VII.

It would be a bitter reproach on the household of our nation if there

were any unconsidered, who were left in poverty and without hope and

outside our brotherhood. We have not yet considered the agricultural

laborer--the proletarian of the countryside. His is, in a sense, the

most difficult problem of any. The basis of economic independence in

his industry is the possession of land, and that is not readily to be

obtained in Ireland. The earth does not upheave itself from beneath the

sea and add new land to that already above water in response to our

need for it. Yet I would not pass away from the rural laborer without,

however inadequately, indicating some curves in his future evolution.

These laborers are not in Ireland half so numerous as farmers, for it

is a country of small holdings, where the farmer and his family are

themselves laborers. Labor is badly paid, and, owing to the lack of

continuous cropping of the land, it is often left without employment at

seasons when employment is most needed. No class which is taken up today

and dropped tomorrow will in modern times remain long in a country.

Employers often act as if they thought labor could be taken up and laid

down again like a pipe and tobacco. None have contributed so to thicken

the horde of Irish exiles as the rural laborers. Three hundred thousand

of them in less than my lifetime have left the fields of Ireland for the

factories of the new world. Yet I can only rejoice if Irishmen, who are

badly dealt with in their motherland, find an ampler life and a more

prosperous career in another land. A wage of ten or eleven shillings a

week will bind none but the unaspiring lout to his country. But I would

like to make Ireland a land which, because of the human kindness in it,

few would willingly leave. The agricultural proletarian, like all other

labor, should be organized in a national union. That is bound to come.

But the agricultural laborer should, I think, no more than labor in the

cities, make the raising of wages his main or only object. He should

rather strive to make himself economically independent; or, in the

alternative, seek for status by integration into the co-operative

communities of farmers by becoming a member, and by pressing for

permanent employment by the community rather than casual employment by

the individual. Agricultural labor undoubtedly will have to struggle for

better remuneration. Yet it has to be remembered that agriculture is

a protean industry. It is not like mining, where the colliery produces

coal and nothing but coal, and where the miners have a practical

monopoly of supply. If miners are dissatisfied with wages and are well

organized they can enforce their terms, and the colliery owners may

almost be indifferent, because they can charge the increased cost

of working to the public. But agriculture, as I said, is protean and

changes its forms perpetually. If tillage does not pay this year, next

year the farmer may have his land in grass. He reverts to the cheapest

methods of farming when prices are low, or labor asks a wage which the

farmer believes it would be unprofitable to pay. In this way pressure

on the farmer for extra wages might result in two men being employed

to herd cows where a dozen men were previously employed at tillage.

The farmer cannot easily--as the mine-owner--unload his burden on the

general public by the increase of prices. There are many difficulties,

which seem almost insoluble, if we propose to ourselves to integrate the

rural laborer into the general economic life of the country by making

him a partner in the industry he works on. But what I hope for most

is first that the natural evolution of the rural community, and the

concentration of individual manufacture, purchase and sale, into

communal enterprises, will lead to a very large co-operative ownership

of expensive machinery, which will necessitate the communal employment

of labor. If this takes place, as I hope it will, the rural laborer,

instead of being a manual worker using primitive implements, will have

the status of a skilled mechanic employed permanently by a cooperative

community. He should be a member of the society which employs him, and

in the division of profits receive in proportion to his wage, as the

farmers in proportion to their trade.

A second policy open to agricultural labor when it becomes organized

is the policy of collective farming. This I believe will and ought to

receive attention in the future. Co-operative societies of agricultural

laborers in Italy, Roumania, and elsewhere have rented land from

landowners. They then reallotted the land among themselves for

individual cultivation, or else worked it as a true co-operative

enterprise with labor, purchase and sale all communal enterprises, with

considerable benefit to the members. We can well understand a landowner

not liking to divide his land into small holdings, with all the

attendant troubles which in Ireland beset a landlord with small farmers

on his estate. But I think landowners in Ireland could be found who

would rent land to a co-operative society of skilled laborers who

approached the owner with a well-thought-out scheme. The success of one

colony would lead to others being started, as happened in Italy.

This solution of the problem of agricultural labor will be forced on us

for many reasons. The economic effects of the great European War, the

burden of debt piled on the participating nations, will make Ministers

shun schemes of reform involving a large use of national credit, or

which would increase the sum of national obligations. Land purchase

on the old term I believe cannot be continued. Yet we will demand the

intensive cultivation of the national estate, and increased production

of wealth, especially of food-stuffs. The large area of agricultural

land laid down for pasture is not so productive as tilled land, does

not sustain so large a population, and there will be more reasons in the

future than in the past for changing the character of farming in these

areas. The policy of collective farming offers a solution, and whatever

Government is in power should facilitate the settlement of men in

cooperative colonies and provide expert instructors as managers for the

first year or two if necessary. Such a policy would not be so expensive

as land purchase, and with fair rent fixed, hundreds of thousands of

people could be planted comfortably on the land in Ireland and produce

more wealth from it than could ever be produced from grazing lands,

and agricultural workers and the sons of farmers who now emigrate could

become economically independent.

I hope, also, that farmers, becoming more brotherly as their own

enterprises flourish, will welcome laborers into their co-operative

stores, credit banks, poultry and bee-keeping societies, and allow them

the benefits of cheap purchase, cheap credit, and of efficient marketing

of whatever the laborer may produce on his allotment. The growth of

national conscience and the spirit of human brotherhood, and a

feeling of shame that any should be poor and neglected in the national

household, will be needed to bring the rural laborer into the circle of

national life, and make him a willing worker in the general scheme.

