities of it are realized, our thousand years of sorrow and
darkness may be followed by as long a cycle of happy effort and ever-growing prosperity.
We shall want all these plans whether we are ruled from Westminster or College Green.
Without an imaginative conception of what kind of civilization we wish to create, the best
government from either quarter will never avail to lift us beyond national mediocrity.
I write for those who have joined the ranks of co-operators without perhaps realizing
all that the movement meant, or all that it tended to. Because we hold in our hearts and
keep holy there the vision of a great future, we have fought passionately for the entire
freedom of our movement from external control, lest the meddling of politicians or official
persons without any inspiration should deflect, for some petty purpose or official
gratification, the strength of that current which was flowing and gathering strength unto the
realization of great ideals. Every country has its proportion of little souls which could find
ample room on a threepenny bit, and be majestically housed in a thimble, who follow out
some little minute practice in an ecstacy of self-satisfaction, seeking some little job which
is the El Dorado of their desires as if there were nought else, as if humanity were not going
from the Great Deep to the Great Deep of Deity, with wind and water, fire and earth, stars
and sun, lordly companions for it on its path to a divine destiny. We have our share of
these in Ireland in high and low places, but I do not write for them. This essay is for those
who are working at laying deep the foundations of a new social order, to hearten them with
some thought of what their labour may bring to Ireland. I welcome to this work the United
Irishwomen. As one of their poetesses has said in a beautiful song, the services of women
to Ireland in the past have been the services of mourners to the stricken. But for today and
tomorrow we need hope and courage and gaiety, and I repeat for them the last passionate
words of her verse:

"Rise to your feet, O daughters, rise,

Our mother still is young and fair,
Let the world look into your eyes
And see her beauty shining there.
Grant of that beauty but one ray,
Heroes shall leap from every hill:
Today shall be as yesterday,
The red blood burns in Ireland still."

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Chapter XIII.

Life Finding Its Level

At the beginnings of the human household some of old Mother Nature's children
decided to look after the House and its furnishing, and some decided to go into the fields
and grow things. Now the Children in the House were always together, and they knew
each other's minds; and as they rarely saw the Children working in the fields they began
to lose interest in them, and finally forgot all about them, and treated them as strangers,
and grumbled at them when the fruit, vegetables, or grain, came to the door of the house
in bad condition, or there was not enough, or the Children of the Fields asked too much for
them. The Children in the House made it gayer and gayer. They lit it up and had brilliant
festivals, and the Children in the Fields saw the lights in the House, and they became
envious. Then they said: "We have as much right to be in the House as those others."
So many of them left working in the Fields and crowded into the House, and the Children
left in the Fields grew more and more lonely, and more and more they went to live in the
House, and share in its pleasures. Then it came about that the Children in the Fields did
not grow enough fruit, or vegetables, or grain, to give plenty to the Children in the House,
and the household grew hungry and quarrelsome.
The Children in the House have never acted fairly by the Children in the Fields.
They have been trying indeed to do so lately; but they are acting ignorantly, because the
Children in the House, who arrange everything, do not really understand how to arrange
life for the Children in the Fields, and there are long centuries of neglect to make up, and
for long centuries the wealth of the world has poured into the cities. There are pleasures
to be enjoyed. There are libraries where all the knowledge of the world is to be learned,
and theatres where all the gaiety in the heart of man or woman can be satiated. There the
great, the wise, and the famous congregate. There national destinies are decided. The
day in the cities is busy and crowded with activity. The night of the cities seems like a
fairyland with the glitter of lights, and with the friendly people in the streets bent on
pleasure, and the houses, too, seem built up to high heaven to those who know only the
cabins and cottages; and, when the misty brilliance of lamps is diffused over the streets,
the great buildings rise up above them like imagined Babylon or many-templed Nineveh.
All this allures the young country boy or girl coming from the fields; and it is only when they
are caught in the net that they realize that every high beauty in the city exists because of
a deformity alongside it: that stupendous wealth exists because there are vast gulfs of
poverty and despair. But the Children of the Fields do not know this, and they come
flocking, allured by the distant gleam.
This is going on the world over, but it will not go on always. Reactions take place
inevitably, even if they occupy vast periods of time; and the reaction against the
domination of the town has begun over the world. There is an immense social change
taking place; part of this change is the organization of the farmers to protect themselves
and their industry, and this organization, when complete, will shift the centre of power to
the country from the town where it has been too long. Humanity is like water, and is always
pushing to its own highest level; and since all cannot live in the city those who must live
in the country are organizing themselves, from farthest east in Japan to farthest west in
California, and they are going to claim for the Children of the Fields access to knowledge,
beauty, pleasure, and power. They are going to build up a civilization so pleasant, so
kindly, so healthy, so prosperous, that the Children of the Fields will not want to live with
the Children of the House; but will be content with where they are, growing comely and
sweet-blooded in the sunshine and pure air, growing wise at their own labours, and strong
in their union. They will have rustic sports and festivals of their own, and because there will
be more of them in the Fields and less in the House, and because they will be better
educated and better equipped, they will produce more, and the Children in the House will
be better fed, and the balance will be struck.
This is the work that, consciously or unconsciously organized farmers over the world
are putting their hands to. Some of them work only for immediate gain, and nobody can
blame them. But some are working for higher aims, not only in Ireland but in America and
Europe. There are men labouring as heroically at the building up of a beautiful rural
civilization as any hero in the past wrought at the making of Rome or Athens or Memphis,
or any of those proud cities which have become to us symbols of tne magnificence of the
world. Here, too, humanity is trying to find its own highest level. However suppressed,
clogged, shackled - that life, in spite of all indirections, missings of the way, is eternally
aiming at the highest. What the social reformer has to do is not to coerce but to liberate
and unite those human energies and let them express themselves freely and rise freely to
their natural level. That they will find their natural level is inevitable, and that level will
seem high or low as men are optimists, or pessimists.
I am one of those who believe that the natural level of the spirit in man is with the
highest in the universe, and I regard as damnable heresies all other conceptions of his
destiny. I hate the people who talk scornfully of Paddy or Hodge, of those who work on the
land; as if the low brow and the dull brain were an inevitable accompaniment of such toil,
as if Spirit were not there, an awful presence, a majesty imprisoned from the infinite. Mr.
Edmond Holmes tells us he found, when he was inspector of national schools in England,
a backward country district where the genius of a teacher divined a soul and a kinship with
immortal things in the children of Hodge. She bent herself to liberate these powers, and
a crowd of lovely things went fluttering out of the opened cage. There the feet of the little
rustics danced as the feet of life should dance. They loved and saw beauty; that is, they
saw with the divine eye. There art and music and literature were loved. There was
imagination, happiness, and quick intelligence; and all this because life was not
suppressed nor disciplined in formal obedience to an external law. The higher was evoked
and it disciplined the lower. Yet all this vision and beauty did not make the children unfit
for labour afterwards, for on inquiry among the farmers it was found that no sluggards or
lazy workers came out of that school. The evocation of the higher faculties in men or
women does not unfit them for the world's labour; for the higher comprehends the lower,
though the lower does not include the higher.
I can speak out of my own knowledge of Ireland. I believe there that those who live
on the land have a deeper life than those who live in the towns; who deceive themselves,
thinking that the twinkling of a sophisticated mind is wisdom; who collect ideas as if they
were collecting postage stamps. The shallow puddle can reflect the stars and heavens
without being deep. The country folk comprehend great fundamental ideas. They do not
understand the sophisticated urban mind. But the rural reformer who starts his work with
the idea that those who labour on the land are, by nature of their avocation, less capable
than the city folk of moulding life nobly and greatly, are unjust to them and will achieve little.
Indeed it is with the people who live on the land, who are bathed continually in sunlight and
pure air, who are close to Mother Nature, that the future and hope of humanity lies.
There is no future for life in the great cities. Life shrivels there and decays, divorced
from the fountain of life. Has anyone ever heard of a Londoner of the fourth generation?
The country people carry quietly about with them, unknown to themselves, divine powers
and tremendous destinies; as children predestined to greatness carry, unknown to
themselves or others, powers that will make beauty or stormy life in the world hereafter.
The country men have been repressed through the ages. They have been serfs. They
have been neglected. They were not allowed to combine to work out their own destiny, but
were used as instruments to make wealth and power for others. Yet the people on the
land have the mighty energies of nature in their blood; and if they are allowed to unite
freely, to work out unrestricted their destiny, nature will work through them the miracles of
wonder and beauty she brings to pass in other forms of life, in the beauty of forests, of
birds and flowers.
I have written this little book, which, I know, is incomplete and chaotic, and
unsatisfactory even as an expression of my own ideas, because at this moment the rural
life movement in Ireland, from which I hope so much, is being assailed on all sides and
misunderstood, the objects of its promoters perverted. I wished to show, however
inadequately, that it is a sincere attempt to solve some Irish and some human problems,
and not the move in a piece of mean political strategy which it has been held up to Ireland
to be.

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NOTE

The following is a summary of the societies organized by the Irish Agricultural

Organization Society as compiled from the last available statistics, those for the year
ending December 31st, 1910, the figures for 1911 not being yet procurable:

Type of Society - No. of Societies - Membership - Turn-over (L)

Dairy Societies - 312 - 44,792 - L1,999,313

Auxiliary Societies not separately registered - 79 - --- - ---
Agricultural Societies - 166 - 16,743 - 124, 720
Credit Societies - 237 - 19,190 - 55,855
Poultry Societies - 18 - 6,188 - 61,213
Home Industries Societies - 20 - 1,376 - 4,815
Miscellaneous (including Flax, Bacon-curing Societies and Bee-keepers) - 47 -
5,976 - 62,737
Federations - 2 - 247 - 280,906
(Total) - 881 - 94,512 - 2,589,559

The turnover of 924 societies in existence on December 31st,

1911, is estimated at L2,750,000.
From the beginning of the movement in 1889 to the close of last year the trade
turnover of the movement, in which is included the loans granted by the credit societies to
their members, is L25,734,581 computed from the reports of the I.A.O.S., which contain
particulars of the business done by the societies taken from their audited balance-sheets.
As there are in each year a certain number of societies from which figures are not
procurable, the total trade turnover of the movement is greater than is represented above.
Information with regard to the educational propaganda of the I.A.O.S. can be had on
application to the Secretary, Irish Agricultural Organization Society, The Plunkett House,
Dublin.

-----------------------

The Dublin Strike

by "AE" (George W. Russell)

("Irish Worker" Press, Liberty Hall, Dublin, Ireland)

I. A Plea for the Workers

- A Speech delivered in the Royal Albert Hall, London,

November 1, 1913, to an audience of 12,000 persons.
 I stand for the first time on a public platform in this country. The great generosity
of English to Irish workers has obliterated the memory of many an ancient tale of wrong.
I come from Dublin, where most extraordinary things have been happening. Humanity long
dumb there has found a voice, it has its prophet and its martyrs. We no longer know
people by the old signs and the old shams. People are to us either human or sub-human.
They are either on the side of those who are fighting for human conditions in labour or they
are with those who are trying to degrade it and thrust it into the abyss.
Ah ! but I forgot; there has sprung up a third party, who are super-human beings,
they have so little concern for the body at all, that they assert it is better for children to be
starved than to be moved from the Christian atmosphere of the Dublin slums. Dublin is the
most Christian city in these islands. Its tottering tenements are holy. The spiritual
atmosphere which pervades them is ample compensation for the diseases which are there
and the food which is not there. If any poor parents think otherwise, and would send their
children for a little from that earthly paradise, they will find the docks and railway stations
barred by these super-human beings and by the police, and they are pitched head-long out
of the station, set upon and beaten, and their children snatched from them. A Dublin
labourer has no rights in his own children. You see if these children were even for a little
out of the slums, they would get discontented with their poor homes, so a very holy man
has said. Once getting full meals, they might be so inconsiderate as to ask for them all
their lives. They might destroy the interesting experiments carried on in Dublin for
generations to find out how closely human beings can be packed together, on how little a
human being can live, and what is the minimum wage his employer need pay him. James
Larkin interrupted these interesting experiments towards the evolution of the underman and
he is in gaol.* You have no idea what the slums in Dublin are like. There are more than
20,000 families, each living in one room. Many of these dens are so horrible, so
unsanitary, so overrun with vermin, that doctors tell me that the only condition on which a
man can purchase sleep is that he is drugged with drink. The Psalmist says the Lord gives
sleep to his beloved, but in these Dublin dens men and women must pay the devil his price
for a little of that peace of God. It maddens one to think that man the immortal, man the
divine, should exist in such degradation, that his heirship of the ages should be the life of
a brute.

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* Released November 13.
-----------

I beseech you not to forsake these men who are out on strike. They may have been
to blame for many an action. The masters may perhaps justifiably complain of things done
and undone. But if the masters have rights by the light of reason and for the moment, the
men are right by the light of spirit and for eternity. This labour uprising in Ireland is the
despairing effort of humanity to raise itself out of a dismal swamp of disease and poverty.
James Larkin may have been an indiscreet leader. He may have committed blunders, but
I believe in the sight of heaven the crimes are all on the other side. If our Courts of Justice
were courts of humanity, the masters of Dublin would be in the dock charged with criminal
conspiracy, their crime that they tried to starve out one-third of the people in Dublin, to
break their hearts, and degrade their manhood, for the greatest crime against humanity is
its own degradation.
The men have always been willing to submit their case to arbitration, but the
masters refuse to meet them. They refused to consult with your trades union leaders.
They would not abide by the Askwith report. They refused to hear of prominent Irishmen
acting as arbitrators. They said scornfully of the Peace Committee that it was only
interfering. They say they are not fighting trades unionism, but they refuse point blank to
meet the Trades Council in Dublin. They want their own way absolutely. These Shylocks
of industry want their pound of flesh starved from off the bones of the workers. They think
their employees have no rights as human beings, no spirit whose dignity can be abased.
You have no idea what labour in Ireland, which fights for the bare means of human
support, is up against. The autocrats of industry can let loose upon them the wild beasts
that kill in the name of the State. They can let loose upon them a horde of wild fanatics
who will rend them in the name of God. The men had been deserted by those who were
their natural leaders. For ten weeks the miserable creatures who misrepresent them in
Parliament kept silent. When they were up for the first time in their lives against anything
real they scurried back like rats to their hole. These cacklers about self-government had
no word to say on the politics of their own city, but after ten weeks of silence they came out
with six lines of letter signed by all the six poltroons. They disclaimed in responsibility for
what is happening in the city and county they represent. It was no concern of theirs; but
they would agree to anything the Archbishop might say! Are they not heroic prodigies!
Dublin is looking on these wild alien eyes. It was thought they were democrats; we have
found out they were only democratic blathers.
We are entering from today on a long battle in Ireland. The masters have flung
down a challenge to the workers. The Irish aristocracy were equally scornful of the workers
in the land, and the landlords of land are going or have gone. The landlords of industry will
have disappeared from Ireland when the battle begun this year is ended. Democratic
control of industry will replace the autocracy which exists today. We are working for the
co-operative commonwealth to make it the Irish policy of the future, and I ask you to stand
by the men who are beginning the struggle. There is good human material there.
I have often despaired over Dublin, which John Mitchel called a city of genteel
dastards and bellowing slaves, but a man has arisen who has lifted the curtain which veiled
from us the real manhood in the city of Dublin. Nearly all the manhood is found among
obscure myriads who are paid from five to twenty-one shillings per week. The men who
will sacrifice anything for a principle get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth. I am a
literary man, a lover of ideas, but I have found few people in my life who would sacrifice
anything for a principle. Yet in Dublin, when the masters issued that humiliating document,
asking men on penalty of dismissal to swear never to join a trades union, thousands of
men who had no connection with the Irish Transport Workers - many among them
personally hostile to that organisation - refused to obey. They would not sign away their
freedom, their right to choose their own heroes and their own ideas. Most of these men
had no strike funds to fall back on. They had wives and children depending on them.
Quietly and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City. They stand
silently about the streets. God alone knows what is passing in the heart of these men.
Nobody in the Press in Dublin has said a word about it. Nobody has praised them, no one
has put a crown upon their brows. Yet these men are the true heroes of Ireland today, they
are the descendants of Oscar, Cuchulain, the heroes of our ancient stories. For all their
tattered garments, I recognise in these obscure men a majesty of spirit. It is in these
workers in the towns and in the men in the cabins in the country that the hope of Ireland
lies. The poor have always helped each other, and it is they who listen eagerly to the
preachers of a social order based on brotherhood and cooperation.
I am a literary man and not a manual worker - I am but a voice, while they are the
deed and the being, but I would be ashamed ever in my life again to speak of an ideal if
I did not stand by these men and say of them what I hold to be true. If
you back them up today they will be able to fight their own battles tomorrow, and perhaps
to give you an example. I beseech you not to forsake these men.

