In Ireland we begin naturally our consideration of this problem with the
folk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal--the linking
up of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since the
destruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factor
in rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other and
from the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action; and that was
so until the movement for the organization of agriculture was initiated
by Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in that patriotic association,
the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Though its actual
achievement is great; though it may be said to be the pivot round which
Ireland has begun to swing back to its traditional and natural communism
in work, we still have over the larger part of Ireland conditions
prevailing which tend to isolate the individual from the community.
When we examine rural Ireland, outside this new movement, we find
everywhere isolated and individualistic agricultural production, served
with regard to purchase and sale by private traders and dealers, who are
independent of economic control from the consumers or producers, or the
State. The tendency in the modern world to conduct industry in the grand
manner is not observable here. The first thing which strikes one who
travels through rural Ireland is the immense number of little shops.
They are scattered along the highways and at the crossroads; and where
there are a few families together in what is called a village,
the number of little shops crowded round these consumers is almost
incredible. What are all these little shops doing? They are supplying
the farmers with domestic requirements: with tea, sugar, flour, oil,
implements, vessels, clothing, and generally with drink. Every one of
them almost is a little universal provider. Every one of them has its
own business organization, its relations with wholesale houses in the
greater towns. All of them procure separately from others their bags
of flour, their barrels of porter, their stocks of tea, sugar, raisins,
pots, pans, nails, twine, fertilizers, and what not, and all these
things come to them paying high rates to the carriers for little loads.
The trader's cart meets them at the station, and at great expense the
necessaries of life are brought together. In the world-wide amalgamation
of shoe-makers into boot factories, and smithies into ironworks,
which is going on in Europe and America, these little shops have been
overlooked. Nobody has tried to amalgamate them, or to economize human
effort or cheapen the distribution of the necessaries of life. This work
of distribution is carried on by all kinds of little traders competing
with each other, pulling the devil by the tail; doing the work
economically, so far as they themselves are concerned, because they
must, but doing it expensively for the district because they cannot
help it. They do not serve Ireland well. The genius of amalgamation and
organization cannot afford to pass by these shops, which spring up
in haphazard fashion, not because the country needs them, but because
farmers or traders have children to be provided for. To the ignorant
this is the easiest form of trade, and so many are started in life in
one of these little shops after an apprenticeship in another like it.
These numerous competitors of each other do not keep down prices. They
increase them rather by the unavoidable multiplication of expenses;
and many of them, taking advantage of the countryman's irregularity of
income and his need for credit, allow credit to a point where the small
farmer becomes a tied customer, who cannot pay all he owes, and who
therefore dares not deal elsewhere. These agencies for distribution do
not by their nature enlarge the farmer's economic knowledge. His vision
beyond them to their sources of supply is blocked, and in this respect
he is debarred from any unity with national producers other than his own
class.
Let us now for a little consider the small farmer around whom have
gathered these multitudinous little agencies of distribution. What kind
of a being is he? We must deal with averages, and the small farmer
is the typical Irish countryman. The average area of an Irish farm is
twenty-five acres or thereabouts. There are hundreds of thousands who
have more or less. But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer with
twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a drift
of sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal: call him Patrick
Maloney and accept him as symbol of his class. We will view him outside
the operation of the new co-operative policy, trying to obey the command
to be fruitful and replenish the earth. He is fruitful enough. There is
no race suicide in Ireland. His agriculture is largely traditional. It
varied little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and the
beginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite of
a huge department of agriculture. His butter, his eggs, his cattle,
horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers. He rarely knows where
his produce goes to--whether it is devoured in the next county or is
sent across the Channel. It might be pitched into the void for all he
knows about its destiny. He might be described almost as the primitive
economic cave-man, the darkness of his cave unillumined by any ray of
general principles. As he is obstructed by the traders in a general
vision of production other than his own, so he is obstructed by these
dealers in a general vision of the final markets for his produce. His
reading is limited to the local papers, and these, following the example
of the modern press, carefully eliminate serious thought as likely to
deprive them of readers. But Patrick, for all his economic backwardness,
has a soul. The culture of the Gaelic poets and story-tellers, while
not often actually remembered, still lingers like a fragrance about his
mind. He lives and moves and has his being in the loveliest nature, the
skies over him ever cloudy like an opal; and the mountains flow
across his horizon in wave on wave of amethyst and pearl. He has the
unconscious depth of character of all who live and labor much in the
open air, in constant fellowship with the great companions--with the
earth and the sky and the fire in the sky. We ponder over Patrick, his
race and his country, brooding whether there is the seed of a Pericles
in Patrick's loins. Could we carve an Attica out of Ireland?
