VI.

It is the business of the rural reformer to create the rural community.

It is the antecedent to the creation of a rural civilization. We have to

organize the community so that it can act as one body. It is not enough

to organize farmers in a district for one purpose only--in a credit

society, a dairy society, a fruit society, a bacon factory, or in a

co-operative store. All these may be and must be beginnings; but if they

do not develop and absorb all rural business into their organization

they will have little effect on character. No true social organism will

have been created. If people unite as consumers to buy together they

only come into contact on this one point; there is no general identity

of interest. If co-operative societies are specialized for this purpose

or that--as in Great Britain or on the Continent--to a large extent the

limitation of objects prevents a true social organism from being formed.

The latter has a tremendous effect on human character. The specialized

society only develops economic efficiency. The evolution of humanity

beyond its present level depends absolutely on its power to unite and

create true social organisms. Life in its higher forms is only possible

because of the union of myriads of tiny lives to form a larger being,

which manifests will, intelligence, affection, and the spiritual powers.

The life of the amoeba or any other unicellular organism is low compared

with the life in more complex organisms, like the ant or bee. Man is

the most highly developed living organism on the globe; yet his body

is built up of innumerable cells, each of which might be described as

a tiny life in itself. But they are built up in man into such a close

association that what affects one part of the body affects all. The pain

which the whole being feels if a part is wounded, if one cell in the

human body is hurt, should prove that to the least intelligent. The

nervous system binds all the tiny cells together, and they form in this

totality a being infinitely higher, more powerful, than the cells which

compose it. They are able to act together and achieve things impossible

to the separated cells. Now humanity today is, to some extent, like

the individual cells. It is trying to unite together to form a real

organism, which will manifest higher qualities of life than the

individual can manifest. But very few of the organisms created by

society enable the individual to do this. The joint-stock companies or

capitalist concerns which bring men together at this work or that do

not yet make them feel their unity. Existence under a common government

effects this still less. Our modern states have not yet succeeded in

building up that true national life where all feel the identity of

interest; where the true civic or social feeling is engendered and the

individual bends all his efforts to the success of the community on

which his own depends; where, in fact, the ancient Greek conception

of citizenship is realized, and individuals are created who are ever

conscious of the identity of interest between themselves and their race.

In the old Greek civilizations this was possible because their States

were small, indeed their ideal State contained no more citizens than

could be affected by the voice of a single orator. Such small States,

though they produced the highest quality of life within themselves,

are no longer possible as political entities. We have to see whether we

could not, within our widespread nationalities, create communities

by economic means, where something of the same sense of solidarity of

interest might be engendered and the same quality of life maintained.