--------

II. An Open Letter to the Employers

By "AE."

SIRS, I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because,
like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you
and your class and its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those
who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in
poverty today is making our industrial civilisation stir like a quaking bog. You do not seem
to realise that your assumption that you are answerable to yourselves alone for your
actions in the industries you control is one that becomes less and less tolerable in a world
so crowded with necessitous life. Some of you have helped Irish farmers to upset a landed
aristocracy in this island, an aristocracy richer and more powerful in its sphere than you are
in yours, with its roots deep in history. They, too, as a class, though not all of them, were
scornful or neglectful of the workers in the industry by which they profited; and to many
who knew them in their pride of place and thought them all-powerful they are already
becoming a memory, the good disappearing together with the bad. If they had done their
duty by those from whose labour came their wealth, they might have continued
unquestioned in power and prestige for centuries to come. The relation of landlord and
tenant is not an ideal one, but any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused
into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.
Despotisms endure while they are benevolent, and aristocracies while "noblesse oblige"
is not a phrase to be referred to with a cynical smile. Even an oligarchy might be
permanent if the spirit of human kindness, which harmonises all things otherwise
incompatible, is present.
You do not seem to read history so as to learn its lessons. That you are an
uncultivated class was obvious from recent utterances of some of you upon art. That you
are incompetent men in the sphere in which you arrogate imperial powers is certain,
because for many years, long before the present uprising of labour, your enterprises have
been dwindling in the regard of investors, and this while you have carried them on in the
cheapest labour market in these islands, with a labour reserve always hungry and ready
to accept any pittance. You are bad citizens, for we rarely, if ever, hear of the wealthy
among you endowing your city with the munificent gifts which it is the pride of merchant
princes in other cities to offer, and Irishmen not of your city, who offer to supply the wants
left by your lack of generosity, are met with derision and abuse. Those who have
economic power have civic power also, yet you have not used the power that was yours
to right what was wrong in the evil administration of this city. You have allowed the poor
to be herded together so that one thinks of certain places in Dublin as of a pestilence.
There are twenty thousand rooms, in each of which live entire families, and sometimes
more, where no functions of the body can be concealed, and delicacy and modesty are
creatures that are stifled ere they are born. The obvious duty of you in regard to these
things you might have left undone, and it be imputed to ignorance or forgetfulness; but
your collective and conscious action as a class in the present labour dispute has revealed
you to the world in so malign an aspect that the mirror must be held up to you, so that you
may see yourself as every humane person sees you.
The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is I assure you,
not at all the one which onlookers hold of you. No doubt, you have rights on your side. No
doubt, some of you suffered without just cause. But nothing which has been done to you
cries aloud to Heaven for condemnation as your own actions. Let me show you how it
seems to those who have followed critically the dispute, trying to weigh in a balance the
rights and wrongs. You were within the rights society allows you when you locked out your
men and insisted on the fixing of some principle to adjust your future relations with labour
when the policy of labour made it impossible for some of you to carry on your enterprises.
Labour desired the fixing of some such principle as much as you did. But, having once
decided on such a step, knowing how many thousands of men, women and children, nearly
one-third ot the population of this city, would be affected, you should not have let one day
have passed without unremitting endeavours to find a solution of the problem.
What did you do? The representatives of labour unions in Great Britain met you,
and you made of them a preposterous, an impossible demand, and because they would
not accede to it you closed the Conference; you refused to meet them further; you
assumed that no other guarantees than those you asked were possible, and you
determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one-third of the population of this city,
to break the manhood of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives and the hunger
of their children. We read in the Dark Ages of the rack and thumbscrew. But these
iniquities were hidden and concealed from the knowledge of men in dungeons and torture-
chambers. Even in the Dark Ages humanity could not endure the sight of such suffering,
and it learnt of such misuse of power by slow degrees, through rumour, and when it was
certain it razed its Bastilles to their foundations. It remained for the twentieth century and
the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly upon
starving one hundred thousand people, and refusing to consider any solution except that
fixed by their pride. You, masters, asked men to do that which masters of labour in any
other city in these islands had not dared to do. You insolently demanded of those men
who were members of a trade union that they should resign from that union; and from
those who were not members you insisted on a vow that they would never join it.
Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the
modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity. If you had between you
collectively a portion of human soul as large as a threepenny bit, you would have sat night
and day with the representatives of labour, trying this or that solution of the trouble, mindful
of the women and children, who at least were innocent of wrong against you. But no! You
reminded labour you could always have your three square meals a day while it went
hungry. You went into conference again with the representatives of the State, because,
dull as you are, you know public opinion would not stand your holding out. You chose as
your spokesman the bitterest tongue that ever wagged in this island, and then, when an
award was made by men who have an experience in industrial matters a thousand times
transcending yours, who have settled disputes in industries so great that the sum of your
petty enterprises would not equal them, you withdraw again, and will not agree to accept
their solution, and fall back again on your devilish policy of starvation. Cry aloud to Heaven
for new souls! The souls you have got cast upon the screen of publicity appear like the
horrid and writhing creatures enlarged from the insect world, and revealed to us by the
cinematograph.
You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation by your victory.
The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding
and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant
being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It
is not they - it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order.
You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy in industry. There was autocracy in political
life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you
the control of industry. The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the
aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you.
Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from
humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned ere
it is too late.

Dublin, October 6th, 1913.

------------

III. An Appeal to Dublin Citizens

The following letter from "A.E." appeared in "The Times" of Nov. 13th, 1913, after
being denied publication by the Press of Dublin:

It may seem an audacity on the part of one whose views on the politics of this city
are obviously unpopular to attempt once more, through you, to influence public opinion.
But the most unpopular council is not necessarily more filled with unwisdom.
The masters of Dublin I have addressed in vain. I now ask the citizens of Dublin to
consider what effect the policy of the masters is going to have. What has been gained by
this resolute refusal of the federated employers to meet the only body with which
negotiations can be carried on? Have they proved their wisdom? Are we any nearer a
settlement? Are not the forces on the side of labour becoming more resolute and
exasperated week by week?
Nobody in Dublin seems to realise the gigantic power the masters have challenged.
As a disdainful attitude is manifested on the one side, the leaders of labour have settled
into a grim determination never to submit.
 The labour leaders, men who have it in their power to do what they threaten, declare
that they will rather hold up the industrial system of these islands than see the humiliation
of the men completed. Are the citizens content? Do they think it right they should sit silent
and have all this brought on them because the masters are too proud to meet the
representatives of labour in Dublin.
These people seem to read nothing, know nothing, or think nothing of what is
happening with respect of labour elsewhere in the world. They do not know that organized
labour has become one of the great powers, that its representatives are met by the
representatives of capital in industrial countries with the respect that the delegates of great
nations meet each other.
In Great Britain the Press, representing all parties, unite in condemning the policy
of the employers. What is the position of the men? They have declared always that they
wanted arbitration boards such as exist in hundreds in industrial centres where the
representatives of organized labour and the federated employers could meet, and to which
disputes over labour could be referred. Agreements entered into after frank and free
discussion as between equals the men will keep. They will not keep agreements into which
they consider they are forced. Labour has a sense of honour of its own which is as high
as the honour of the masters any day.
I will be met by the famous outburst about contracts and the nether world. That
sentence was never uttered in the sense in which it was reported. Mr. Larkin was
speaking, not with reference to the contracts between masters and men, but about the
masters' complaints that owing to strikes they could not carry out their contracts. It may
have been an unfeeling remark, but it was not the defiance of all honour between master
and employee that an abbreviated report made it.
Sir, if you will permit me to say something which may irritate the Irish Press, but
which, I think, is true and necessary to be said, if the Dublin journals had not been so
manifestly biased on the side of the employers, reporters would not have come to regard
their work, not as the true gathering of strike news, but the making up of a case against the
men. Nor would it have been so necessary for me to emphasize one side, as I did in my
Open Letter and the much abused speech at the AIbert Hall.
I am charged with being a revolutionary; I who for seven or eight years past have
week by week been expounding an orderly evolution of society. I am charged with being
against religion; I the sole poet of my generation, who has never written a single poem
which did not try to express a spiritual mood.
But I am not with those who wish to bring about in Ireland a peace of God without
any understanding, and I and all free spirits will fight with all our power against the fanatics
who would bludgeon us into their heaven, to bow to their savage conception of a deity.
The deity of the infuriated bigot, call him by what holy name they choose, is never anything
but the Old Adversary, who can put on the whole outward armoury of God.
I have known, worked with, and loved many noble men, true priests of Christ, and
they would not, I am sure, assert that the spirit which drives a mob to bludgeon and kick
parents before the eyes of their children is the Spirit which is present at the elevation of the
Host. What I say here of the hooligans of religion in Dublin I would say with equal sincerity
of the hooligans of religion in Belfast.
But I do not wish now to explain or defend myself, but to point out the danger of
allowing the present policy to continue. I tell the citizens of this city that, if the civil
authorities, the masters, and their allies in the Press had been trying deliberately and of
set purpose to make of Dublin another Barcelona, with the bomb of the Anarchist a
frequent blazing terror in the streets, if they wished to empty the churches and make of
Dublin another Paris, they could not devise a policy more certain to bring about the result.
The Irish are a gentle people, but history is thronged with evidence that in long-
exasperated men, suffering from real or fancied injustice, gentleness turns to ferocity. To
know that is true we can find ample proof in the story of our own race, whether we begin
with the mythical Cat Head, in the far-off uprising of the common people in Ireland, or come
nearer our own time to the Dynamitards.
I ask my fellow-townsmen to think whether it would not have been better for the
masters of Dublin to have met organised labour, and argued out the rights and wrongs than
to have had months of bitter and futile revilings, with such hot words out of a hot heart as
I myself have uttered? Would it not have been better for the masters to treat the men as
human beings who could be reasoned with than to issue ultimatums like despots to
subjects who must be coerced without discussion?
I ask whether it is most likely agreements will be kept and good work done if the
men are starved into submission, or if they are made after the most open interchange of
opinions?
The State has set up a tribunal which has given its judgment. Ought not public
opinion to insist on the recommendation of the Askwith Committee being tried? How can
the masters complain of the lawlessness of the workers when they themselves set an
example by ignoring the verdict of the only legal tribunal which has tried the case?
Dublin seems to be stumbling darkly and blindly to a tragedy, and the silence of
those who foresee and do not speak is a crime. It is time for the Chorus to cry out to warn
the antagonists in the drama.

----------

[Pamphlet Advertisement:]

Books by "AE" (George Russell)

Which can be had from "Irish Worker" Library, Liberty Hall, Dublin.

- Homeward, Songs by the Way.

- The Earth Breath.
- The Divine Vision.
- The Mask of Apollo.
- The Nuts of Knowledge.
- By Still Waters.
- Some Irish Essays.
- Deirdre.
- Co-operation and Nationality
- The Hero in Man.
- The Renewal of Youth.
- Collected Poems.
 "AE" George Russell, is in his own person a prophecy of what an Ireland free of
oppression could give to the world - a combination of the prophetic wisdom of the seer and
a thorough group of actual realities - each tempering and aiding the other. He has shown
that the dreamer and the worker may co-exist in the one individuality and in the one nation.
Ireland is proud of him, because in him she sees herself at her best.
------------

Information upon the prices, etc., of Mr. Russell's works can be had at "Irish Worker"
Office, Liberty Hall, Dublin.

-----------------------

Ireland, Agriculture and the War

- An Open Letter to Irish Farmers, by the Editor of the Irish Homestead

(I.A.O.S. Pamphlet No. 15.)

Reprinted from the Irish Homestead, The Sackville Press, 11 & 12 Findlater Place, Dublin.

