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the urbanization of all thought people in these days think 
the town method is suitable to the country conditions. They 
are still hankering after the joint-stock method, and have not 
yet learnt that co-operation is the only method suitable to 
agricultural conditions. Therefore, we say you have to start 
by teaching co-operation, and that until you have done that 
you cannot successfully introduce scientific methods into the 
practice of agriculture, nor until you have got people to come 
together in the business of their lives can you get them to 
come together for higher intellectual and social purposes. 
Our formula in Ireland for solving the rural problem has 
some notoriety now. It is better farming, better business, 
better living, and we say that you must begin with better 
business, and that better business is co-operation. Now I 
say nothing about the Eastern origin of the most typical of 
the Irish people. I think myself that their addiction to co- 
operation has a great deal to do with that. But, broadly 
speaking, the Irish belong to the associative races rather than 
to the individualistic, and that is a tremendous advantage, 
and it is in that respect that I think many of the tropical 
countries, especially India, might learn a great deal from our 
work in Ireland, not so much perhaps from the successes as 
from the failures. I myself have had five-and-twenty years 
of work in that country, and I have learnt far more from my 
failures than I have from my successes; and I am in a posi- 
tion now, in dealing with people who have the same kind of 
outlook towards this problem, to suggest to them how to 
avoid many of the mistakes we have made. 
The most important respect of all, I should say, in which 
co-operation in dealing with the tropics has to be studied is 
in the precise relations which ought to exist between State 
assistance and organized voluntary effort. As you go down in 
the economic and social scale it becomes more and more 
necessary to develop self-reliance, but at the same time it is 
more and more necessary to begin with State assistance. 
And the whole problem, it seems to me, in countries like 
India, where the co-operative movement is in the hands of 
what I think is the finest Civil Service in the world, is how 
to administer large doses of State assistance without weaken- 
ing the patient’s resistance to the many diseases which attack 
the principle of self-help. 
I have one practical suggestion to offer, and that is, that 
this Congress should recognize that agricultural organization 
