In Ireland we must of necessity give special thought to the needs of the
countryman, because our main industry is agriculture. We have few big
cities. Our great cities are almost all outside our own borders. They
are across the Atlantic. The surplus population of the countryside
do not go to our own towns but emigrate. The exodus does not enrich
Limerick or Galway, but New York. The absorption of life in great
cities is really the danger which most threatens the modern State with a
decadence of its humanity. In the United States, even in Canada, hardly
has the pioneer made a home in the wilderness when his sons and his
daughters are allured by the distant gleam of cities beyond the plains.
In England the countryside has almost ceased to be the mother of men--at
least a fruitful mother. We are face to face in Ireland with this
problem, with no crowded and towering cities to disguise the emptiness
of the fields. It is not a problem which lends itself to legislative
solution. Whether there be fair rents or no rents at all, the child
of the peasant, yearning for a fuller life, goes where life is at
its fullest. We all desire life, and that we might have it more
abundantly,--the peasant as much as the mystic thirsting for infinite
being,--and in rural Ireland the needs of life have been neglected.
The chief problem of Ireland--the problem which every nation in greater
or lesser measure will have to solve--is how to enable the country-man,
without journeying, to satisfy to the full his economic, social,
intellectual, and spiritual needs. We have made some tentative efforts.
The long war over the land, which resulted in the transference of the
land from landlord to cultivator, has advanced us part of the way,
but the Land Acts offered no complete solution. We were assured by hot
enthusiasts of the magic of proprietorship, but Ireland has not tilled
a single acre more since the Land Acts were passed. Our rural exodus
continued without any Moses to lead us to Jerusalems of our own. At
every station boys and girls bade farewell to their friends; and hardly
had the train steamed out when the natural exultation of adventure made
the faces of the emigrants glow because the world lay before them, and
human appetites the country could not satisfy were to be appeased at the
end of the journey.
How can we make the countryside in Ireland a place which nobody would
willingly emigrate from? When we begin to discuss this problem we soon
make the discovery that neither in the new world nor the old has there
been much first-class thinking on the life of the countryman. This will
be apparent if we compare the quality of thought which has been devoted
to the problems of the city State, or the constitution of widespread
dominions, from the days of Solon and Aristotle down to the time of
Alexander Hamilton, and compare it with the quality of thought which has
been brought to bear on the problems of the rural community.
On the labors of the countryman depend the whole strength and health,
nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country,
politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the
countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table.
It seems to be so in Canada and the States even, countries which we in
Europe for long regarded as mainly agricultural. It seems only yesterday
to the imagination that they were colonized, and yet we find the
Minister of Agriculture in Canada announcing a decline in the rural
population in Eastern Canada. As children sprung from the loins of
diseased parents manifest at an early age the same defects in their
constitution, so Canada and the States, though in their national
childhood, seem already threatened by the same disease from which
classic Italy perished, and whose ravages today make Great Britain seem
to the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit--ruddy
without, but eaten away within and rotten at the core. One expects
disease in old age, but not in youth. We expect young countries to sow
their wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle down
to national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles--the
result of excessive energy--as we are by symptoms of premature decay. No
nation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry, contented
with rural employments, however discontented with other things, exists
on its soil. The disease which has attacked our great populations here
and in America is a discontent with rural life. Nothing which has been
done hitherto seems able to promote content. It is true, indeed, that
science has gone out into the fields, but the labors of the chemist,
the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer are not enough to
ensure health. What is required is the art of the political thinker, the
imagination which creates a social order and adjusts it to human needs.
The physician who understands the general laws of human health is of
more importance to us here than the specialist. The genius of rural life
has not yet appeared. We have no fundamental philosophy concerning it,
but we have treasures of political wisdom dealing with humanity as a
social organism in the city States or as great nationalities. It might
be worth while inquiring to what extent the wisdom of a Solon, an
Aristotle, a Rousseau, or an Alexander Hamilton might be applied to the
problem of the rural community. After all, men are not so completely
changed in character by their rural environment that their social needs
do not, to a large extent, coincide with the needs of the townsman. They
cannot be considered as creatures of a different species. Yet statesmen
who have devoted so much thought to the constitution of empires and the
organization of great cities, who have studied their psychology, have
almost always treated the rural problem purely as an economic problem,
as if agriculture was a business only and not a life.
Our great nations and widespread empires arose in a haphazard fashion
out of city States and scattered tribal communities. The fusion of these
into larger entities, which could act jointly for offence or defense,
so much occupied the thoughts of their rulers that everything else was
subordinated to it. As a result, the details of our modern civilizations
are all wrong. There is an intensive life at a few great political or
industrial centres, and wide areas where there is stagnation and decay.
Stagnation is most obvious in rural districts. It is so general that it
has been often assumed that there was something inherent in rural life
which made the countryman slow in mind as his own cattle. But this is
not so, as I think can be shown. There is no reason why as intense,
intellectual, and progressive a life should not be possible in the
country as in the towns. The real reason for the stagnation is that the
country population is not organized. We often hear the expression, "the
rural community," but where do we find rural communities? There are
rural populations, but that is altogether a different thing. The word
"community" implies an association of people having common interests and
common possessions, bound together by laws and regulations which express
these common interests and ideals, and define the relation of the
individual to the community. Our rural populations are no more closely
connected, for the most part, than the shifting sands on the seashore.