[Circa 1915]

----------------

I feel impelled this week to speak to you personally and directly on the
circumstances brought about by the war which affect you as farmers, because from reports
which have reached me by many channels, public and private, I am certain that immense
numbers of you are unaware of, or do not realise, the new situation created, and that time
is hurrying on rapidly to a point where a light will beat strongly on you and all your doings
and the attention of the nation will be concentrated upon your class and the way in which
you discharge your functions in the national life.
You all know that half the world is at war. Many of you realise it painfully and
intimately through brothers, sons, kin or friends who are actual participants in the fighting.
In that sense you need no more reminder that the world is at war, but you do not yet realise
that you are more than onlookers, that you are called on to be participators in the struggle,
not as combatants, but as part of that other noble army whose business it is in many ways
to heal up the wounds of the combatants, to make good the wastage in society, and to
ameliorate the evil effects of the war. What those working under the Red Cross do for all
combatants alike, without distinction between friend or foe of their country, you are called
upon to do for society at large. Your occupation, always necessary in times of peace, in
time of war, in periods of great human necessity stands out prominently and assumes its
eternal position as the foremost, the most necessary, of all human occupations.
 The longer war continues the more does farming, normally hidden behind a hundred
other occupations, come to the front. Men think little in times of plenty of the labours which
bring them the food that enables them to live and work; but let there be shortage and a
wild apprehension springs up in society and people realise that it is upon you and your
labours that they depend altogether. You become the staff on which they lean. Every
other occupation almost might disappear, but yours never, without humanity disappearing,
and any failure of yours in time of necessity to equal the need of the world inflicts the most
terrible suffering on the world. Any neglect of duty in a time of necessity would be as
ignoble as the act of a Red Cross contingent who on the battlefield neglected to attend to
the wounded. The longer the war continues the more insistent will be the claims of the
world upon you who can farm, you over whose fields no armies have marched, to supply
the shortage of food brought about by the withdrawal of millions of your class in Europe to
take part in a redder reaping than any the world has hitherto known.
"Is, then, the necessity for food production that has arisen really so great," you may
ask, "that we must upset the normal routine of our industry? Are you, who say this one of
the many scare-mongers whose souls flare out in wild apprehensions and panic if anything
unusual happens in the world? Is there really fear of shortage of the food supply of the
world? Are people in the islands in which we live in danger of famine?" I can only say that
those whose business it is to search most deeply into the sources of supply are those who
are most deeply concerned about the future and the food supply of the civil population in
Europe. I can only retail to you some facts which I believe to be accurate, and you can
form your own judgment.
In theory, the European countries at war can put somewhat over forty million
persons into the field. The law of conscription, which prevails over Europe, allows few
able-bodied men to evade the obligation of leaving their normal occupation when called
upon by the government to defend their country. The gigantic extent of the war being
waged at present is forcing Germany, France, Austria, Russia, Servia and Belgium to call
more and more on the reserves of humanity in these countries up to the utmost limit, from
boys of eighteen up to elderly men, to decide the destinies of half the world. So great are
the problems to be decided. So great is the number of people gathered to force a solution
of the questions at issue. From these islands, from our own country, we are sending larger
numbers of men than have ever before in our history left our shores on a martial
enterprise. Even from Australia, Canada and New Zealand, from the uttermost ends of the
earth, men are journeying, drawn on by this maelstrom which is swallowing up our
humanity. A very large part, perhaps the largest part of these armies, have been called
from agricultural occupations; only the women and children and the very old are left in the
warring countries in Europe to till and harvest as best they can.
You know what production you might expect from your own farms if all the able-
bodied men from eighteen to forty-five were called away and the work was left to your
wives and children and the elders who remained. Besides this certain decline in production
in the future there has been actual great destruction of crops in the field. Armies stretching
over hundreds of miles, in their rushings to and fro across the continent, make havoc of the
land they fight over. Though the last harvest, tilled in times of peace and gathered in war,
was a full one, anticipation of future shortage is affecting prices. They have gone up
steadily, and will rise still more. It is towards the middle and latter end of this year that
those who have thought most over this question look with painful apprehension. They fear,
nay, they are certain of a shortage in the food supply of the world. They fear for the
workers in the towns. They anticipate food riots and a red conflagration breaking out of
men and women maddened by the hunger of their families and their own hunger.
It will be too late then to think of remedial measures. Whatever must be done to
prevent disaster or to relieve it of its worst terrors and make it bearable must be done now.
Food cannot be created in a day or a week the way coal can be dug out of the earth or oil
drawn from the wells. Meat and wheat, butter, fruit, vegetables, all must be prepared in
anticipation many months beforehand, or years beforehand in the case of cattle. At first
when the war broke out these economic results of the war were not clearly apprehended.
Military requirements necessarily came before everything else. It was vaguely supposed
that, so far as the food supply in these islands was concerned, it simply depended on
keeping the trade routes open; a few weeks would rid the seven seas of enemy cruisers;
and then we could draw upon the world for our granary as usual.
Well, we can draw upon the world and prices are rising. It is impossible in the
modern world, where countries are economically interdependent, to shelter people in one
nation from a commotion which rages fiercely among neighbouring nations. Prices rise in
harmony everywhere, and when there is competition over a continent and a shortage of
supply, no country, however open its ports, can expect to live as usual. The question of
food supply and food prices is further complicated by the uncertainty of receiving supplies.
We doubt the ability of enemy submarines to make effective a blockade of ports in Great
Britain and Ireland. But the sinking, with loss of life, of half-a-dozen ships out of one
thousand would have a great moral effect, which means that shipowners and sailors and
insurance companies would be seriously perturbed, and wages, freight and insurance
would be raised, with consequent further effect upon the cost of cargoes to customers. By
the law of affinities misfortunes for the public never come singly. The attack on the Suez
Canal is conceived for the same purpose. The sinking of one or two ships there also would
produce a moral effect on shipowners and sailors. Every one of these things tends to
increase prices of food stuffs and to make more imperative the necessity for the home
farmer to produce more food stuffs.
"It is all very well to talk about producing more food stuffs," you may answer me, "but
how are we to do it? We also suffer from scarcity or high prices in the supply of raw
materials of our industry. One-eighth of the horse supply of Ireland has become military
fuel. Agricultural labour has also gone to the front, largely through recruiting or the calling
up of reservists. The fertilisers we use are more expensive, so are seeds, so are feeding
stuffs. Even granting that we might procure the seeds, the fertilisers and the feeding stuffs,
how is an increase in tillage and food production to be combined with a shortage in labour
and in horses for agricultural work? You are asking of us impossibilities. We who tilled
before worked hard enough, and you now ask us to slave." I might answer that I know that
you are human and brotherly-hearted enough to other human beings actually to slave to
relieve them if the hungry or starving people were in your own parish, visible to your eyes,
and were actually dependent, to your own knowledge, for food on you and you alone.
Slave, of course, in that case you would.
I am trying to lend you glasses to make you see things at a distance as if they were
close. You may know that already the cost of living for workers in the towns has gone up
twenty-five percent. That is, the wage of the worker who has twenty shillings a week at the
present time can only procure food and coal and other necessaries to the amount which
fifteen shillings would have purchased before the war. It is practically equivalent to a drop
of five shillings a week in the income of such a household. That is, somehow, food or heat
or light must be restricted in the family to the extent of five shillings a week. The
threatened blockade if effective to any degree, actually or morally, will knock some more
shillings off such incomes weekly; and through it all will be going on the exhaustion of the
last harvest of the world and the prospect of meagre production in the warring countries
in Europe. If you exercise your imaginations, if you allow your hearts to brood a little on
all that implies, on all that is threatened, you will see what I mean when I say your industry
is coming into prominence. It is taking its rightful place as the most important of any, and
it is for you, farmers, to take the place your profession and duty make obligatory on you as
a great auxiliary to the Red Cross in the trouble of the world, they relieving the wounded
and you working with all your energy to feed the hungry, and not to have it on your
conscience later on that it was through lethargy of yours that some children may have died
of malnutrition in the cities of your country.
I have shown, I think, that I realise your difficulties with regard to labour, horses and
the raw materials of your industry. But I think, and my belief is confirmed by the opinion
of the greatest agricultural experts - men who are not only farming but who think about
farming, and who enquire beyond their own parish into the sources of supply and the
substitutes and expedients to be adopted - that you could still increase production and do
it with honour and profit to yourselves. I am loth in moments of great human necessity to
mention the word profit along with the word honour, but it must be mentioned because a
large number of you are poor and it would be impossible for many to go to the expense of
increasing production unless they were certain that they would receive a return which
would recoup their expenditure. So I say that there is no production of beef, mutton,
bacon, wheat, oats, potatoes, milk or butter possible in these islands which would not
amply in the coming year repay the cost of labour, implements and raw materials.
You have seen already the improved tendency of prices for your stock and produce,
and you may rest assured that while the war lasts that tendency will persist and for nigh
a year after the war until men can get back to their ancient labours on the land in Europe.
I do not advise you as to the kind of crop you should produce; the greatest practical expert
in agriculture could make no general statement which would apply to all farmers and all
kinds of land. The thing you have to do is to make your farms produce to the utmost you
know them capable of bearing. Nothing will produce less than grass. Grass has borne in
times of peace all it can do. The uttermost stock that grass land can bear has been
calculated, and every farmer knows to a single unit of stock what quantity his grazing lands
will support if untilled. By this method no increase is possible. It is only by tillage methods
that the acres which feed one cow will feed three, and it is tillage of one kind or another you
must adopt if you are to produce more as the times demand.
The agricultural instructors in your county can advise you in these matters, if you
venture upon crops you have not hitherto grown. Our own contributor, Mr. Wibberley, has
made famous a system which he calls continuous cropping, which will, he has proved,
enable the farmer to double, or even in some cases to treble, his milk production or the
number of fattening cattle his acres will support. Most of you are familiar with Mr.
Wibberley's methods. His articles and book on the subject are available, and he himself
and others trained by him can be consulted up to their limit of human energy. They do not
dread work but invite it. So that, so far as technical advice is concerned you are amply
equipped in Ireland.
"But," you will say, "knowledge will not enable us to produce if labour is lacking."
Well, that it is also possible in large measure to overcome by the use of efficient
implements and power machinery. "Are we to buy all these implements, cultivators, disc
harrows, potato diggers, reapers and binders, steam threshers, and what not," you will
ask? "That would be a huge expenditure." Yes, it would, if small farmers had to buy them
for individual use. It would not pay. But it pays the big tillage farmer to use such
implements, and it amply pays the small farmer to use them if he only pays for the use of
them a cost proportionate to the extent he cultivates. That use by the poorest farmers is
made possible and profitable by means of co-operative societies. Societies of small
farmers have been able without feeling the cost to erect and equip with expensive
machinery creameries to the number of many hundreds. Can any small farmer who is a
member of a creamery say he has really felt his share of the burden of putting it up? The
banks have aided you by cheap credit in erecting your creameries, and you have paid off,
or are paying off, the loans from the banks and are richer all the time by the increased
value of your milk. You can just as easily procure through co-operation all the implements
and machinery I have mentioned, hold it in common and let it to the members for fractional
sums, and you will find in every case that the use of the machines will enable you to do
much more work at less expense than when you were employing antiquated implements
and hand labour. As the manual labourer leaves the land, the machine comes in to supply
the power, and it will enable you to pay the labourers who remain a better wage and yet
produce more and more profitably from your land.
All this has been proved by farmers in many parts of Ireland who have adopted the
new methods. It is for you at least to inquire into these methods. It is, I think I have shown,
your obvious human duty in a great human crisis to play your part in it as men, doing your
work, the honourable toil demanded from you, as soldiers and sailors do their less happy
but no more necessary duty in the trenches or on the perilous sea, where sudden death
lurks below the shining waters. You have not any more than those who bear the Red
Cross to ask yourselves the rights or the wrongs of the war. It is your duty as it is theirs to
relieve human suffering or want no matter by what race it is felt. Your energy or your
lethargy in production will not help or hinder one side in this terrible conflict. It will help or
weaken both alike, for increased production or lessened production in the harvests of the
world affect all countries finally, prices tending to find their level as water does. So those
questions of the right or wrong of the war which have been raised in certain quarters in
Ireland do not affect the duty of the farmer as farmer however they may affect his conduct
as citizen or politician. In a very special sense the well-being of the Irish people will
depend, while the war lasts and for some time after, on the enterprise of the farmers. For
the industrial centres in the North are suffering, and will suffer still more as the meagre
supply of flax which has been doled out in half-time work comes to an end. From Belgium
no flax will come to eke out Irish supplies. What escaped destruction in the battles over
the flax-growing centres was taken to Germany. From Russia little came, and it is unlikely
indeed that much will come, so one great Irish industry on which many thousands of Irish
people depended for their means of living has been stricken and will be in a shaky
condition for a year, or perhaps for two years and maybe longer, and all the people
employed in supplying the necessities of the workers in the Irish textile industries will suffer
in their turn through the lessening amount of wages spent.
There has been a kind of fictitious prosperity in some towns brought about by orders
from the Admiralty or War Office, but the spending of money in that way is like the
spending of capital. While the capital lasts the spender may live up to his old standard or
beyond it even, but when the expenditure of capital comes to an end there is absolute
destitution. Unless some new form of wealth production comes in, or unless some old
industry is revitalised to replace the decrepit industries, the nation will be in a very bad way
indeed, and if nothing of the kind happens in Ireland, we will for many years during and
after the war have our town population in a state of extreme poverty. The war will have
destroyed all the hopes of increased prosperity based in late years on the returns of the
Irish trade in imports and exports.
The one Irish industry which can swell and expand and create wealth sufficient to
offset the inevitable waning for a time of our manufacturing industries is agriculture.
Increased production of wealth in the land leads to increased consumption and the
consequent employment of people in the towns to supply the demands of the country
producers. In spite of all the talk about capturing German trade, the real truth is, and it
cannot be controverted by any feather-headed economist, that when a continent, and that
the greatest industrial wealth creating centre in the world, is at war, and production ceases,
the power of consumption ceases. Such nations not being able to produce or sell, are not
able to buy except by using capital, and neutral countries unable to sell their produce are
also limited in their purchases. The markets of the world while the war continues and some
time after will be poor markets except for the farmer, whose products none can dispense
with, and the makers of armaments, who will make their fortunes while the war lasts.
I would like to think that the terms of peace will put it out of the power of the makers
of engines of destruction to make any more fortunes, but I am afraid that, not only during
the war, but long after, makers of munitions of war will be feverishly engaged in replacing
the wastage of battleships, torpedoes, guns, rifles, shells and other scientific inventions of
the devil. Ireland will have little or no share in this work, and the Irish farmer must be the
Atlas who will for a time support the Irish world. After the war is over, men will be returning
in hundreds of thousands to industrial life, and they will find the constriction of trade so
great that it will be years, maybe, before they are reabsorbed. If they leave their country
in despair they will never return. The one hope for helping Ireland over the darkening
abyss of the next years lies in the increased activity of farmers, if they will rise to the need
of the moment. They can increase production to the utmost they are capable of, and can
market all they can produce. The distributive trade at least should not suffer if farmers do
their duty, and the distributive houses can, if custom is good in the country, keep many
manufacturing firms employed. Ireland, if only the farmers worked energetically, could
bear the shock of the war better than its mighty industrial neighbour.
I have spoken of increased production by the farmers as a duty. The word duty
implies obligation. In a merely technical and legal sense Irish farmers have no obligations
connected with the land they occupy other than the payment of their rent or annuities. But
there is another sense in which their obligations to the nation are very real, and if these
obligations are not fulfilled, Irish farmers as a class will suffer just as surely as if they had
the reputation of not paying their legal debts and were refused credit on all sides. Irish
farmers appealed to the nation to support them in their efforts first to have security of
tenure and to have tribunals created which would fix the fair rental farmers should pay, and
after that they asked the nation to back up their great policy of land purchase. The nation
supported farmers in their struggle and secured legislative sanction for the changes they
desired. Public credit was pledged to enable the gigantic financial operations connected
with land purchase to be carried through. Why was all this done? It was not because
farmers were really the poorest class in Ireland. At all times, even today, even in Dublin,
the capital city of this country, many thousands of urban workers lived and live in a state
of wretchedness and poverty which could hardly have been paralleled and certainly not
exceeded even in the worst of the congested districts. The Great Father has His many
mansions in the heavens and the Devil has his on earth. In Dublin alone twenty thousand
families live in one room each, in a state of foetid squalor which you could hardly imagine.
The public aid given to your class was not given because you were the poorest class
in the community, but because public aid given to agriculture promised to repay the nation
by an increasing production of wealth which would finally affect the urban workers in
Ireland. Directly it seemed the State could find no way of making the poor in Irish towns
wealth producers, so they were passed over, but aid given to you promised a return to the
nation. Statesmen were told of the magic of proprietorship and that once you owned the
land you occupied you would immediately increase production, you would improve your
methods, till more, pay labour better and be better customers for the decaying urban
industries in Ireland. The moral obligation as a class you owe to the nation is to help it in
its need, as it helped you in your need.
It cannot be said that these prophecies of increased production have been fulfilled.
Tillage has steadily declined year by year since the Land Acts came into operation. Less
labour has been employed. You are not altogether responsible for this. The decline in
prices for foodstuffs which had been going on since the New World poured the produce
of its virgin soil into the markets of the Old World made it difficult indeed for farmers in the
Old World to compete. You were unorganised for business purposes, are still, three-
quarters of you, unorganised to buy, manufacture, and market in that large economic
manner which in modern times is required for successful business. Technically, you were
uneducated. Methods of farming almost primitive, together with a business policy which
split up your buying and selling into petty and fractional enterprises, could not hope to
make farming a success even on the most fertile land, even if it was burdened with neither
rent nor annuity. That has been changed since the beginning of the century. You have
in Ireland access to technical knowledge. You have a body of extremely able organisers
instructing you in the co-operative methods of doing your business which your rivals in
other lands had so successfully adopted.
I do not blame you for the decline of tillage in the past, for the stagnant statistics in
regard to production. But I do say that if from this year forward there is not a great
improvement, you will have absolutely no moral claim on the Irish nation for a use of
national credit to aid you to purchase the yet unpurchased land. You have today access
to technical knowledge. Co-operative societies for purchase, manufacture and marketing
are easily organised. You have markets crying out for all you can send and offering prices
for your produce such as you never dreamed of a year before. More than this, you have
a great national necessity for the products of your industry. It is not merely the normal
impetus towards wealth production which is expected of you but very definite action by you
to do your utmost as human beings to feed the hungry and to create plenty, so far as you
can, in a world where certainly, and for all you can do, there will not be enough to go round.
You do greatly desire that the policy of land purchase shall be completed. It will be
difficult with a national debt doubled or perhaps trebled after the war is ended to finance
future purchases on such easy terms as past purchases. Public credit will not be so good.
The more a man borrows the more has he to pay for the accommodation he receives. The
more national indebtedness grows, the more expensive does it become to borrow money
for national purposes. If you read the papers you will see that truth illustrated in the terms
of the war loan. Well, after the war is over, with a national debt doubled or trebled, with
industries crippled, and a myriad social problems created by the backwash of the tidal
wave of militarism to be solved, what do you think of your chances of getting the State to
increase its indebtedness on your account, if it appears that the national necessity found
you unmoved, that although the Press rang with the cries of people affected by the scarcity
of food supplies, you went on as before, producing neither more nor less, that you
accepted whatever services the nation could render to your class but did not stir in the
nation's need to render any service to it? You could make no claim, nor as a class would
you have any claim on the nation.
If the past policy was justified by its results, if you increased production, if you had
manfully served the nation, then, I think, a good case could be made out for continuance
of the policy of land purchase. The industry which stood the strain of war best, which
increased its output, and had been a strong factor in the powers of endurance of the
nation, that industry would be certain of preferential treatment by the nation. You will be
judged as a class, not as individuals. The statistical columns in Irish Blue Books will be
merciless witnesses about you as a class, and therefore it is necessary that you should
realise, as a class, that the right method now of fighting for the completion of land purchase
is to make your land produce more food. Political methods will not help you in the future
one jot in this matter if your industry has taken out of the mouths of your advocates the
great argument that ownership led to increased agricultural production and would benefit
the nation. If that argument fails your advocates, if you request aid and confess no
obligations, the nation will turn from you and devote itself to the amelioration of the
conditions of the long neglected workers in Irish towns. I would regret with a personal
passion that your class should cease to be predominant in our national life. I believe that
country is happiest and has the most moral and stable life where agriculture predominates
among the industries. A fine life is possible for humanity working on the land, bronzed by
the sun and wind, living close to nature, affected by its arcane influences, which bring
about essential depth and a noble simplicity of character.
To create a rural civilisation is a great ideal. There is another life, fine in its way,
where humanity, collected in the cities, has exalted urban civilisation by the arts and
sciences until the cities are beautiful and healthy and the life is quickened by intellect. The
first civilisation it is in our power to create in a generation at its best. The second for us
would indeed be a long labour, and if we turned from the task of building up a rural
civilisation to making the urban life predominant, Ireland would wait many a long year
combating the alcoholic intelligence which rules in its towns and which has made them so
generally corrupt in their administration and so mean, dirty and disorderly in their character.
These things will have to be fought, and urban life will demand its just share of national
interest, but we will move a hundred times more rapidly to national prosperity and
happiness if we try to make our civilisation predominantly rural. There will be a better race
in Ireland, stronger men and comelier women, and we will be less subject to shock by the
tidal ebb and flow of the industrial world, with its slumps in trade, its feverish and transient
prosperities, and its dependence upon factors and forces outside Ireland and beyond
possibility of control by us.
I have fought your battles and worked for many years to bring about a rural
civilisation in Ireland, and I think I should be accounted as a friend, and as a friend I give
you this frank and friendly advice about your duty now and have tried to show how your
future status in Ireland depends on your actions in this year of crisis and peril. What I
have said may irritate some of you, but that I cannot help. I would never have been worth
my salt as champion of your co-operative movement if I was not as ready to tell you
unpleasant truths as I was to tell them to your enemies. I have no desire to irritate you, but
only to help you and your cause by telling you what many people are murmuring today, and
what will be an outcry against you tomorrow, if you do not heed the warning.
I subscribe myself your sincere friend,

