ORGANISATION. 171 



advantage. He is in the main a producer. Evidently 

 the farmer's Co-operation, although still the same beneficent 

 institution as the industrial worker's, resting upon the same 

 foundation — a foundation that cannot be shaken — accord- 

 ingly presents itself with rather a different face. There is no 

 question here, it is true, of emancipating the working man. 

 And the purely consumptive side of present-day industrial 

 Co-operation drops into the background. The mass of 

 industrial co-operators are mainly consumers. On the 

 farmer's side domestic consumption is of considerable 

 importance, but not as a question of the technical calhng. 

 It certainly makes an appeal to him. He may greatly 

 benefit by it — benefit, among other things, for the organi- 

 sation of other Co-operation which professionally concerns 

 him. And in very deed we find that farmers enrolling 

 themselves under the banner of the Agricultural Organisa- 

 tion Society, not only small ones, but also the substantial 

 farmers of the Eastern Counties Association, were particu- 

 larly keen upon profiting by the rapprochement between 

 agricultural and industrial co-operative societies, of which 

 I made myself the successful advocate at the Birmingham 

 Congress in 1905, in the way of obtaining cheap goods for 

 domestic consumption. To very small farmers and agri- 

 cultural labourers the services of a co-operative distributive 

 society, cheapening their grocer's and draper's goods, making 

 them independent of the gombeen man and the scarcely 

 less rapacious village shopkeeper in some parts of our 

 country, would be a very substantial boon. It ought to 

 be systematically striven for. There are parishes in Switzer- 

 land in which the shopkeeper has been entirely crowded 

 out by the farmers' own co-operative stores. And the rural 

 community is the more prosperous for it, laying by out 

 of its business with the stores, instead of running into debt 

 with the grocer-draper. In Eastern Switzerland, so it may 

 be to the point to mention, the transaction of such business 

 in combination with purely agricultural Co-operation, such 

 as we now claim the right of doing in Ireland, has proved 

 not only a benefit but a necessity, and in truth the salvation 

 of agricultural Co-operation, which was on the point of 



