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the urbanization of all thought people in these days think 

 the town method is suitable to the country conditions. They 

 are still hankering after the joint-stock method, and have not 

 yet learnt that co-operation is the only method suitable to 

 agricultural conditions. Therefore, we say you have to start 

 by teaching co-operation, and that until you have done that 

 you cannot successfully introduce scientific 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 higher intellectual and social purposes. 



Our formula in Ireland for solving the rural problem has 

 some notoriety now. It is better farming, better business, 

 better living, and we say that you must begin with better 

 business, and that better business is co-operation. Now I 

 say nothing about the Eastern origin of the most typical of 

 the Irish people. I think myself that their addiction to co- 

 operation has a great deal to do with that. But, broadly 

 speaking, the Irish 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 much perhaps from the successes as 

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

 of work in that country, and I have learnt far more from 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 

 outlook 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. 

 And the whole problem, it seems to me, in countries like 

 India, where the co-operative movement is in the hands of 

 what I think is the finest Civil Service in the world, is how 

 to administer large doses of State assistance without weaken- 

 ing the patient's resistance to the many diseases which attack 

 the principle of self-help. 



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

 this Congress should recognize that agricultural organization 