The Editor

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Thoughts for a Convention

- Memorandum on the State of Ireland By A.E.

Maunsel and Company Ltd.

Dublin and London
1917

Second Edition

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1. There are moments in history when by the urgency of circumstance everyone in

a country is drawn from normal pursuits to consider the affairs of the nation. The merchant
is turned from his warehouse, the bookman from his books, the farmer from his fields,
because they realize that the very foundations of the Society, under whose shelter they
were able to carry on their avocation, are being shaken, and they can no longer be
voiceless, or leave it to deputies, unadvised by them, to arrange national destinies. We
are all accustomed to endure the annoyances and irritations caused by legislation which
is not agreeable to us, and solace ourselves by remembering that the things which really
matter are not affected. But when the destiny of a nation, the principles by which life is to
be guided are at stake, all are on a level, are equally affected and are bound to give
expression to their opinions.
 Ireland is in one of these moments of history. Circumstances with which we are all
familiar and the fever in which the world exists have infected it, and it is like molten metal
the skilled political artificer might pour into a desirable mould. But if it is not handled rightly,
if any factor is ignored, there may be an explosion which would bring on us a fate as tragic
as anything in our past history. Irishmen can no longer afford to remain aloof from each
other, or to address each other distantly and defiantly from press or platform, but must
strive to understand each other truly, and to give due weight to each others' opinions, and,
if possible arrive at a compromise, a balancing of their diversities, which may save our
country from anarchy and chaos for generations to come.
2. An agreement about Irish Government must be an agreement, not between two
but three Irish parties first of all, and afterwards with Great Britain. The Premier of a
coalition Cabinet has declared that there is no measure of self government which Great
Britain would not assent to being set up in Ireland, if Irishmen themselves could but come
to an agreement. Before such a compromise between Irish parties is possible there must
be a clear understanding of the ideals of these parties, as they are understood by
themselves, and not as they are presented in party controversy by special pleaders whose
object too often is to pervert or discredit the principles and actions of opponents, a thing
which is easy to do because all parties, even the noblest, have followers who do them
disservice by ignorant advocacy or excited action. If we are to unite Ireland we can only
do so by recognising what truly are the principles each party stands for, and will not
forsake, and for which if necessary they will risk life. True understanding is to see ideals
as they are held by men between themselves and Heaven; and in this mood I will try, first
of all, to understand the position of Unionists, Sinn Feiners and Constitutional Nationalists
as they have been explained to me by the best minds among them, those who have
induced others of their countrymen to accept those ideals. When this is done we will see
if compromise, a balancing of diversities be not possible in an Irish State where all that is
essential in these varied ideals may be harmonized and retained.
3. I will take first of all the position of Unionists. They are, many of them, the
descendants of settlers who by their entrance into Ireland broke up the Gaelic uniformity
and introduced the speech, the thoughts, characteristic of another race. While they have
grown to love their country as much as any of Gaelic origin, and their peculiarities have
been modified by centuries of life in Ireland and by intermarriage, so that they are much
more akin to their fellow-countrymen in mind and manner than they are to any other
people, they still retain habits, beliefs and traditions from which they will not part. They
form a class economically powerful. They have openness and energy of character, great
organizing power and a mastery over materials, all qualities invaluable in an Irish State.
In North-East Ulster where they are most homogeneous they conduct the affairs of
their cities with great efficiency, carrying on an international trade not only with Great
Britain but with the rest of the world. They have made these industries famous. They
believe that their prosperity is in large measure due to their acceptance of the Union, that
it would be lessened if they threw in their lot with the other Ireland and accepted its ideals,
that business which now goes to their shipyards and factories would cease if they were
absorbed in a self-governing Ireland whose spokesmen had an unfortunate habit of
nagging their neighbours and of conveying the impression that they are inspired by race
hatred. They believe that an Irish legislature would be controlled by a majority,
representatives mainly of small farmers, men who had no knowledge of affairs, or of the
peculiar needs of Ulster industry, or the intricacy of the problems involved in carrying on
an international trade; that the religious ideas of the majority would be so favoured in
education and government that the favouritism would amount to religious oppression.
They are also convinced that no small country in the present state of the world can
really be independent, that such only exist by sufferance of their mighty neighbours, and
must be subservient in trade policy and military policy to retain even a nominal freedom;
and that an independent Ireland would by its position be a focus for the intrigues of powers
hostile to Great Britain, and if it achieved independence Great Britain in self protection
would be forced to conquer it again. They consider that security for industry and freedom
for the individual can best be preserved in Ireland by the maintenance of the Union, and
that the world spirit is with the great empires.
4. The second political group may be described as the spiritual inheritors of the
more ancient race in Ireland. They regard the preservation of their nationality as a sacred
charge, themselves as a conquered people owing no allegiance to the dominant race.
They cannot be called traitors to it because neither they nor their predecessors have ever
admitted the right of another people to govern them against their will. They are inspired
by an ancient history, a literature stretching beyond the Christian era, a national culture and
distinct national ideals which they desire to manifest in a civilization which shall not be an
echo or imitation of any other. While they do not depreciate the worth of English culture
or its political system they are as angry at its being imposed on them as a young man with
a passion for art would be if his guardian insisted on his adopting another profession and
denied him any chance of manifesting his own genius.
Few hatreds equal those caused by the denial or obstruction of national aptitudes.
Many of those who fought in the last Irish insurrection were fighters not merely for a
political change but were rather desperate and despairing champions of a culture which
they held was being stifled from infancy in Irish children in the schools of the nation. They
believe that the national genius cannot manifest itself in a civilization and is not allowed to
manifest itself while the Union persists. They wish Ireland to be as much itself as Japan,
and as free to make its own choice of political principles, its culture and social order, and
to develop its industries unfettered by the trade policy of their neighbours.
Their mood is unconquerable, and while often overcome it has emerged again and
again in Irish history, and it has perhaps more adherents today than at any period since the
Act of Union, and this has been helped on by the incarnation of the Gaelic spirit in modern
Anglo-Irish literature, and a host of brilliant poets, dramatists and prose writers who have
won international recognition, and have increased the dignity of spirit and the self-respect
of the followers of this tradition. They assert that the Union kills the soul of the people;
that empires do not permit the intensive cultivation of human life: that they destroy the
richness and variety of existence by the extinction of peculiar and unique gifts, and the
substitution therefor of a culture which has its value mainly for the people who created it,
but is as alien to our race as the mood of the scientist is to the artist or poet.
5. The third group occupies a middle position between those who desire the
perfecting of the Union and those whose claim is for complete independence; and
because they occupy a middle position, and have taken coloring from the extremes
between which they exist they have been exposed to the charge of insincerity, which is
unjust so far as the best minds among them are concerned. They have aimed at a middle
course, not going far enough on one side or another to secure the confidence of the
extremists. They have sought to maintain the connexion with the empire, and at the same
time to acquire an Irish control over administration and legislation. They have been more
practical than ideal, and to their credit must be placed the organizing of the movements
which secured most of the reforms in Ireland since the Union, such as religious equality,
the acts securing to farmers fair rents and fixity of tenure, the wise and salutary measures
making possible the transfer of land from landlord to tenant, facilities for education at
popular universities, the labourers' acts and many others.
They are a practical party taking what they could get, and because they could show
ostensible results they have had a greater following in Ireland than any other party. This
is natural because the average man in all countries is a realist. But this reliance on
material results to secure support meant that they must always show results, or the minds
of their countrymen veered to those ultimates and fundamentals which await settlement
here as they do in all civilizations. As in the race with Atalanta the golden apples had to
be thrown in order to win the race. The intellect of Ireland is now fixed on fundamentals,
and the compromise this middle party is able to offer does not make provision for the ideals
of either of the extremists, and indeed meets little favour anywhere in a country excited by
recent events in world history, where revolutionary changes are expected and a settlement
far more in accord with fundamental principles.
6. It is possible that many of the rank and file of these parties will not at first agree
with the portraits painted of their opponents, and that is because the special pleaders of
the press, who in Ireland are, as a rule, allowed little freedom to state private convictions,
have come to regard themselves as barristers paid to conduct a case, and have acquired
the habit of isolating particular events, the hasty speech or violent action of individuals in
localities, and of exhibiting these as indicating the whole character of the party attacked.
They misrepresent Irishmen to each other. The Ulster advocates of the Union, for
example, are accustomed to hear from their advisers that the favourite employment of Irish
farmers in the three southern provinces is cattle driving, if not worse. They are told that
Protestants in these provinces live in fear of their lives, whereas anybody who has
knowledge of the true conditions know that, so far from being riotous and unbusinesslike,
the farmers in these provinces have developed a network of rural associations, dairies,
bacon factories, agricultural and poultry societies, etc., doing their business efficiently,
applying the teachings of science in their factories, competing in quality of output with the
very best of the same class of society in Ulster and obtaining as good prices in the same
market. As a matter of fact this method of organization now largely adopted by Ulster
farmers was initiated in the South.
With regard to the charge of intolerance I do not believe it. Here, as in all other
countries, there are unfortunate souls obsessed by dark powers, whose human malignity
takes the form of religious hatreds, but I believe, and the thousands of Irish Protestants in
the Southern Counties will affirm it as true, that they have nothing to complain of in this
respect. I am sure that in this matter of religious tolerance these provinces can stand
favourable comparison with any country in the world where there are varieties of religions,
even with Great Britain.
I would plead with my Ulster compatriots not to gaze too long or too credulously into
that distorting mirror held up to them, nor be tempted to take individual action as
representative of the mass. How would they like to have the depth or quality of spiritual
life in their great city represented by the scrawlings and revilings about the head of the
Catholic Church to be found occasionally on the blank walls of Belfast. If the same method
of distortion by selection of facts was carried out there is not a single city or nation which
could not be made to appear baser than Sodom or Gomorrah and as deserving of their
fate.
7. The Ulster character is better appreciated by Southern Ireland, and there is little
reason to vindicate it against any charges except the slander that Ulster Unionists do not
regard themselves as Irishmen, and that they have no love for their own country. Their
position is that they are Unionists, not merely because it is for the good of Great Britain,
but because they hold it to be for the good of Ireland, and it is the Irish argument weighs
with them, and if they were convinced it would be better for Ireland to be self-governed they
would throw in their lot with the rest of Ireland, which would accept them gladly and greet
them as a prodigal son who had returned, having made, unlike most prodigal sons, a
fortune, and well able to be the wisest adviser in family affairs.
It is necessary to preface what I have to say by way of argument or remonstrance
to Irish parties by words making it clear that I write without prejudice against any party, and
that I do not in the least underestimate their good qualities or the weight to be attached to
their opinions and ideals. It is the traditional Irish way, which we have too often forgotten,
to notice the good in the opponent before battling with what is evil. So Maeve, the ancient
Queen of Connacht, looking over the walls of her city of Cruachan at the Ulster foemen,
said of them, "Noble and regal is their appearance," and her own followers said, "Noble
and regal are those of whom you speak." When we lost the old Irish culture we lost the
tradition of courtesy to each other which lessens the difficulties of life and makes it possible
to conduct controversy without creating bitter memories.
8. I desire first to argue with Irish Unionists whether it is accurate to say of them,
as it would appear to be from their spokesmen, that the principle of nationality cannot be
recognized by them or allowed to take root in the commonwealth of dominions which form
the Empire. Must one culture only exist? Must all citizens have their minds poured into the
same mould, and varieties of gifts and cultural traditions be extinguished? What would
India with its myriad races say to that theory? What would Canada enclosing in its
dominion and cherishing a French Canadian nation say? Unionists have by every means
in their power discouraged the study of the national literature of Ireland though it is one of
the most ancient in Europe, though the scholars of France and Germany have founded
journals for its study, and its beauty is being recognized by all who have read it. It contains
the race memory of Ireland, its imaginations and thoughts for two thousand years. Must
that be obliterated? Must national character be sterilised of all taint of its peculiar beauty?
Must Ireland have no character of its own but be servilely imitative of its neighbour in all
things and be nothing of itself?
It is objected that the study of Irish history, Irish literature and the national culture
generates hostility to the Empire. Is that a true psychological analysis? Is it not true in all
human happenings that if people are denied what is right and natural they will instantly
assume an attitude of hostility to the power which denies? The hostility is not inherent in
the subject but is evoked by the denial. I put it to my Unionist compatriots that the ideal
is to aim at a diversity of culture, and the greatest freedom, richness and variety of thought.
The more this richness and variety prevail in a nation the less likelihood is there of the
tyranny of one culture over the rest. We should aim in Ireland at that freedom of the
ancient Athenians, who, as Pericles said, listened gladly to the opinions of others and did
not turn sour faces on those who disagreed with them. A culture which is allowed essential
freedom to develop will soon perish if it does not in itself contain the elements of human
worth which make for immortality. The world has to its sorrow many instances of freak
religions which were persecuted and so by natural opposition were perpetuated and