I am greatly ambitious for the rural community. But it is no use having

mean ambitions. Unless people believe the result of their labors will

result in their equaling or surpassing the best that has been done

elsewhere, they will never get very far. We in Ireland are in quest of

a civilization. It is a great adventure, the building up of a

civilization--the noblest which could be undertaken by any persons. It

is at once the noblest and the most practical of all enterprises, and

I can conceive of no greater exaltation for the spirit of man than

the feeling that his race is acting nobly; and that all together are

performing a service, not only to each other, but to humanity and those

who come after them, and that their deeds will be remembered. It may

seem a grotesque juxtaposition of things essentially different in

character, to talk of national idealism and then of farming, but it is

not so. They are inseparable. The national idealism which will not go

out into the fields and deal with the fortunes of the working farmers is

false dealism. Our conception of a civilization must include, nay, must

begin with the life of the humblest, the life of the average man

or manual worker, for if we neglect them we will build in sand. The

neglected classes will wreck our civilization. The pioneers of a new

social order must think first of the average man in field or factory,

and so unite these and so inspire them that the noblest life will be

possible through their companionship. If you will not offer people the

noblest and best they will go in search of it. Unless the countryside

can offer to young men and women some satisfactory food for soul as well

as body, it will fail to attract or hold its population, and they

will go to the already overcrowded towns; and the lessening of rural

production will affect production in the cities and factories, and the

problem of the unemployed will get still keener. The problem is not only

an economic problem. It is a human one. Man does not live by cash alone,

but by every gift of fellowship and brotherly feeling society offers

him. The final urgings of men and women are towards humanity. Their

desires are for the perfecting of their own life, and as Whitman says,

where the best men and women are there the great city stands, though it

is only a village. It is one of the illusions of modern materialistic

thought to suppose that as high a quality of life is not possible in a

village as in a great city, and it ought to be one of the aims of

rural reformers to dissipate this fallacy, and to show that it is

possible--not indeed to concentrate wealth in country communities as in

the cities--but that it is possible to bring comfort enough to satisfy

any reasonable person, and to create a society where there will be

intellectual life and human interests. We will hear little then of the

rural exodus. The country will retain and increase its population and

productiveness. Like attracts like. Life draws life to itself. Intellect

awakens intellect, and the country will hold its own tug for tug with

the towns.

Now it may be said I have talked a long while round and round the rural

community, but I have not suggested how it is to be created. I am coming

to that. It really cannot be created. It is a natural growth when

the right seed is planted. Co-operation is the seed. Let us consider

Ireland. Twenty-five years ago there was not a single co-operative

society in the country. Individualism was the mode of life. Every farmer

manufactured and sold as seemed best in his eyes. It was generally the

worst possible way he could have chosen. Then came Sir Horace Plunkett

and his colleagues, preaching co-operation. A creamery was established

here, an agricultural society there, and having planted the ideas it

was some time before the economic expert could decide whether they were

planted in fertile soil. But that question was decided many years ago.

The co-operative society, started for whatever purpose originally, is

an omnivorous feeder, and it exercises a magnetic influence on all

agricultural activities; so that we now have societies which buy milk,

manufacture and sell butter, deal in poultry and eggs, cure bacon,

provide fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, seeds, and machinery for their

members, and even cater for every requirement of the farmer's household.

This magnetic power of attracting and absorbing to themselves the

various rural activities which the properly constituted co-operative

societies have, makes them develop rapidly, until in the course of a

decade or a generation there is created a real social organism, where

the members buy together, manufacture together, market together, where

finally their entire interests are bound up with the interests of the

community. I believe in half a century the whole business of rural

Ireland will be done co-operatively. This is not a wild surmise, for we

see exactly the same process going on in Denmark, Germany, Italy, and

every country where the co-operative seed was planted. Let us suppose

that in a generation all the rural industries are organized on

co-operative lines, what kind of a community should we expect to find as

the result? How would its members live? What would be their relations

to one another and their community? The agricultural scientist is making

great discoveries. The mechanical engineer goes from one triumph to

another. The chemist already could work wonders in our fields if

there was a machinery for him to work through. We cannot foretell the

developments in each branch, but we can see clearly that the organized

community can lay hold of discoveries and inventions which the

individual farmer cannot. It is little for the co-operative society to

buy expensive threshing sets and let its members have the use of them,

but the individual farmer would have to save a long time before he could

raise several hundred pounds. The society is a better buyer than the

individual. It can buy things the individual cannot buy. It is a better

producer also. The plant for a creamery is beyond the individual farmer;

but our organized farmers in Ireland, small though they are, find it no

trouble to erect and equip a creamery with plant costing two thousand

pounds. The organized rural community of the future will generate its

own electricity at its central buildings, and run not only its factories

and other enterprises by this power, but will supply light to the houses

of its members and also mechanical power to run machinery on the farm.