If farmers will not, on their part, advance towards their laborers and

bring them into the co-operative community, then labor will be organized

outside their community and will be hostile, and will be always brooding

and scheming to strike a blow when the farmer can least bear it,--when

the ground must be tilled or the harvest gathered. And this, if peace

cannot be made, will result in a still greater decline of tillage and

the continued flight of the rural laborers, and the increase of the area

in grass, and the impoverishing of human life and national well-being.

Some policy to bring contentment to small holders and rural workers must

be formulated and acted upon. Agriculture is of more importance to the

nation than industry. Our task is to truly democratize civilization

and its agencies; to spread in widest commonalty culture, comfort,

intelligence, and happiness, and to give to the average man those things

which in an earlier age were the privileges of a few. The country is the

fountain of the life and health of a race. And this organization of the

country people into co-operative communities will educate them and make

them citizens in the true sense of the word, that is, people continually

conscious of their identity of interest with those about them.

It is by this conscious sense of solidarity of interest, which only the

organized co-operative community can engender in modern times, that the

higher achievements of humanity become possible. Religion has created

this spirit at times--witness the majestic cathedrals the Middle Ages

raised to manifest their faith. Political organization engendered the

passion of citizenship in the Greek States, and the Parthenon and a host

of lordly buildings crowned the hills and uplifted and filled with

pride the heart of the citizen. Our big countries, our big empires, and

republics, for all their military strength and science, and the wealth

which science has made it possible for man to win, do not create

citizenship because of the loose organization of society; because

individualism is rampant, and men, failing to understand the intricacies

of the vast and complex life of their country, fall back on private

life and private ambitions, and leave the honor of their country and the

making of laws and the application of the national revenues to a class

of professional politicians, in their turn in servitude to the interests

which supply party funds, and so we find corruption in high places and

cynicism in the people. It is necessary for the creation of citizens,

for the building up of a noble national life, that the social order

should be so organized that this sense of interdependence will be

constantly felt. It is also necessary for the preservation of the

physical health and beauty of our race that our people should live

more in the country and less in the cities. I believe it would be an

excellent thing for humanity if its civilization could be based on rural

industry mainly and not on urban industry. More and more men and women

in our modern civilization drift out of Nature, out of sweet air,

health, strength, beauty, into the cities, where in the third generation

there is a rickety population, mean in stature, vulgar or depraved in

character, with the image of the devil in mind and matter more than the

image of Deity. Those who go like it at first; but city life is like the

roll spoken of by the prophet, which was sweet in the mouth but bitter

in the belly. The first generation are intoxicated by the new life,

but in the third generation the cord is cut which connected them with

Nature, the Great Mother, and life shrivels up, sundered from the source

of life. Is there any prophet, any statesman, any leader, who will--as

Moses once led the Israelites out of the Egyptian bondage--excite

the human imagination and lead humanity back to Nature, to sunlight,

starlight, earth-breath, sweet air, beauty, gaiety, and health? Is it

impossible now to move humanity by great ideas, as Mahomet fired his

dark hosts to forgetfulness of life; or as Peter the Hermit awakened

Europe to a frenzy, so that it hurried its hot chivalry across a

continent to the Holy Land? Is not the earth mother of us all? Are not

our spirits clothed round with the substance of earth? Is it not from

Nature we draw life? Do we not perish without sunlight and fresh air?

Let us have no breath of air and in five minutes life is extinct. Yet

in the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on day by day. The

lover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any big city and may

look into ten thousand faces and see none that is lovely. Is not the

return of man to a natural life on the earth a great enough idea to

inspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid the green trees

and fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but men say there is

no intellectual life working on the land. No intellectual life when man

is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When the mysterious forces which

bring to birth and life are yet undiscovered; when the earth is teeming

with life, and the dumb brown lips of the ridges are breathing mystery!

Is not the growth of a tree from a tiny cell hidden in the earth as

provocative of thought as the things men learn at the schools? Is not

thought on these things more interesting than the sophistries of the

newspapers? It is only in Nature, and by thought on the problems of

Nature, that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to the

Mighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world.

Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the

grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they

grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of

poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities? The

memory lies on one "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." It

is terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements; the

depletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from the

flaring drink-shops. The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it while

it moves amid such things. And outside these places the clouds are

flying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, the

winds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leaf

to leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk. The

creation of a rural civilization is the greatest need of our time.

It may not come in our days, but we can lay the foundations of it,

preparing the way for the true prophet when he will come. The fight now

is not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who are

on the land contented, happy, and prosperous. And we must begin by

organizing them to defend what is left to them; to take back, industry

by industry, what was stolen from them. We must organize the country

people into communities, for without some kind of communal life men hold

no more together than the drifting sands by the seashore. There is a

natural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves from

the dawn of time. It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees to

build their hexagonal cells. If we read the history of civilization

we will find people in every land forming little clans co-operating

together. Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up; the

greed of powerful men puts an end to them. But, whether broken or not,

the moment the rural dweller is left to himself he begins again, with

nature prompting him, to form little clans--or nations rather--with his

fellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancient

Ireland. The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and the

counties are survivals of these old co-operative colonies, where the men

owned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed their

own social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections. It

was so in every land under the sun. It was so in ancient India and in

ancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them,

are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in

nature--the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. And

it is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that I

have put together these thoughts on the rural community.