hardened in belief. We should allow the greatest freedom in respect of cultural
developments in Ireland so that the best may triumph by reason of superior beauty and not
because the police are relied upon to maintain one culture in a dominant position.
9. I have also an argument to address to the extremists whose claim, uttered lately
with more openness and vehemence, is for the complete independence of the whole of
Ireland, who cry out against partition, who will not have a square mile of Irish soil subject
to foreign rule. That implies they desire the inclusion of Ulster and the inhabitants of Ulster
in their Irish State. I tell them frankly that if they expect Ulster to throw its lot in with a self-
governing Ireland they must remain within the commonwealth of dominions which
constitute the Empire, be prepared loyally, once Ireland has complete control over its
internal affairs, to accept the status of a dominion and the responsibilities of that wider
union. If they will not accept that status as the Boers did, they will never draw that
important and powerful Irish party into an Irish State except by force, and do they think
there is any possibility of that?
It is extremely doubtful whether if the world stood aloof, and allowed Irishmen to
fight out their own quarrels among themselves, that the fighters for complete independence
could conquer a community so numerous, so determined, so wealthy, so much more
capable of providing for themselves the plentiful munitions by which alone one army can
hope to conquer another. In South Africa men who had fiercer traditional hostilities than
Irishmen of different parties here have had, who belonged to different races, who had a few
years before been engaged in a racial war, were great enough to rise above these past
antagonisms, to make an agreement and abide faithfully by it. Is the same magnanimity
not possible in Ireland? I say to my countrymen who cry out for the complete separation
of Ireland from the Empire that they will not in this generation bring with them the most
powerful and wealthy, if not the most numerous, party in their country.
Complete control of Irish affairs is a possibility, and I suggest to the extremists that
the status of a self-governing dominion inside a federation of dominions is a proposal
which, if other safeguards for minority interests are incorporated, would attract Unionist
attention. But if these men who depend so much in their economic enterprises upon a
friendly relation with their largest customers are to be allured into a self-governing Ireland
there must be acceptance of the Empire as an essential condition. The Boers found it not
impossible to accept this status for the sake of a United South Africa. Are our Irish Boers
not prepared to make a compromise and abide by it loyally for the sake of a united Ireland?
10. A remonstrance must also be addressed to the middle party in that it has made
no real effort to understand and conciliate the feelings of Irish Unionists. They have indeed
made promises, no doubt sincerely, but they have undone the effect of all they said by
encouraging of recent years the growth of sectarian organizations with political aims and
have relied on these as on a party machine. It may be said that in Ulster a similar
organization, sectarian with political objects, has long existed, and that this justified a
counter organization. Both in my opinion are unjustifiable and evil, but the backing of such
an organization was specially foolish in the case of the majority, whose main object ought
to be to allure the minority into the same political fold. The baser elements in society, the
intriguers, the job seekers, and all who would acquire by influence what they cannot attain
by merit, flock into such bodies, and create a sinister impression as to their objects and
deliberations. If we are to have national concord among Irishmen religion must be left to
the Churches whose duty it is to promote it, and be dissevered from party politics, and it
should be regarded as contrary to national idealism to organize men of one religion into
secret societies with political or economic aims. So shall be left to Caesar the realm which
is Caesar's, and it shall not appear part of the politics of eternity that Michael's sister's son
obtains a particular post beginning at thirty shillings a week. I am not certain that it should
not be an essential condition of any Irish settlement that all such sectarian organizations
should be disbanded in so far as their objects are political, and remain solely as friendly
societies. It is useless assuring a minority already suspicious, of the tolerance it may
expect from the majority, if the party machine of the majority is sectarian and semi-secret,
if no one of the religion of the minority can join it. I believe in spite of the recent growth of
sectarian societies that it has affected but little the general tolerant spirit in Ireland, and
where evils have appeared they have speedily resulted in the break up of the organization
in the locality. Irishmen individually as a rule are much nobler in spirit than the political
organizations they belong to.
11. It is necessary to speak with the utmost frankness and not to slur over any real
difficulty in the way of a settlement. Irish parties must rise above themselves if they are to
bring about an Irish unity. They appear on the surface unreconcilable, but that, in my
opinion, is because the spokesmen of parties are under the illusion that they should never
indicate in public that they might possibly abate one jot of the claims of their party. A crowd
or organization is often more extreme than its individual members. I have spoken to
Unionists and Sinn Feiners and find them as reasonable in private as they are
unreasonable in public. I am convinced that an immense relief would be felt by all Irishmen
if a real settlement of the Irish question could be arrived at, a compromise which would
reconcile them to living under one government, and would at the same time enable us to
live at peace with our neighbours. The suggestions which follow were the result of
discussions between a group of Unionists, Nationalists and Sinn Feiners, and as they
found it possible to agree upon a compromise it is hoped that the policy which harmonized
their diversities may help to bring about a similar result in Ireland.
12. I may now turn to consider the Anglo-Irish problem and to make specific
suggestions for its solution and the character of the government to be established in
Ireland. The factors are triple. There is first the desire many centuries old of Irish
nationalists for self-government and the political unity of the people: secondly, there is the
problem of the Unionists who require that the self-governing Ireland they enter shall be
friendly to the imperial connection, and that their religious and economic interests shall be
safeguarded by real and not merely by verbal guarantees: and, thirdly, there is the position
of Great Britain which requires, reasonably enough, that any self-governing dominion set
up alongside it shall be friendly to the empire. In this matter Great Britain has priority of
claim to consideration, for it has first proposed a solution, the Home Rule Act which is on
the Statute Book, though later variants of that have been outlined because of the attitude
of Unionists in North-East Ulster, variants which suggest the partition of Ireland, the
elimination of six counties from the area controlled by the Irish government. This Act, or
the variants of it offered to Ireland, is the British contribution to the settlement of the Anglo-
Irish problem.
 13. If it is believed that this scheme, or any diminutive of it, will settle the Anglo-Irish
problem, British statesmen and people who trust them are only preparing for themselves
bitter disappointment. I believe that nothing less than complete self-government has ever
been the object of Irish Nationalism. However ready certain sections have been to accept
instalments, no Irish political leader ever had authority to pledge his countrymen to accept
a half measure as a final settlement of the Irish claim. The Home Rule Act, if put into
operation tomorrow, even if Ulster were cajoled or coerced into accepting it, would not be
regarded by Irish Nationalists as a final settlement, no matter what may be said at
Westminster. Nowhere in Ireland has it been accepted as final. Received without
enthusiasm at first, every year which has passed since the Bill was introduced has seen
the system of self-government formulated there subjected to more acute and hostile
criticism; and I believe it would be perfectly accurate to say that its passing tomorrow
would only be the preliminary for another agitation, made fiercer by the unrest of the world,
where revolutions and the upsetting of dynasties are in the air, and where the claims of
nationalities no more ancient than the Irish, like the Poles, the Finns, and the Arabs, to
political freedom are admitted by the spokesmen of the great powers, Great Britain
included, or are already conceded.
If any partition of Ireland is contemplated this will intensify the bitterness now
existing. I believe it is to the interest of Great Britain to settle the Anglo-Irish dispute. It has
been countered in many of its policies in America and the Colonies by the vengeful feelings
of Irish exiles. There may yet come a time when the refusal of the Irish mouse to gnaw at
a net spread about the lion may bring about the downfall of the empire. It cannot be to the
interest of Great Britain to have on its flank some millions of people who, whenever Great
Britain is engaged in a war which threatens its existence, feel a thrill running through them,
as prisoners do hearing the guns sounding closer of an army which comes, as they think,
to liberate them. Nations denied essential freedom ever feel like that when the power
which dominates them is itself in peril. Who can doubt but for the creation of Dominion
Government in South Africa that the present war would have found the Boers thirsty for
revenge, and the Home Governmcnt incapable of dealing with a distant people who taxed
its resources but a few years previous.
I have no doubt that if Ireland was granted the essential freedom and wholeness in
its political life it desires, its mood also would be turned. I have no feelings of race hatred,
no exultation in thought of the downfall of any race; but as a close observer of the mood
of millions in Ireland, I feel certain that if their claim is not met they will brood and scheme
and wait to strike a blow; though the dream may be handed on from them to their children
and their children's children, yet they will hope, sometime, to give the last vengeful thrust
of enmity at the stricken heart of the empire.
14. Any measure which is not a settlement, which leaves Ireland still actively
discontented is a waste of effort, and the sooner English statesmen realize the futility of
half measures the better. A man who claims a debt he believes is due to him, who is
offered half of it in payment, is not going to be conciliated or be one iota more friendly, if
he knows that the other is able to pay the full amount and it could be yielded without
detriment to the donor. Ireland will never be content with a system of self-government
which lessens its representation in the Imperial Parliament, and still retains for that
Parliament control over all-important matters like taxation and trade policy. Whoever
controls these controls the character of an Irish civilization, and the demand of Ireland is
not merely for administrative powers, but the power to fashion its own national policy, and
to build up a civilization of its own with an economic character in keeping by self-devised
and self-checked efforts. To misunderstand this is to suppose there is no such thing as
national idealism, and that a people will accept substitutes for the principle of nationality,
whereas the past history of the world and present circumstance in Europe is evidence that
nothing is more unconquerable and immortal than national feeling, and that it emerges
from centuries of alien government, and is ready at any time to flare out in insurrection.
At no period in Irish history was that sentiment more self-conscious than it is today.
15. Nationalist Ireland requires that the Home Rule Act should be radically changed
to give Ireland unfettered control over taxation, customs, excise and trade policy. These
powers are at present denied, and if the Act were in operation, Irish people instead of trying
to make the best of it, would begin at once to use whatever powers they had as a lever to
gain the desired control, and this would lead to fresh antagonism and a prolonged struggle
between the two countries, and in this last effort Irish Nationalists would have the support
of that wealthy class now Unionist in the three southern provinces, and also in Ulster if it
were included, for they would then desire as much as Nationalists that, while they live in
a self-governing Ireland, the powers of the Irish Government should be such as would
enable it to build up Irish industries by an Irish trade policy, and to impose taxation in a way
to suit Irish conditions.
As the object of British consent to Irish self-government is to dispose of Irish
antagonism nothing is to be gained by passing measures which will not dispose of it. The
practically unanimous claim of Nationalists as exhibited in the press in Ireland is for the
status and powers of economic control possessed by the self-governing dominions. By this
alone will the causes of friction between the two nations be removed, and a real solidarity
of interest based on a federal union for joint defence of the freedom and well-being of the
federated communities be possible and I have no doubt it would take place.
I do not believe that hatreds remain for long among people when the causes which
created them are removed. We have seen in Europe and in the dominions the continual
reversals of feeling which have taken place when a sore has been removed. Antagonisms
are replaced by alliances. It is mercifully true of human nature that it prefers to exercise
goodwill to hatred when it can, and the common sense of the best in Ireland would operate
once there was no longer interference in our internal affairs, to allay and keep in order
these turbulent elements which exist in every country, but which only become a danger to
society when real grievances based on the violation of true principles of government are
present.
16. The Union has failed absolutely to conciliate Ireland. Every generation there
have been rebellions and shootings and agitations of a vehement and exhausting character
carried continually to the point of lawlessness before Irish grievances could be redressed.
A form of government which requires a succession of rebellions to secure reforms
afterwards admitted to be reasonable cannot be a good form of government. These
agitations have inflicted grave material and moral injury on Ireland. The instability of the
political system has prejudiced natural economic development. Capital will not be invested
in industries where no one is certain about the future. And because the will of the people
was so passionately set on political freedom an atmosphere of suspicion gathered around
public movements which in other countries would have been allowed to carry on their
beneficent work unhindered by any party. Here they were continually being forced to
declare themselves either for or against self-government.
The long attack on the movement for the organization of Irish agriculture was an
instance. Men are elected on public bodies not because they are efficient administrators,
but because they can be trusted to pass resolutions favouring one party or another. This
has led to corruption. Every conceivable rascality in Ireland has hid itself behind the great
names of nation or empire. The least and the most harmless actions of men engaged in
philanthropic or educational work or social reform are scrutinized and criticized so as to
obstruct good work. If a phrase even suggests the possibility of a political partiality, or
tendency to anything which might be construed by the most suspicious scrutineer to
indicate a remote desire to use the work done as an argument either for or against self-
government, the man or movement is never allowed to forget it. Public service becomes
intolerable and often impossible under such conditions, and while the struggle continues
this also will continue to the moral detriment of the people.
There are only two forms of government possible. A people may either be governed
by force or may govern themselves. The dual government of Ireland by two houses of
Parliament, one in Dublin and one in London, contemplated in the Home Rule Act would
be impossible and irritating. Whatever may be said for two bodies each with their spheres
of influence clearly defined, there is nothing to be said for two legislatures with concurrent
powers of legislation and taxation, and with members from Ireland retained at Westminster
to provide some kind of democratic excuse for the exercise of powers of Irish legislation
and taxation by the Parliament at Westminster. The Irish demand is that Great Britain shall
throw upon our shoulders the full weight of responsibility for the management of our own
