THE AGRARIAN REFORM OF 1903. 161 



State hiis banded together individuals in village 

 communities of the most varying kinds, and 

 these working in the framework of institutions of 

 historic antiquity have undertaken the adminis- 

 tration of matters of common interest — the 

 communal forests, the pastures, the peat-bogs. 

 In Ireland, all this organization was an affair of 

 the estate, of the landlord or his agent. Now 

 the landlord has disappeared. The Wyndham 

 Act does indeed contain certain paragraphs, 

 inserted at the instance of the co-operative 

 leaders, which provide for the formation of 

 grazing and turbary committees ; but it has not 

 substituted for the estate any system of com- 

 munal agricultural organization. Thus none of 

 the forms of agricultural organization are in 

 existence, except what rest on voluntary co- 

 operative enterprise. The significance of the co- 

 operative movement for Ireland therefore does 

 not lie in the fact that it cheapens production 

 and improves quality. It lies in the fact that 

 through it the erstwhile tenant, now left to 

 himself as a peasant proprietor, gets a backing 

 and an agricultural education — that it opens a 

 way in which the now slowly beginning educa- 

 tional activity of the State can reach him. On 

 the success of this work of agricultural education 

 will depend the measure of success to be 

 achieved by the Irish agrarian reform of the past 

 ten years. 



This reform, in spite of the criticisms which 

 I. have applied to it, has been an absolutely 



M 



