REMEDIES SUGGESTED. 93 



and enterprise, and as a necessary condition to all these, 

 more working capital and full freedom. ' ' As farming became 

 a trade, agricultural progress demanded less personal 

 dependence, a freer hand, a larger scope for individual 

 enterprise." So Mr. Prothero puts it. Our traditional 

 fondness for super antiquas vias stare, however admirable 

 in matters of constitutionalism, is wholly out of place in 

 such a matter as this. We want, in Leon Say's w^ords, 

 efficient and active operators as well as a good machine.^ 

 And to ensure that we have them we want some machinery 

 which will of a certainty produce them. Other nations, 

 which look not for " three livings " in each agricultural 

 enterprise, but for only one— but that a good one — have 

 prospered and developed largely, while we have retrograded. 

 Their " one " interest, like the one lion's cub of the fable, 

 has proved worth more than the whole litter of less valuable 

 fry to which other animals give birth. It has made them 

 think, learn, act. It has led them to " organise," which 

 our old-fashioned farmers still will not do. It is dishearten- 

 ing to see men of this class, who ought to be men " of light 

 and leading " to their humbler brethren, so determinately 

 close their eyes to patent facts, and distinctly warn farmers 

 against that which above all things is calculated to bring 

 them deliverance from troubles which they never cease to 

 complain of, that is, Organisation. Fortunately the world 

 is moving on, in spite of such men. WTiere is the isolated 

 large farmer's power by the side of those giant Co-operative 

 Unions which we see at work abroad, cutting us out and 

 giving their country the lead of us ? It is Co-operative 

 Organisation which has secured to those neighbours of 

 ours a dependable supply of credit, absolutely indispensable 

 to modern farming, on the only lines upon which such 

 supply is possible, that is, by self-help. Do not we observe 

 precisely the same effect in Ireland ? The abolition of 

 dual interest, made to give place to only one, but that an 

 effective one, has — as is shown by j\Ir. Hall, who has severe 

 enough criticism to bestow upon some points of Irish land 



^ "// ne suffit pas d'avoir line bonne machine ; il faut aiissi avoir 

 un bon mecanicien." 