affairs, so that we can only blame ourselves and our political guides and not Great Britain
if we err in our policies.
17. I have stated what I believe to be sound reasons for the recognition of the
justice of the Irish demand by Great Britain and I now turn to Ulster, and ask it whether the
unstable condition of things in Ireland does not aflfect it even more than Great Britain. If
it persists in its present attitude, if it remains out of a self-governing Ireland, it will not
thereby exempt itself from political, social and economic trouble. Ireland will regard the six
Ulster counties as the French have regarded Alsace-Lorraine, whose hopes of reconquest
turned Europe into an armed camp, with the endless suspicions, secret treaties, military
and naval developments, the expense of maintaining huge armies, and finally the inevitable
war. So sure as Ulster remains out, so surely will it become a focus for nationalist designs.
I say nothing of the injury to the great wholesale business carried on from its capital city
throughout the rest of Ireland where the inevitable and logical answer of merchants in the
rest of Ireland to requests for orders will be: "You would die rather than live in the same
political house with us. We will die rather than trade with you." There will be lamentably
and inevitably a fiercer tone between North and South. Everything which happens in one
quarter will be distorted in the other. Each will lie about the other. The materials will exist
more than before for civil commotion, and this will be aided by the powerful minority of
Nationalists in the excluded counties working in conjunction with their allies across the
border. Nothing was ever gained in life by hatred; nothing good ever came of it or could
come of it; and the first and most important of all the commandments of the spirit that
there should be brotherhood between men will be deliberately broken to the ruin of the
spiritual life of Ireland.
 18. So far from Irish Nationalists wishing to oppress Ulster, I believe that there is
hardly any demand which could be made, even involving democratic injustice to
themselves, which would not willingly be granted if their Ulster compatriots would fling their
lot in with the rest of Ireland and heal the eternal sore. I ask Ulster what is there that they
could not do as efficiently in an Ireland with the status and economic power of a self-
governing dominion as they do at present. Could they not build their ships and sell them,
manufacture and export their linens? What do they mean when they say Ulster industries
would be taxed? I cannot imagine any Irish taxation which their wildest dreams imagined
so heavy as the taxation which they will endure as part of the United Kingdom in future.
They will be implicated in all the revolutionary legislation made inevitable in Great Britain
by the recoil on society of the munition workers and disbanded conscripts.
Ireland, which luckily for itself, has the majority of its population economically
independent as workers on the land, and which, in the development of agriculture now
made necessary as a result of changes in naval warfare, will be able to absorb without
much trouble its returning workers. Ireland will be much quieter, less revolutionary and be
expensive to govern. I ask what reason is there to suppose that taxation in a self-
governing Ireland would be greater than in Great Britain after the war, or in what way Ulster
industries could be singled out, or for what evil purpose by an Irish Parliament? It would
be only too anxious rather to develop still further the one great industrial centre in Ireland;
and would, it is my firm conviction, allow the representatives of Ulster practically to dictate
the industrial policy of Ireland. Has there ever at any time been the slightest opposition by
any Irish Nationalist to proposals made by Ulster industrialists which would lend colour to
such a suspicion? Personally, I think that Ulster without safeguards of any kind might trust
its fellow-countrymen; the weight, the intelligence, the vigour of character of Ulster people
in any case would enable them to dominate Ireland economically.
19. But I do not for a moment say that Ulster is not justified in demanding
safeguards. Its leader, speaking at Westminster during one of the debates on the Home
Rule Bill, said scornfully, "We do not fear oppressive legislation. We know in fact there
would be none. What we do fear is oppressive administration." That I translate to mean
that Ulster fears that the policy of the spoils to the victors would be adopted, and that
jobbery in Nationalist and Catholic interests would be rampant. There are as many honest
Nationalists and Catholics who would object to this as there are Protestant Unionists, and
they would readily accept as part of any settlement the proposal that all posts which can
rightly be filled by competitive examination shall only be filled after examination by Irish
Civil Service Commissioners, and that this should include all posts paid for out of public
funds whether directly under the Irish Government or under County Councils, Urban
Councils, Corporations, or Boards of Guardians. Further, they would allow the Ulster
Counties through their members a veto on any important administrative position where the
area of the official's operation was largely confined to North-East Ulster, if such posts were
of a character which could not rightly be filled after examination and must needs be a
government appointment.
I have heard the suspicion expressed that Gaelic might be made a subject
compulsory on all candidates, and that this would prejudice the chances of Ulster
candidates desirous of entering the Civil Service. Nationalist opinion would readily agree
that, if marks were given for Gaelic, an alternative language, such as French or German,
should be allowed the candidate as a matter of choice and the marks given be of equal
value. By such concession jobbery would be made impossible. The corruption and bribery
now prevalent in local government would be a thing of the past. Nationalists and Unionists
alike would be assured of honest administration and that merit and efficiency, not
membership of some sectarian or political association, would lead to public service.
20. If that would not be regarded as adequate protection Nationalists are ready to
consider with friendly minds any other safeguards proposed either by Ulster or Southern
Unionists, though in my opinion the less there are formal and legal acknowledgments of
differences the better, for it is desirable that Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and
Nationalist should meet and redivide along other lines than those of religion or past party
politics, and it is obvious that the raising of artificial barriers might perpetuate the present
lines of division. A real settlement is impossible without the inclusion of the whole province
in the Irish State, and apart from the passionate sentiment existing in Nationalist Ireland
for the unity of the whole country there are strong, economic bonds between Ulster and the
three provinces. Further, the exclusion of all or a large part of Ulster would make the
excluded part too predominantly industrial and the rest of Ireland too exclusively
agricultural, tending to prevent that right balance between rural and urban industry which
all nations should aim at and which makes for a varied intellectual life, social and political
wisdom and a healthy national being.
Though for the sake of obliteration of past differences I would prefer as little building
by legislation of fences isolating one section of the community from another, still I am
certain that if Ulster, as the price of coming into a self-governing Ireland, demanded some
application of the Swiss Cantonal system to itself which would give control over local
administration it could have it; or, again, it could be conceded the powers of local control
vested in the provincial governments in Canada, where the provincial assemblies have
exclusive power to legislate for themselves in respect of local works, municipal institutions,
licences, and administration of justice in the province. Further, subject to certain provisions
protecting the interests of different religious bodies, the provincial assemblies have the
exclusive power to make laws upon education. Would not this give Ulster all the
guarantees for civil and religious liberty it requires?
What arguments of theirs, what fears have they expressed which would not be met
by such control over local administration? I would prefer that the mind of Ulster should
argue its points with the whole of Ireland and press its ideals upon it without reservation
of its wisdom for itself. But doubtless if Ulster accepted this proposal it would benefit the
rest of Ireland by the model it would set of efficient administration; and it would, I have no
doubt, insert in its Provincial constitution all the safeguards for minorities there which they
would ask should be inserted in any Irish constitution to protect the interest of their co-
religionists in that part of Ireland where they are in a minority.
21. I can deal only with fundamentals in this memorandum because it is upon
fundamentals there are differences of thinking. Once these are settled it would be
comparatively easy to devise the necessary clauses in an Irish constitution, giving
safeguards to England for the due payment of the advances under the Land Acts, and the
principles upon which an Irish contribution should be made to the empire for naval and
military purposes. It was suggested by Mr. Lionel Curtis in his "Problems of the
Commonwealth," that assessors might be appointed by the dominions to fix the fair taxable
capacity of each for this purpose.
 It will be observed that while I have claimed for Ireland the status of a dominion, I
have referred solely hitherto to the powers of control over trade policy, customs, excise,
taxation and legislation possessed by the dominions, and have not claimed for Ireland the
right to have an army of a navy of its own. I recognize that the proximity of the two islands
makes it desirable to consolidate the naval power under the control of the Admiralty. The
regular army should remain in the same way under the War Office which would have the
power of recruiting in Ireland. The Irish Parliament would, I have no doubt, be willing to
raise at its own expense under an Irish Territorial Council a Territorial Force similar to that
of England but not removable from Ireland. Military conscription could never be permitted
except by Act of the Irish Parliament. It would be a denial of the first principle of nationality
if the power of conscripting the citizens of the country lay not in the hands of the National
Parliament but was exercised by another nation.
22. While a self-governing Ireland would contribute money to the defence of the
federated empire, it would not be content that that money should be spent on dockyards,
arsenals, camps, harbours, naval stations, ship-building and supplies in Great Britain to the
almost complete neglect of Ireland as at present. A large contribution for such purposes
spent outside Ireland would be an economic drain if not balanced by counter expenditure
here. This might be effected by the training of a portion of the navy and army and the Irish
regiments of the regular army in Ireland, and their equipment, clothing, supplies, munitions
and rations being obtained through an Irish department. Naval dockyards should he
constructed here and a proportion of ships built in them.
Just as surely as there must be a balance between the imports and exports of a
country, so must there be a balance between the revenue raised in a nation and the public
expenditure on that nation. Irish economic depression after the Act of Union was due in
large measure to absentee landlordism and the expenditure of Irish revenue outside
Ireland with no proportionate return. This must not be expected to continue against Irish
interests. Ireland, granted the freedom it desires, would be willing to defend its freedom
and the freedom of other dominions in the commonwealth of nations it belonged to, but it
is not willing to allow millions to be raised in Ireland and spent outside Ireland. If three or
five millions are raised in Ireland for imperial purposes and spent in Great Britain it simply
means that the vast employment of labour necessitated takes place outside Ireland:
whereas if spent here it would mean the employment of many thousands of men, the
support of their families, and in the economic chain would follow the support of those who
cater for them in food, clothing, housing, etc. Even with the best will in the world, to do its
share towards its defence of the freedom it had attained, Ireland could not permit such an
economic drain on its resources. No country could approve of a policy which in its
application means the emigration of thousands of its people every year while it continued.
23. I believe even if there were no historical basis for Irish nationalism that such
claims as I have stated would have become inevitable, because the tendency of humanity
as it develops intellectually and spiritually is to desire more and more freedom, and to
substitute more and more an internal law for the external law or government, and that the
solidarity of empires or nations will depend not so much upon the close texture of their
political organization or the uniformity of mind so engendered as upon the freedom allowed
and the delight people feel in that freedom. The more educated a man is the more it is
hateful to him to be constrained and the more impossible does it become for central
governments to provide by regulation for the infinite variety of desires and cultural
developments which spring up everywhere and are in themselves laudable, and in no way
endanger the state.
A recognition of this has already led to much decentralization in Great Britain itself.
And if the claim for more power in the administration of local affairs was so strongly felt in
a homogeneous country like Great Britain that, through its county council system, people
in districts like Kent or Essex have been permitted control over education and the purchase
of land, and the distribution of it to small holders, how much more passionately must this
desire for self-control be felt in Ireland where people have a different national character
which has survived all the educational experiments to change them into the likeness of
their neighbours.
The battle which is going on in the world has been stated to be a spiritual conflict
between those who desire greater freedom for the individual and think that the state exists
to preserve that freedom, and those who believe in the predominance of the state and the
complete subjection of the individual to it and the moulding of the individual mind in its
image. This has been stated, and if the first view is a declaration of ideals sincerely held
by Great Britain it would mean the granting to Ireland, a country which has expressed its
wishes by vaster majorities than were ever polled in any other country for political changes,
the satisfaction of its desires.
24. The acceptance of the proposals here made would mean sacrifices for the two
extremes in Ireland, and neither party has as yet made any real sacrifice to meet the other,
but have gone on their own way. I urge upon them that if the suggestions made here were
accepted both would obtain substantially what they desire, the Ulster Unionists that safety
for their interests and provision for Ireland's unity with the commonwealth of dominions
inside the empire; the Nationalists that power they desire to create an Irish civilization by
self-devised and self-checked efforts. The brotherhood of dominions of which they would
form one would be inspired as much by the fresh life and wide democratic outlook of
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, as by the hoarier political wisdom of
Great Britain; and military, naval, foreign and colonial policy must in the future be devised
by the representatives of those dominions sitting in council together with the
representatives of Great Britain. Does not that indicate a different form of imperialism from
that they hold in no friendly memory? It would not be imperialism in the ancient sense but
a federal union of independent nations to protect national liberties, which might draw into
its union other peoples hitherto unconnected with it, and so beget a league of nations to
make a common international law prevail.
The allegiance would be to common principles which mankind desire and would not
permit the dominance of any one race. We have not only to be good Irishmen but good
citizens of the world, and one is as important as the other, for earth is more and more
forcing on its children a recognition of their fundamental unity, and that all rise and fall and
suffer together, and that none can escape the infection from their common humanity. If
these ideas emerge from the world conflict and are accepted as world morality it will be
some compensation for the anguish of learning the lesson. We in Ireland like the rest of
the world must rise above ourselves and our differences if we are to manifest the genius
which is in us, and play a noble part in world history.

