AGRICULTURAL CO-OPERATION IN IRELAND. 233 



miscellaneous societies which carry on various rural industries, from flax- 

 scutching- to the making- of lace, and also include the improvement and 

 marketing of poultry and eg-gs. Lastly — they come last, but had I realised their 

 enormous educational value, they should have preceded all other forms of asso- 

 ciation — come 87 agricultural banks. These societies exist for the sole purpose 

 ot creating funds to be lent out to their members. The loans are made chiefly on 

 the security of the character as to honesty and industry, of the borrowers, but 

 only when the committee is satisfied that the purpose to which the loan is to 

 be applied is a productive one, and that it can be repaid, interest and principal, 

 out of such application. When I tell you that these associations are registered 

 with unlimited liability, that thousands of loans have been made by them to 

 their members, that the cases of unpunctual repayment are rare, and that 

 default is unknown, that the system flourishes best and is productive of the 

 greatest good in the poorest districts, I think you will fancy that there must 

 be something very like magic in the agency which converts hopelessly insolvent 

 individuals into a community to which capital can be advanced with the 

 certainty of repayment. And, surely, the transformation scene is remarkable. 

 You find a desperately poor community owned body and soul by the local 

 trader, who systematically keeps his customers just up to their necks in debt, 

 and then supplies them with barely enough to keep them alive, taking in 

 exchange everything they have got, from their poultry and eggs to their 

 labour. If you could analyse the accounts in which these barter transactions 

 are recorded, you would find revealed a system of usury more ingenious than 

 any which Shylock knew. I leave to your imagination the economic and social 

 effect produced when, by co-operative organisation of the intelligence of these 

 poor but honest and would-be industrious folk, payment in cash is supple- 

 mented for a barter credit, when the functions of capital, and the meaning and 

 the proper proportions of interest come to be understood, and when the 

 diff"erence between borrowing to spend, and borrowing to make, so brightens 

 the mental horizon that the man who has always hidden his indebtedness, as 

 he would an unsightly sore, now parades his credit as the sign that by virtue 

 of his honesty and liis industry he is given by his fellows the opportunity of 

 becoming a wealth-producer in the community. 



" There is one factor in the Irish problem which perhaps more than any other 

 stimulated the Irish pioneers, which appealed equally to the comprehensive 

 sympathies of Lord Monteagle and Father Finlay, the President and Vice- 

 President of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, to Mr. Anderson and 

 Mr. Russell, its Secretary and Assistant Secretaty, and which in some measure 

 directed the trend of the Irish movement. Our population is melting away as 

 fast as yours is being reinforced. The drain from Ireland is worse from the 

 standpoint of quality even than from that of quantity, for the active and enter- 

 prising leave us with an undue proportion of the very old and very young, of 

 the mentally and physically unsound. These leaders and their associates 

 realised that in addition to organised self-help, which was, I need hardly tell 

 you, their chief reliance, the economic condition of the country required a 

 measure of State aid — a slight departure from your idolised laissez faire — not 

 by any means as a substitute for, but as a stimulant and supplement to, asso- 

 ciated eff"ort. This principle was accepted by the Recess Committee, a self- 

 appointed body of Irishmen representing all shades of opinion, which, you 

 will remember, issued a unanimous report calling upon the Government to 

 create a new Department of State. Mr. Gerald Balfour, with a statesmanship 

 quite new to us in Ireland, conceded an Irish demand so novel in its unanimity, 

 and in the non-political arguments upon which it was founded. Now State aid 

 to agricultural industry unless accompanied by a growing spirit of self-reliance 

 would, in our opinion, be as disastrous as, properly administered, it ought to 



