CO-OPERATION 303 



their own countrymen, by living on their demesne 

 lands and working like their neighbours at the great 

 industry of the country, but the small farmers them- 

 selves are grasping the truth that in co-operation lies 

 their opportunity of offering a successful resistance to 

 the pressure of modern competition on the small pro- 

 ducer. Co-operation advances not because it can 

 promise a halfpenny a pound or a shilling a quarter 

 more profit, but by its appeal to the spirit ; and 

 Ireland, devastated but renascent and always sensitive 

 to the spiritual side of things, is answering to the 

 appeal. Of course the Department of Agriculture is 

 doing wonderfully good work in educating the farmer 

 by precept and example, work of which the fruit is 

 manifest even in statistics. But government in Ireland 

 has always had a strong centralizing tendency ; officials 

 will take charge whenever a people do not resent de- 

 spotic methods ; and a Department, necessarily paternal 

 in its procedure where it has to deal with farmers of a 

 very rudimentary type, may possibly become in the end 

 tyrannical and both clog and demoralize the spirit of 

 initiative and enterprise which alone makes for lasting 

 success in agriculture as in any other walk of 

 life. 



Here comes in the special value of the co-operative 

 movement to Ireland ; above all other things it affords 

 a training in the duty and method of self-help ; it is 

 democratic because every member of the society has a 

 vote, but a vote checked by its immediate result upon 

 his pocket and that of his fellows, but upon nobody else. 

 No training can be better for the newly emancipated 

 farmer, no stimulus more salutary, than the experience 

 of collective enterprise which a small co-operative 

 society affords, even if it only begins by collecting the 

 members' eggs or buying their manures wholesale. 