-----------
Note
I was asked to put into shape for publication ideas and suggestions for an Irish
settlement which had been discussed among a group whose members represented all
extremes in Irish opinion. The compromise arrived at was embodied in documents written
by members of the group privately circulated, criticized and again amended. I make
special acknowledgments to Colonel Maurice Moore, Mr. James G. Douglas, Mr. Edward
E. Lysaght, Mr. Joseph Johnston, F.T.C.D., Mr. Alec Wilson and Mr. Diarmid Coffey. For
the tone, method of presentation and general arguments used, I alone am responsible.
And if any are offended at what I have said, I am to be blamed, not my fellow-workers.
- A.E.

--------------

Addendum

This pamphlet is a reprint of articles which appeared in the Irish Times on 26th, 28th
and 29th May [1917]. The letters which follow appeared in the same paper on the 31st
May.

To the Editor of the Irish Times:

Sir - In an attempt to discover what measure of agreement today was possible
between the political antagonists of yesterday, the attention of a few dozen Irish men and
women was drawn to the articles by A.E. which have appeared in your columns, and the
following statement was signed by those whose names are appended beneath it: -

"We, the undersigned, having read 'Thoughts for a Convention' by A.E. without
endorsing all his statements, express our general agreement with his conclusions and with
the argument by which these are reached."
The signatories include: -

His Grace the Most Rev. Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin.

The Lord Monteagle, K.P.
Sir John Griffith, M.A.I., M. Inst. C.E.
Sir Nugent Everard
Sir Algernon Coote, Bt.
Sir J.R. O'Connell, LL.D.
Sir Henry Grattan Bellew, St.
Lady Gregory
Mrs. J.R. Green
Douglas Hyde, LL.D., D. Litt., Professor Irish National University
Edmund Curtis, M.A., Professor Oratory, History and English Literature, Dublin
University
T. B. Rudmose Brown, M.A., Professor of Romance Languages, University of Dublin
Dermod O'Brien, President Royal Hibernian Academy
Thomas E. Gordon, M.D., F.R.C.S.I.
Oliver Gogarty, F.R.C.S.I.
 Joseph T. Wigham, M.D.
Frank C. Purser, M.D.
Robert J. Rowlette, M.D.
John McCann
Edward Martyn
J. Hubbard Clarke, J.P.
George Gavan Duffy
Thomas Butler
F. J. O'Connor
John Douglas
John Mackie, F.C.A.
E. A. Stopford
John O'Neill
James MacNeill

Does not this suggest that agreement might also be possible in an Irish Convention
if, by some miracle, Irishmen of various parties would step out of their well-fenced
enclosures to take counsel in common?
-Yours, etc.,
James G. Douglas.
Dublin, May 30th, 1917.

----------

To the Editor of the London Times

Sir - May I express the hope that 'A.E.'s' "Thoughts for a Convention," the last
instalment of which you published yesterday, and which I am informed will reappear as a
penny pamphlet this week, will be widely read? I am not thinking of his conclusions, ably
reasoned as they are, but of the tone and temper in which he handles the most explosive
material in the whole magazine of Irish controversy. It is refreshing to listen to one who not
only has the courage of his convictions, but can also say honestly that the convictions are
his own and not somebody else's.
'A.E.' strikes a note which may go far to make the Convention the success the vast
majority of Irishmen hardly dare to hope that it will be. If he speaks only for himself, "More
shame for his generation" will surely be the verdict of history.
-Yours, etc.,
Horace Plunkett.

The Plunkett House, Dublin,

May 30th, 1917.

--------------------

The Economics of Ireland

 and the Policity of the British Government
By George W. Russell ("AE")

With an introduction by Francis Hackett

B.W. Huebsch, Inc.

New York
1920

Mr. Russell's essay was first printed in the Freeman (New York) under the title, "Sir
Auckland Geddes Handiwork."

--------------

Introduction

Most of us feel strongly, and talk strongly, about national questions, but it is the
exceptional man who holds his feelings and his tongue in check until he has achieved
mastery of his more immediate and more egoistic inclinations. Among such exceptional
men, of our generation, I know none more distinguished than the Ulsterman, George W.
Russell. George Russell is the one towering figure of contemporary Ireland. Because he
has never worked in England, like Bernard Shaw or George Moore or W. B. Yeats, his
name is not so well known along the beaten paths of publicity. In proportion to his
achievement he is, I think, not at all well known. But no one who ever sees his weekly
journal, The Irish Homestead, or who has read his poetry, examined his paintings or
thought over his books on nationality and cooperation and the state, can fail to have a
sense of the fine and soaring distinction of this Irishman. And what gives his distinction its
powerful and permanent quality is the base on which it stands.
George Russell is eloquent and imaginative, but he is definite, candid, pointed and
sane. Into his Irishness there is mixed something that has the tang of the Northern
province. It is not exactly Scotch cautiousness. It is not exactly harsh Presbyterian
naturalism. But it is something hard and clear and firm, that cannot be easily traded upon
or misled. And this quality, so often devoted to personal advancement, George Russell
has given with absolute disinterestedness to the large pursuits that I have named. Other
men, of course, in the religious world or the artistic or the educational or the socialistic, can
and do exhibit this sort of disinterestedness. It was common during the war, on both sides.
In Ireland, as the movement that ended in the Easter executions testified, perfect self-
sacrifice for a political or social cause, is by no means rare. But the thing that marks the
devotion of George Russell is the swift and sweeping intelligence that has accompanied
it. In holding to his cause of Irish agricultural and industrial development, he has embraced
the realities of all civilization. It is this, in my opinion, that makes him tower above all other
Irish spokesmen. It is this that makes The Irish Homestead editorials the best editorials
in the English language today.
This is the witness who comes to testify to Americans on the real meaning of Lloyd
George's new bill for the government of Ireland. He does not, so far as I know, enjoy the
business of political discussion. He was appointed by Lloyd George to the Irish Convention
of 1917, and when that convention failed he practically made up his mind to put his future
efforts into activities removed from politics. But much as he distrusts politics, and aloof as
he holds himself from them, he is too anxious for a brotherhood of Irishmen not to speak
when he alone seems able to speak effectively. This accounts for his coming forward now.
He comes forward not as a Nationalist, a Republican or a Unionist. He comes forward as
an Irishman, an economist and a believer in public opinion. In his own words, he writes "in
order that no American who is interested in Ireland may be deceived."
There are many points, indeed, on which Americans may be deceived in regard to
Ireland. What, for example, is the real policy of the British Government? On the face of
it, as a great many Americans of British forbears contend, British policy in regard to Ireland
cannot be dishonest or debased - stupid, perhaps, or misguided, but not dishonest. Men
who believe in what Gilbert Murray calls the "profound consciousness of ultimate
brotherhood between the two great English-speaking peoples" are loath to believe that the
policy of the British Government ever could be crooked and sinister.
They set such assertions down to passion - that passion which, as George Russell
himself declares, when it enters into public life "too often makes men blind in action and
reckless in speech, and things are done and said which bring disaster to the nation."
It is not in passion that George Russell analyzes the sinister policy of Britain. He
does not speak out of those fuming instincts that belong to every herd. He speaks as a
hard, clear economist, who reads what the scales record.
And what a picture he gives us in the article that follows of a governmental policy
not straightforward, not disinterested, not even commonly honest. He does not assert, he
demonstrates, that the British Government has after long calculation devised a scheme by
which the Irish people cannot possibly work out their own salvation. Is this incredible? We
all know that it is not incredible that such schemes should be devised. Some of them were
developed at Versailles. It is a similar scheme that George Russell patiently exposes in
this article. He shows, first of all, the cold policy of the British government in regard to Irish
trade and taxation. He portrays as "sheer robbery," with necessarily dire results, the forced
contribution from Ireland of eighteen millions in sterling a year. But more crippling even
than this exaction, in the judgment of Russell, is the powerlessness of Ireland in regard to
its taxation and its trade. Is there any attempt to aid in the development of Irish agriculture
or industries? Is there any attempt to give Ireland access to American markets, or America
access to Ireland? There is, instead, the actual manacling of Ireland's underdeveloped
industries, in obedience to British jealousy. There is the same cruel and dwarfing inhibition
of Irish technical culture. The Irish government is to have no power to remit taxation or
extend bounties. It is driven to depress the standard of life of its poorer classes, and to
raise an inordinate revenue at the expense of these workers, of which Britain is to skim the
cream. In addition, the Irish must continue to trade through Britain with whatever
customers and producers it has by mere chance in the rest of the world. For this
dependence, also, the bill provides indirectly, governed by its indefensible desire to keep
Ireland enslaved.
Such enslavement, however, requires more than a trade policy; and George Russell
shows further how it is being secured. It is "not the policy of the British Government that
one section of the people should trust another section." He illustrates therefore how the
British Government has juggled with the Ulster area, in "its reactionary attempt to make
religion the basis of politics." This passage in Mr. Russell's argument is particularly
important. When Lloyd George communicated his plan to America he did not explain how
"Ulster" was to be defined. George Russell shows how it has been defined, and why. And
he shows how the Lloyd George division cuts the heart out of representative government
in Ireland, as modern democracy conceives representative government.
But is not Ulster being protected? And is this whole scheme not a sample of
federalism? Mr. Russell explains the bad intention of partitioning Ulster from the rest of
Ireland. He proves the helpless and exasperating subordination that is implied in this kind
of "federalism."
But even if Nationalist Ireland were not actually much richer than Unionist Ireland,
even if the extortion of eighteen million pounds were adjusted to say eight millions, even
if the Council were changed and county option allowed and the police made local and
indirect taxation arranged to suit an Irish standard of living, the bill that is here riddled to
pieces would remain a monument of human perfidy. And this Mr. Russell also intimates.
He intimates it by showing, on the one hand, the high possibilities of civilization that
await Ireland (to which Ireland is alive), and, on the other, the smashing ruthlessness of
British military power. That military power is directed against the heart of Ireland, against
a nationality that has been misunderstood, belittled, reviled and despoiled.
"The power of Germany," said an Oxford Pamphlet in 1914, "the power of Germany
over Alsace Lorraine or over Belgium means, if it means anything at all, that a certain
number of human beings, Belgians or Alsatians, are forced to act in various ways against
their inclinations at the command of other individuals, not because they admire or respect
these individuals but from fear of the consequence of disobedience. The will of Germany
is decided by the wills of individual Germans. It is being exercised at this moment upon
individual Belgians, with what results of suffering and anguish to the victims and
brutalization to the oppressors we are every day learning.
The power of one nation over another which can be gained by war means this and
nothing else than this, in whatever various forms it may be exercised. If we believe that
it is not good for one man to have arbitrary power over others, if we believe that slavery is
bad for the master as well as for the slave, we must believe it equally bad for one nation
to rule over another against its will. To adapt Lincoln's words: "No nation is good enough
to rule over another nation without that other's consent." That is what George Russell
means, with the change of Germany to Britain and Belgium to Ireland, when he utters the
brutal fact: "Great Britain holds Ireland by military power and not by moral power."
Perhaps it is foolish to talk to Americans of British descent, about moral power. But
no one who wants to see life lifted up out of the squalor and hatred, the disease and
famine, into which it has been plunged by mad imperialism can resist pleading, in the name
of principle, for a sober understanding of the facts that Mr. Russell presents. The cause
of Ireland is moral, or it is nothing. No policy of the British Government, however debased
and dishonest, can crush Ireland. It can only give her suffering and anguish, while
brutalizing the oppressor. But the time has now come for the world to set its
consciousness against the establishment of such policies, and resolutely to deprive
imperialism of the sanctions without which it cannot live.
"The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs [Lord Curzon] has appointed a
committee, with Sir Charles Eliot as chairman, to advise regarding a common policy
towards British institutions, which will tend to promote solidarity among British communities
in foreign countries. The committee has been given a wide scope. It will examine the
question of further fostering solidarity by the propagation of British ideals in foreign
countries. The suggestions made cover the registration of British subjects and
encouragement of British schools, chambers of commerce, and local British newspapers
and clubs."
So British Imperialism is setting its foot in the path of German imperialism. So the
victor drinks of victory, and is blind. But the world is sick of such maleficence! It is through
with such underhand solidarity. Not all the "solidarity" on earth should protect the policies
of the British Government when they have the character which George Russell shows them
to have, in the Irish scheme now supported by so many British guns.

- Francis Hackett
New York City

------------

The Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British Government

A Labor of Love?
The new British Ambassador to the United States, prior to his departure for
Washington, perhaps with the idea of propitiating Irish opinion in America, elected to speak
on St. Patrick's Day. He wore a green Irish halo for the occasion. He said it had been a
labor of love for him during last summer and autumn to assist in reducing to legislative form
proposals for ending the Irish question. He said the new Bill for the government of Ireland
was "a sincere attempt to place definitely and finally in the hands of the elected
representatives of the Irish people the duty and responsibility of working out their own
salvation and the salvation of their country." No doubt this statement has been cabled to
America, and I propose to examine here how far this statement is justified and how Ireland
is indebted to Sir Auckland Geddes for his interest in its welfare. I lay this down as a
fundamental proposition, which I do not think will be denied, that whoever controls the
taxation and trade policy of a country controls its destiny and the entire character of its
civilization. The body with control over customs, excise, income-tax, supertax, excess
profits duty and external trade has it in its power to make that country predominantly
industrial or agricultural or to make a balance between urban and rural interests. It can
direct the external trade of the country, make it flow into this or that channel. These
powers over Irish taxation and trade policy are expressly denied to Ireland. Ireland in fact
has less power under this last Bill over its own economic development than it had under
the Act of Union. Under that Act, Ireland had one hundred and two members in the
Imperial Parliament who could at times hold the balance of power. It was not a very real
power, because when the interests of Ireland and Great Britain conflicted, both parties in
Great Britain united against Ireland, but still to the leaders of parties Irish votes were worth
angling for, for British purposes, and had to be paid for by Land Acts or other measures.
The new Bill provides that the Irish representation at Westminster shall be reduced to forty-
two members, and so at Westminster Ireland is made practically powerless, while
everything which really affects Irish economic interests is still legislated for by the British
Parliament.