One of our Irish societies already supplies electric light for the town

it works in. In the organized rural community the eggs, milk, poultry,

pigs, cattle, grain, and wheat produced on the farm and not consumed,

or required for further agricultural production, will automatically be

delivered to the co-operative business centre of the district, where the

manager of the dairy will turn the milk into butter or cheese, and the

skim milk will be returned to feed the community's pigs. The poultry and

egg department will pack and dispatch the fowl and eggs to market. The

mill will grind the corn and return it ground to the member, or there

may be a co-operative bakery to which some of it may go. The pigs will

be dealt with in the abattoir, sent as fresh pork to the market or

be turned into bacon to feed the members. We may be certain that any

intelligent rural community will try to feed itself first, and will only

sell the surplus. It will realize that it will be unable to buy any food

half as good as the food it produces. The community will hold in

common all the best machinery too expensive for the members to buy

individually. The agricultural laborers will gradually become skilled

mechanics, able to direct threshers, binders, diggers, cultivators, and

new implements we have no conception of now. They will be members of the

society, sharing in its profits in proportion to their wages, even as

the farmer will in proportion to his trade. The co-operative community

will have its own carpenters, smiths, mechanics, employed in its

workshop at repairs or in making those things which can profitably be

made locally. There may be a laundry where the washing--a heavy burden

for the women--will be done: for we may be sure that every scrap of

power generated will be utilized. One happy invention after another will

come to lighten the labor of life. There will be, of course, a village

hall with a library and gymnasium, where the boys and girls will be made

straight, athletic, and graceful. In the evenings, when the work of

the day is done, if we went into the village hall we would find a dance

going on or perhaps a concert. There might be a village choir or band.

There would be a committee-room where the council of the community

would meet once a week; for their enterprises would have grown, and the

business of such a parish community might easily be over one hundred

thousand pounds, and would require constant thought. There would be

no slackness on the part of the council in attending, because their

fortunes would depend on their communal enterprises, and they would

have to consider reports from the managers and officials of the various

departments. The co-operative community would be a busy place. In years

when the society was exceptionally prosperous, and earned larger profits

than usual on its trade, we should expect to find discussions in which

all the members would join as to the use to be made of these profits:

whether they should be altogether divided or what portion of them should

be devoted to some public purpose. We may be certain that there would

be animated discussions, because a real solidarity of feeling would have

arisen and a pride in the work of the community engendered, and they

would like to be able to outdo the good work done by the neighboring

communities.

One might like to endow the village school with a chemical laboratory,

another might want to decorate the village hall with reproductions

of famous pictures, another might suggest removing all the hedges and

planting the roadsides and lanes with gooseberry bushes, currant bushes,

and fruit trees, as they do in some German communes today. There would

be eloquent pleadings for this or that, for an intellectual heat would

be engendered in this human hive, and there would be no more illiterates

or ignoramuses. The teaching in the village school would be altered to

suit the new social order, and the children of the community would,

we may be certain, be instructed in everything necessary for the

intelligent conduct of the communal business. The spirit of rivalry

between one community and another, which exists today between

neighboring creameries, would excite the imagination of the members,

and the organized community would be as swift to act as the unorganized

community is slow to act. Intelligence would be organized as well

as business. The women would have their own associations, to promote

domestic economy, care of the sick and the children. The girls would

have their own industries of embroidery, crochet, lace, dress-making,

weaving, spinning, or whatever new industries the awakened intelligence

of women may devise and lay hold of as the peculiar labor of their

sex. The business of distribution of the produce and industries of the

community would be carried on by great federations, which would attend

to export and sale of the products of thousands of societies. Such

communities would be real social organisms. The individual would be free

to do as he willed, but he would find that communal activity would be

infinitely more profitable than individual activity. We would then

have a real democracy carrying on its own business, and bringing about

reforms without pleading to, or begging of, the State, or intriguing

with or imploring the aid of political middlemen to get this, that, or

the other done for them. They would be self-respecting, because they

would be self-helping above all things. The national councils and

meetings of national federations would finally become the real

Parliament of the nation; for wherever all the economic power is

centered, there also is centered all the political power. And no

politician would dare to interfere with the organized industry of a

nation.

There is nothing to prevent such communities being formed. They would

be a natural growth once the seed was planted. We see such communities

naturally growing up in Ireland, with perhaps a little stimulus from

outside from rural reformers and social enthusiasts. If this ideal of

the organized rural community is accepted there will be difficulties, of

course, and enemies to be encountered. The agricultural middleman is a

powerful person. He will rage furiously. He will organize all his forces

to keep the farmers in subjection, and to retain his peculiar functions

of fleecing the farmer as producer and the general public as consumer.