Their life is almost entirely individualistic. There are personal
friendships, of course, but few economic or social partnerships.
Everybody pursues his own occupation without regard to the occupation of
his neighbors. If a man emigrates it does not affect the occupation of
those who farm the land all about him. They go on ploughing and digging,
buying and selling, just as before. They suffer no perceptible economic
loss by the departure of half-a-dozen men from the district. A true
community would, of course, be affected by the loss of its members. A
co-operative society, if it loses a dozen members, the milk of their
cows, their orders for fertilizers, seeds, and feeding-stuffs, receives
serious injury to its prosperity. There is a minimum of trade below
which its business cannot fall without bringing about a complete
stoppage of its work and an inability to pay its employees. That is the
difference between a community and an unorganized population. In the
first the interests of the community make a conscious and direct appeal
to the individual, and the community, in its turn, rapidly develops an
interest in the welfare of the member. In the second, the interest of
the individual in the community is only sentimental, and as there is no
organization the community lets its units slip away or disappear without
comment or action. We had true rural communities in ancient Ireland,
though the organization was rather military than economic. But the
members of a clan had common interests. They owned the land in common.
It was a common interest to preserve it intact. It was to their interest
to have a numerous membership of the clan, because it made it less
liable to attack. Men were drawn by the social order out of merely
personal interests into a larger life. In their organizations they were
unconsciously groping, as all human organizations are, towards the final
solidarity of humanity--the federation of the world.
Well, these old rural communities disappeared. The greater organizations
of nation or empire regarded the smaller communities jealously in the
past, and broke them up and gathered all the strings of power into
capital cities. The result was a growth of the State, with a local decay
of civic, patriotic, or public feeling, ending in bureaucracies and
State departments, where paid officials, devoid of intimacy with local
needs, replaced the services naturally and voluntarily rendered in an
earlier period. The rural population, no longer existing as a rural
community, sank into stagnation. There was no longer a common interest,
a social order turning their minds to larger than individual ends. Where
feudalism was preserved, the feudal chief, if the feeling of noblesse
oblige was strong, might act as a centre of progress, but where this was
lacking social decay set in. The difficulty of moving the countryman,
which has become traditional, is not due to the fact that he lives in
the country, but to the fact that he lives in an unorganized society.
If in a city people want an art gallery or public baths or recreation
grounds, there is a machinery which can be set in motion; there are
corporations and urban councils which can be approached. If public
opinion is evident--and it is easy to organize public opinion in a
town--the city representatives will consider the scheme, and if they
approve and it is within their power as a council, they are able to levy
rates to finance the art gallery, recreation grounds, public gardens,
or whatever else. Now let us go to a country district where there is no
organization. It may be obvious to one or two people that the place is
perishing and the intelligence of its humanity is decaying, lacking some
centre of life. They want a village hall, but how is it to be obtained?
They begin talking about it to this person or that. They ask these
people to talk to their friends, and the ripples go out weakening and
widening for months, perhaps for years. I know of districts where this
has happened. There are hundreds of parishes in Ireland where one or
two men want co-operative societies or village halls or rural libraries.
They discuss the matter with their neighbors, but find a complete
ignorance on the subject, and consequent lethargy. There is no social
organism with a central life to stir. Before enthusiasm can be kindled
there must be some knowledge. The countryman reads little, and it is a
long and tedious business before enough people are excited to bring them
to the point of appealing to some expert to come in and advise.
More changes often take place within a dozen years after a co-operative
society is first started than have taken place for a century previous. I
am familiar with a district--in the northwest of Ireland. It was a most
wretchedly poor district. The farmers were at the mercy of the gombeen
traders and the agricultural middlemen. Then a dozen years ago a
co-operative society was formed. I am sure that the oldest inhabitant
would agree with me that more changes for the better for farmers have
taken place since the co-operative society was started than he could
remember in all his previous life. The reign of the gombeen man is over.
The farmers control their own buying and selling. Their organization
markets for them the eggs and poultry. It procures seeds, fertilizers,
and domestic requirements. It turns the members' pigs into bacon. They
have a village hall and a woman's organization. They sell the products
of the women's industry. They have a co-operative band, social
gatherings, and concerts. They have spread out into half-a-dozen
parishes, going southward and westward with their propaganda, and
in half-a-dozen years, in all that district, previously without
organization, there will be well-organized farmers' guilds,
concentrating in themselves the trade of their district, having
meeting-places where the opinion of the members can be taken, having a
machinery, committees, and executive officers to carry out whatever may
be decided on: and having funds, or profits, the joint property of the
community, which can be drawn upon to finance their undertakings. It
ought to be evident what a tremendous advantage it is to farmers in
a district to have such organizations, what a lever they can pull
and control. I have tried to indicate the difference between a rural
population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together
by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who
are closely knit together in an association and who form a true social
organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find
expression and society is malleable to the general will. I assert
that there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real
prosperity without such farmers' organizations or guilds. Wherever rural
prosperity is reported of any country inquire into it, and it will be
found that it depends on rural organization. Wherever there is rural
decay, if it is inquired into, it will be found that there was a rural
population but no rural community, no organization, no guild to promote
common interests and unite the countrymen in defense of them.