The Policy of Economic Subjection

Every clause in this new Bill betrays the greatest apprehension lest Ireland should
develop industrially. It is forbidden to remit excise duties. It could not, for example, by
lowering the duty build up an Irish tobacco industry, or the manufacture of industrial
alcohol, or the manufacture of sugar from beets. Infant industries cannot be bountied, nor
can export be encouraged by this means. The power to do that or anything like that for any
of our industries is expressly denied. The jealousy against any possible great development
of industries in Ireland which was manifest in the discussions on the last Home Rule Bill
is even more evident in this Bill. We are not denied powers of taxation. Oh, no, we are
allowed to impose on ourselves an additional income-tax or an additional supertax, or to
take off that additional income-tax or supertax. In fact after a poor country is taxed in all
respects as its very rich neighbor, it is given as a special privilege the power of increasing
its supertax, or the further special privilege of taking off this super-supertax. William Blake
says "one law for the lion and the ox is oppression," and whatever may be said for an equal
tax upon equal incomes it is manifestly unjust to insist that the same indirect taxation, the
same duties on tea, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, etc., shall be charged in a country where the
average wage is about thirty-five shillings per week as in a country where the worker's
average weekly wage is from five to six pounds. The better paid worker can bear with
comparative ease high duties on tobacco, tea, or other commodities, but these bear heavily
on the poorly paid Irish worker. This boasted equality of treatment is in reality flagrant
injustice, and this injustice, of which Irishmen have complained since the Act of Union was
passed, will be continued under the new Bill if it becomes an Act.

Shackling Ireland's Industries

If this were really a sincere attempt to undo the work of British oppression in Ireland,
to leave Ireland within the Empire free to develop industrially, if Great Britain wished to
make clear to the world that nothing like the suppression of the Irish woolen industry would
be possible in future, that the spirit which dictated that infamous suppression was dead,
it would have left Ireland absolute freedom with regard to trade policy and taxation. The
disinterested onlooker would have commented, "It would perhaps be expecting too much
from Great Britain to allow Ireland political independence, but the complete freedom to
develop industrially now allowed within the Empire is sign of a real change of heart." No
critic of British policy with regard to Ireland can find any evidence whatever of such a
change of heart. The old industrial jealousy is still obvious, and the old desire to tax Ireland
that Great Britain may be enriched. Great Britain demands from Ireland a tribute of
eighteen million pounds annually. A little island with four million inhabitants is expected,
after providing for the expenditure on its own services, still further to provide this sum as
a tribute to Great Britain. Now the main cause of the depopulation of Ireland, the main
reason why it alone of all European Countries has halved its population within living
memory, was the export of Irish revenues to Great Britain. After the Act of Union the Irish
aristocracy began more and more to live in the new centre of political power, and the
revenues from their estates formerly spent in Ireland, supporting Irish tradesmen and Irish
industries, were spent in England, with the inevitable consequence that Irish industries
decayed; and they could not for lack of capital be adjusted when the industrial revolution,
brought about by the use of power machinery, made increased capital necessary for that
adjustment. Then came on the top of this the amalgamation of the two exchequers, and
Irish surpluses varying during the past century from two to five million pounds annually
were exported to Great Britain and spent there. Up to the period of the Great Famine,
Ireland increased its population by cutting down its standard of living. At that time the
country was swarming with beggars and paupers. The Famine forced on Ireland the tragic
expedient of throwing off half its children so that those left might live, and ever since then
Ireland year by year has sent its sons and daughters to the new world or the Dominions.
That country which exports its revenues must export its population, and Great Britain is
determined that this export of Irish revenue and Irish population shall continue, for in this
new Bill it is provided that Ireland shall export eighteen million pounds annually as tribute
to Great Britain.

Eighteen Millions for What?

What does this mean? It means that as the average wage of Irish laborers is about
thirty shillings a week, and if we imagine every Irish laborer with a wife and three children,
the British Government withdraws from Ireland annually the means of subsistence of a
population of about six or seven hundred thousand people, and spends that money in
Great Britain. Workers must follow their wage, and Irish workers must emigrate in the
future as in the past. What is the justification for this tribute? Great Britain protects Ireland
with its army and its navy. The protection which its army gives Ireland at present is to
proclaim martial law over the country, to arrest its political leaders and the most prominent
of their followers, to prevent Irish Fairs being held, to prohibit the sale of Irish industries,
to suppress a commission appointed by Irish Members of Parliament to inquire into the
resources and industries of Ireland, to hold with rifle and bayonet the places where it was
found evidence was to be taken by this commission. This may seem unbelievable but it
is actually happening, and if doubt is expressed every statement made can be verified from
reports in British newspapers without Irish newspapers, which might be prejudiced to
exaggeration, being quoted. "Oh," says the Imperialist, "but we protect Ireland from its
foreign enemies for this eighteen million pounds." We do not know who are our foreign
enemies. We never were oppressed by any people except our neighbors.

Robbing a Small Nation

But let us for a moment grant that eighteen million pounds is the moral equivalent
of that protection. We then ask what is the economic equivalent to Ireland for this eighteen
millions. If you who read fall into the sea and somebody plunges in after you and saves
your life and in gratitude you say, "You are entitled to all I possess;" if the rescuer takes
your income, you starve. If Great Britain really desired to be just to Ireland, it would
arrange that there would be an expenditure in Ireland equal to the tribute; that ships for
the navy, aeroplanes, clothing for troops, munitions, etc., could be manufactured here so
that while Ireland would be contributing to Imperial defence it would not be impoverished
by the manner in which the tribute would be exacted. Irish workmen would be employed
and paid from the Irish revenues and the money raised in Ireland would be spent in Ireland;
and however heavy the taxation would be, the money raised would return to its people and
its tradesmen. It would be economically easier for Ireland to contribute eighteeen millions
yearly for imperial purposes, if the money was spent in Ireland, than to contribute half that
amount and have the money spent in Great Britain. The tribute as it stands is sheer
robbery of a poor country by a rich one. We are forced to contribute money to pay British
workmen; and every Irish family, after being taxed for Irish services, must contribute on
an average eighteen pounds yearly per family to the payment or support of British
workmen. Because we object we are called an unreasonable people. None of the
Dominions will pay tribute to Great Britain. They realize that if they export their revenues
they must export their population. Spanish colonies were lost to Spain because the
revenues were exported with inevitable consequent impoverishment and inevitable
rebellion.

No Solution Wanted
I am not now arguing for a republic or for independence. I am simply trying to make
clear what element of truth there is in Sir Auckland Geddes' statement that the last
Government of Ireland Bill, which he helped to draft, was a sincere attempt to render
justice to Ireland inside the Empire. The British Ambassador to Washington made other
statements in his speech, justifying British control over our economic system. "Ireland,"
he said, "for good or ill was inevitably within the sphere of the British economic system.
It was dependent on England for manufactured goods of all sorts, and on the entrepot
trade of England for the supply of raw materials of foreign origin. No human power, no
legislation, could end the economic and financial association of Irish and British interests,
nor could any readjustment prevent Ireland suffering because of disturbances in the
exchange-rate between the London money-market and the markets of the outside world."
I grant that the proximity of Great Britain to Ireland makes both these countries natural
customers to each other. But Great Britain is not content with such natural trade. She
forces us to trade with her only. Irish shipping, once prosperous, was gradually crushed
out. Only a few days ago a British paper announced with exultation that the last
independent Irish shipping company had been incorporated in a British shipping trust and
there was not one single Irish overseas shipping company left. As it is, we have now to get
permits to export Irish produce anywhere except to Great Britain. What Sir Auckland
Geddes would have us believe is that we could not get manufactured goods anywhere in
the world except from Great Britain; that America, for example, would not or could not
trade with us; that we could not get steel from the United States for our ship-building
industry, or that Belgium or Russia would not sell flax to our linen-manufacturers, but for
our union with Great Britain: in fact we would be outcasts of the industrial world and no
nation would trade with us, only that Great Britain supports us with its credit and sees to
it that we pay our bills.

Cheated on Exchange
With reference to the exchange, I might point out that the 1918 report on the Irish
trade in imports and exports shows that Irish exports exceeded in value the imports by
L26,885,000 or twenty-five percent. The exports were valued at L152,903,000 and the
imports at L126,018,000. If Ireland had an independent economic system and if the laws
which govern the rates of exchange between Great Britain and the United States, or
between Great Britain and France, prevailed, the British pound sterling would decline in
value to about seventeen or sixteen shillings, and the Irish pound would appreciate in value
in purchasing goods in Great Britain. Great Britain could not export gold at the rate of
twenty-five million pounds annually to balance its trade with us. It balances accounts
between Ireland and itself by the simple plan of extracting eighteen million pounds. All
these restrictions Sir Auckland Geddes has helped during a summer and autumn to devise.
As he says, it has been "a labor of love" to him. If there were any other restrictions which
this labor of love did not suggest to him, are they not all provided for by the power of veto
given to the Irish Viceroy, who will give dissent or approval to Irish legislation on advice
from the British Government? Finally is there not the British army, encamped in Ireland
with tanks, aeroplanes, armoured cars, poisonous gas-bombs and all the paraphernalia
of control? British interests are quite safe. It is only the ironical humor of British Members
of Parliament which makes them protest to the world that they are endangering their
Empire by giving Ireland so much liberty and so many Parliaments.

The Religious Issue

As for the moral consequences of this Government of Ireland Bill, if it is put into
operation it will artificially divide Protestant and Catholic. Nothing could be more loathsome
to the man of liberal mind than this reactionary attempt to make religion the basis of
politics. I, as an Irish Protestant and an Ulsterman by birth, have lived in Southern Ireland
most of my life. I have worked in every county, and I have never found my religion made
any barrier between myself and my Catholic countrymen, nor was my religion a bar to my
work; and in that ill-fated Irish Convention one Southern Protestant Unionist after another
rose up to say they did not fear persecution from their Nationalist and Catholic countrymen.
The leader of the Southern Unionists made an eloquent appeal to the Ulster Unionists to
throw their lot in with the rest of Ireland; he said, "We who have lived among Nationalists
trust them; we ask you to trust them." It was not the policy of the British Government that
one section of the Irish people should trust the other section; and Mr. Lloyd George
invented the "two Nations" theory to keep Ireland divided. He has painted an imaginative
political landscape of Ireland, a country he has never been in, and expects Ireland to adjust
itself until it becomes like his imaginary political landscape. The Ulsterman and industrialist
is told that the farmers of Ireland will tax him out of existence if he comes into an all-Irish
Parliament. A British finger is pointed at the Irish Nationalist as the person who will plunder
the poor Ulsterman, all the time another British hand is securely in the Ulster pocket; and
Ulster is being depopulated at exactly the same rate as the other three Provinces.
"Nationalist Ireland will tax Ulster out of existence," says the British politician, who arranges
in this very Bill that the six Ulster Counties shall every year export L7,920,000 as their
share of Imperial tribute after paying for their own services. Is it conceivable that Irish
Nationalists would tax those six counties as the British Government taxes them and intends
to continue taxing them, all the while warning the poor deluded Belfast worker against
possible depredations on his pocket by the Southern Irishman?

Ulster Not "Most Prosperous"

The truth is that Nationalist Ireland is much richer than Unionist Ireland. The theory
that Ulster Unionists create most of the wealth of the country is demonstrably untrue. One
has only to read the report on the Irish trade in imports and exports, and compare the
values of exports from Nationalist Ireland with the values of exports from Unionist Ireland
to realize that agricultural and Nationalist Ireland is the great wealth-producer. But even
in this we can not take figures at their face value. The export of ships, mainly from Belfast,
was valued in 1918 at L10,147,000, the highest recorded value, and the Belfast people are
justly entitled to think with pride of these world-famous yards of theirs. But if we compare
this output, not with the great cattle trade, but with one of the minor branches of Irish
agricultural industry, the egg and poultry trade, ship-building as a wealth-creating industry
takes its proper place. In 1918 the women on the farms of Ireland were able to export
eggs and poultry to the value of L18,449,310. Now the point about this total as compared
with the value of the output of the ship-builders is that the nominal values do not indicate
the real wealth created. Practically all the L18,449,310 was new wealth created out of the
earth, since not five percent of the feeding stuffs used were imported. If we look at the
import-statistics we see that vast sums were paid for steel, iron, coal and other raw
materials to enable the shipbuilders to get to work, so that less new wealth is created in the
one industry than in the other, pound for pound in value. And this applies to almost all the
industries carried on in Nationalist Ireland; a much smaller percentage of raw materials
required is imported, and more real wealth is created than in North Ireland. If we examine
into the means of production we find that there is more actual profit for the producer in
every pound of final value, than in the case of the manufacturing industries in North-east
Ulster. I do not wish to depreciate in any way the magnificent energy of Ulster Irishmen.
They have a right to be proud of what they have achieved, but it is not right to speak of that
corner of Ireland as the wealth-creating centre. It will really suffer much more than the rest
of Ireland under the regime Mr. Lloyd George has devised. He has cleverly taken the
Ulstermen's own valuation of their wealth-producing capacity, and he demands from six
Ulster Counties a tribute of L7,920,000 annually. This will go to pay British workmen, not
Belfast workmen. I believe it will not take my Ulster countrymen very long to find out who
really is oppressing them.

Give Ireland Freedom

The Bill which Sir Auckland Geddes helped to plan does not enable Ireland to work
out its own salvation. We in Ireland ask for powers to enable us to build up a civilization
which will fit our character and genius as the glove fits the hand. We can not do that while
an external power controls our taxation, revenues and trade policy. It is the noblest and
most practical of all human enterprises - the building up of civilization - and why the desire
to do it should be deplored rather than lauded, I do not know. The British people, though
they live beside us, know nothing about us - nothing about our national culture, history and
traditions, or our legendary literature, so rich and imaginative, as ancient as the Greek, and
going back as the legends of all ancient peoples do, to the creation of the world. The
English are a comparatively new people with no mythology or antiquity of their own and
they ignore Irish culture or try to crush it out in the schools they create. They believe or
pretend to believe of the flame of nationality which burns so brightly in Ireland today that
it is only a transitory passion. It will all burn out soon enough. A little more resolute
repression, and it will disappear. They are so proud of their material might that they
understand nothing of the power of spiritual ideas.
I imagine that on a red sunset nineteen hundred years ago some believer in the all-
conquering might of material power murmured so, as he gazed upon a crucified figure. A
young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization
which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine
that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "It will all blow over now."
Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for
centuries yet. After the spiritual powers, there is nothing in the world more unconquerable
than the spirit of nationality. Once it is created, it can raise up Babylons from the sands
of the desert, and leave behind it monuments which awe us like the majesties of nature.
It can not be suppressed. It is like the wheat which when cut down before it has seeded,
springs up again and again. So the spirit of nationality in Ireland will persist even though
the mightiest of material powers be its neighbour. It springs from biological necessity. We
desire to create a civilization of our own, expressing our nature and genius; and therefore
we ask for freedom and power. That freedom and that power to build up our own life are
not given to us by the scheme which the British Ambassador to America helped to devise.
In spite of his fine words about freedom, he was only tightening our chains; and I write this
in order that no American who is interested in Ireland may be deceived. It is not self-
government the British are bestowing on us; they are digging for us a dungeon even
deeper than Pitt digged for us in the Act of Union.

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