But unless we are determined to eliminate the middleman in agriculture

we will fall to effect anything worth while attempting. I would lay

down certain fundamental propositions which, I think, should be accepted

without reserve as a basis of reform. First, that the farmers must be

organized to have complete control over all the business connected with

their industry. Dual control is intolerable. Agriculture will never be

in a satisfactory condition if the farmer is relegated to the position

of a manual worker on his land; if he is denied the right of a

manufacturer to buy the raw materials of his industry on trade terms; if

other people are to deal with his raw materials, his milk, cream,

fruit, vegetables, live stock, grain, and other produce; and if these

capitalist middle agencies are to manufacture the farmers' raw material

into butter, bacon, or whatever else are to do all the marketing and

export, paying farmers what they please on the one hand, and charging

the public as much as they can on the other hand. The existence of these

middle agencies is responsible for a large proportion of the increased

cost of living, which is the most acute domestic problem of modern

industrial communities. They have too much power over the farmer,

and are too expensive a luxury for the consumer. It would be very

unbusinesslike for any country to contemplate the permanence in national

life of a class whose personal interests are always leading them to

fleece both producer and consumer alike. So the first fundamental idea

for reformers to get into their minds is that farmers, through their own

co-operative organizations, must control the entire business connected

with agriculture. There will not be so much objection to co-operative

sale as to co-operative purchase by the farmers. But one is as necessary

as the other. We must bear in mind, what is too often forgotten, that

farmers are manufacturers, and as such are entitled to buy the raw

materials for their industry at wholesale prices. Every other kind

of manufacturer in the world gets trade terms when he buys. Those

who buy--not to consume, but to manufacture and sell again--get their

requirements at wholesale terms in every country in the world. If

a publisher of books is approached by a bookseller he gives that

bookseller trade terms, because he buys to sell again. If I, as a

private individual, want one of those books I must pay the full retail

price. Even the cobbler, the carpenter, the solitary artist, get trade

terms. The farmer, who is as much a manufacturer as the shipbuilder, or

the factory proprietor, is as much entitled to trade terms when he buys

the raw materials for his industry. His seeds, fertilizers, ploughs,

implements, cake, feeding-stuffs are the raw materials of his industry,

which he uses to produce wheat, beef, mutton, pork, or whatever else;

and, in my opinion, there should be no differentiation between the

farmer when he buys and any other kind of manufacturer. Is it any wonder

that agriculture decays in countries where the farmers are expected to

buy at retail prices and sell at wholesale prices? We must not, to save

any friction, sell the rights of farmers. The second proposition I lay

down is that this necessary organization work among the farmers must be

carried on by an organizing body which is entirely controlled by those

interested in agriculture--farmers and their friends. To ask the State

or a State Department to undertake this work is to ask a body influenced

and often controlled by powerful capitalists, and middle agencies which

it should be the aim of the organization to eliminate. The State can,

without obstruction from any quarter, give farmers a technical education

in the science of farming; but let it once interfere with business,

and a horde of angry interests set to work to hamper and limit by

every possible means and compromises on matters of principle, where no

compromise ought to be permitted, are almost inevitable.

A voluntary organizing body like the Irish Agricultural Organization

Society, which was the first to attempt the co-operative organization of

farmers in these islands, is the only kind of body which can pursue its

work fearlessly, unhampered by alien interests. The moment such a body

declares its aims, its declaration automatically separates the sheep

from the goats, and its enemies are outside and not inside. The

organizing body should be the heart and centre of the farmers' movement,

and if the heart has its allegiance divided, its work will be poor and

ineffectual, and very soon the farmers will fall away from it to follow

more single-hearted leaders. No trades union would admit representatives

of capitalist employers on its committee, and no organization of farmers

should allow alien or opposing interest on their councils to clog

the machine or betray the cause. This is the best advice I can give

reformers. It is the result of many years' experience in this work.

An industry must have the same freedom of movement as an individual in

possession of all his powers. An industry divided against itself can

no more prosper than a household divided against itself. By the means

I have indicated the farmers can become the masters of their own

destinies, just as the urban workers can, I think, by steadfastly

applying the same principles, emancipate themselves. It is a battle in

which, as in all other battles, numbers and moral superiority united

are irresistible; and in the Irish struggle to create a true democracy

numbers and the power of moral ideas are with the insurgents.