Before Patrick can become the father of a Pericles, before Ireland can
become an Attica, Patrick must be led out of his economic cave: his low
cunning in barter must be expanded into a knowledge of economic law--his
fanatical concentration on his family--begotten by the isolation and
individualism of his life--be sublimed into national affections; his
unconscious depths be sounded, his feeling for beauty be awakened by
contact with some of the great literature of the world. His mind is
virgin soil, and we may hope that, like all virgin soil, it will
be immensely fruitful when it is cultivated. How does the policy of
co-working make Patrick pass away from his old self? We can imagine him
as a member of a committee getting hints of a strange doctrine called
science from his creamery manager. He hears about bacteria, and these
dark invisibles replace, as the cause of bad butter-making, the wicked
fairies of his childhood. Watching this manager of his society he learns
a new respect for the man of special or expert knowledge. Discussing the
business of his association with other members he becomes something of a
practical economist. He knows now where his produce goes. He learns that
he has to compete with Americans, Europeans, and Colonials--indeed
with the farmers of the world, hitherto concealed from his view by a
mountainous mass of middle-men. He begins to be interested in these
countries and reads about them. He becomes a citizen of the world.
His horizon is no longer bounded by the wave of blue hills beyond his
village. The roar of the planet begins to sound in his ears. What
is more important is that he is becoming a better citizen of his
own country. He meets on his committee his religious and political
opponents, not now discussing differences out identities of interest. He
also meets the delegates from other societies in district conferences
or general congresses, and those who meet thus find their interests are
common, and a new friendliness springs up between North and South,
and local co-operation leads on to national co-operation. The best
intellects, the best business men in the societies, meet in the big
centres as directors of federations and wholesales, and they get an
all-Ireland view of their industry. They see the parish from the point
of view of the nation, and this vision does not desert them when they go
back to the parish. They realize that their interests are bound up with
national interests, and they discuss legislation and administration with
practical knowledge. Eyes getting keener every year, minds getting more
instructed, begin to concentrate on Irish public men. Presently Patrick
will begin to seek for men of special knowledge and administrative
ability to manage Irish affairs. Ireland has hitherto been to Patrick
a legend, a being mentioned in romantic poetry, a little dark Rose, a
mystic maiden, a vague but very simple creature of tears and aspirations
and revolts. He now knows what a multitudinous being a nation is, and in
contact with its complexities Patrick's politics take on a new gravity,
thoughtfulness, and intellectual character.
Under the influence of these associations and the ideas pervading them
our typical Irish farmer gets drawn out of his agricultural sleep of
the ages, developing rapidly as mummy-wheat brought out of the tomb and
exposed to the eternal forces which stimulate and bring to life. I have
taken an individual as a type, and described the original circumstance
and illustrated the playing of the new forces on his mind. It is the
only way we can create a social order which will fit our character as
the glove fits the hand. Reasoning solely from abstract principles about
justice, democracy, the rights of man and the like, often leads us into
futilities, if not into dangerous political experiments. We have to see
our typical citizen in clear light, realize his deficiencies, ignorance,
and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we can
wisely enlarge his boundaries. The centre of the citizen is the home.
His circumference ought to be the nation. The vast majority of Irish
citizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital
relations with their circumference which alone entitle them to the
privileges of citizenship, and enable them to act with political wisdom.
An emotional relationship is not enough. Our poets sang of a united
Ireland, but the unity they sang of was only a metaphor. It mainly meant
separation from another country. In that imaginary unity men were really
separate from each other. Individualism, fanatically centering itself on
its family and family interests, interfered on public boards to do jobs
in the interests of its kith and kin. The co-operative movement connects
with living links the home, the centre of Patrick's being, to the
nation, the circumference of his being. It connects him with the
nation through membership of a national movement, not for the political
purposes which call on him for a vote once every few years, but
for economic purposes which affect him in the course of his daily
occupations. This organization of the most numerous section of the Irish
democracy into co-operative associations, as it develops and embraces
the majority, will tend to make the nation one and indivisible and
conscious of its unity. The individual, however meagre his natural
endowment of altruism, will be led to think of his community as himself;
because his income, his social pleasures even, depend on the success
of the local and national organizations with which he is connected. The
small farmers of former times pursued a petty business of barter and
haggle, fighting for their own hand against half the world about them.
The farmers of the new generation will grow up in a social order,
where all the transactions which narrowed their fathers' hearts will be
communal and national enterprises. How much that will mean in a change
of national character we can hardly realize, we who were born in an
Ireland where petty individualism was rampant, and where every child had
it borne in upon him that it had to fight its own corner in the world,
where the whole atmosphere about it tended to the hardening of the
personality.
We may hope and believe that this transformation of the social
order will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation,
identifying national with personal interests. For those who believe
there is a divine seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they may
hope will promote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in the
past, in favorable airs, has made beauty or grandeur or spirituality
the characteristics of ancient civilizations in Greece, in Egypt, and in
India. No one can work for his race without the hope that the highest,
or more than the highest, humanity has reached will be within reach of
his race also. We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the
rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the lofty
edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious. And in
Ireland, for all its melancholy history, we may, knowing that we are
human, dream that there is the seed of a Pericles in Patrick's loins,
and that we might carve an Attica out of Ireland.