212 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



such prohibition in connection with the employment of 

 Development Fund money, which makes the Irish prohibi- 

 tion only the more unfair. But there the Government 

 has considered it to be its duty to come to the assistance 

 of the nascent co-operative movement — which, it is true, 

 for want of proper guidance by people not only well inten- 

 tioned but at the same time also acquainted with co-opera- 

 tive practice, made little progress, and enlisted but meagre 

 material support — in a distinctly prejudicial way. There 

 should have been no occasion for this. We have wealthy 

 men enough in the country, interested in the matter, to 

 be able to finance the movement in its early stages, till it 

 should become self-supporting. And those people would 

 probably have come forward if there had been plain evidence 

 that the direction given was in expert hands, not of patrons, 

 but of experienced co-operators. At the outset it was not. 

 The Government, having paid the piper, as a matter of 

 course claims to call the tune. One of its representatives 

 has frankly urged this. And the " tune " called is not 

 in every instance a co-operative one. The Society has 

 practically become an annexe to the Board of Agriculture, 

 doing its will. One would like to know in what manner 

 our industrial co-operative movement would accept such an 

 arrangement. The Government has even gone so far as 

 to nominate the Society's " Board " of " Governors." The 

 concession made to co-operative feeling in asking for repre- 

 sentatives of the Co-operative Union is mere dust in the 

 balance. We cannot expect to see genuine Co-operation 

 — which is the only Co-operation which will last — grow up 

 under such conditions. 



And our would-be agricultural co-operators had so much 

 better and more promising a way open to them ! We 

 actually have among us the most brilliantly successful 

 co-operative movement that the world has ever seen — a 

 movement of which, after looking into its working, the 

 American David Lubin, United States Delegate to the 

 International Institute of Agriculture at Rome, remarked, 

 in 1913, that that was the thing of all that he had seen 

 which came nearest a " miracle." That m.ovement has 



