Farming with a Pen 7 



It is a misfortune of mankind that every man 

 must be born into a mob, and I think the best 

 thing that ever came to me was the longing to get 

 out of mine. The younger the better, and after 

 the first deliverance, I dragged myself in and out 

 of succeeding mobs, only to find that they were 

 in every case much the same an organised 

 attempt to average human values at the expense 

 of the top for the benefit of the bottom. Your 

 mob may be a " set " in society, a literary " school," 

 a cult in criticism, a " departure " in art, a political 

 party or, in its most vicious form, an Irish League. 

 In any form, it starts the question : Why should 

 a man be coerced to accept for his standard an 

 average below his value ? Having survived so 

 many baptisms on the way to discover myself, I 

 longed for the hills, and came to see a good 

 furrow as a thing of beauty. The Irish, of all 

 peoples, have need to see that until the individual 

 is permitted, the community is blind. As a 

 people, we bind each other down in a hundred 

 deadly fetters, crippling the individual for the 

 alleged convenience of the crowd, and for their 

 destruction in the end. Every interest of Irish life 

 proclaims it, and agriculture most of all, because 

 the mob cult can dominate the agrarian mind 

 more easily than any other. There is never more 

 than one in ten who can really see. Destroy him, 

 as the Irish always do, and all are blind. 



The philosophy of the matter may be clear 

 enough to me now, but it was not so when I had 

 to decide between the Strand and Mayo as my 



