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binatioii which is suitable to farmers, as we all know, is not the 

 joint stock method, but the cooperative movemewt. I have al- 

 ways felt that the reason that agricultural cooperation lags so far 

 behind — the reason why even in this congress it is not thought 

 necessary to give more than an hour or so out of a week to the 

 discussion of agricultural cooperation — is that in the urbanization 

 of all thought people in these days think the town method is suit- 

 able to the country conditions. They are still hankering after 

 the joint stock method, and have not yet learnt that cooperation 

 is the only method suitable to agricultural conditions. There- 

 fore, we say you have to start by teaching cooperation, and that 

 until you have done that you cannot successfully introduce scien- 

 tific methods into the practice of agriculture, nor until you have 

 got people to come together in the business of their lives, can 

 you get them to come together for higlier intellectual ajid social 

 purposes. 



Our formula in Ireland for solving the rural problem has some 

 notoriety now. It is better farming, better business, better liv- 

 ing, and we say that you must begin with better business, and 

 that better business is cooperation. Now I say nothing about the 

 Eastern origin of the most typical of the Irish people. I think 

 myself that their addiction to cooperation has a great deal to do 

 with that. But, broadly speaking, the Irish people belong to the 

 associative races rather than to the individualistic, and that is a 

 tremendous advantage, and it is in that respect that I think many 

 of the tropical countries, especially India, might learn a great 

 deal from our work in Ireland, not so perhaps from the suc- 

 cesses as from the failures. I myself have had five-and-twenty 

 years of work in that country, and I have learnt far more fron\ 

 my failures than I have from my successes ; and I am in a posi- 

 tion now, in dealing with people who have the same kind of out- 

 look towards this problem, to suggest to them how to avoid many 

 of the mistakes we have made. 



The most important respect of all, I should say, in which co- 

 operation in dealing with the tropics has to be studied is in the 

 precise relations which ought to exist between State assistance 

 and organized voluntary effort. As you go down in the economic 

 and social scale, it becomes more and more necessary to develop 

 self-reliance, but at the same time it is more and more necessary 

 to begin with State assistance without weakening the i^atient's re- 

 sistance U) the many diseases which attack the ])rinciple of self- 

 help. 



I have one practical suggestion to offer, and that is that this 

 Congress should rec(jgnize that agricultural organization is not 

 an amateur business but a very highly technical business, and 

 that men must be trained for it if they are going to have any 

 success in it. That we have learnt in Ireland ; they have learnt 

 it in Rngland ; and they have learnt it in Scotland. We ha\e 

 had in these countries, where the whole trend of thought had 



