was started than he could remember in all his previous life. The farmers control their own buying and selling. Their organization markets for them the eggs and poultry. It procures seeds, fertilizers, and domestic requirements. It turns the members’ pigs into bacon. They have a village hall and a woman’s organization. They sell the products of the women’s industry. They have a co-operative band, social gatherings, and concerts. They have spread out into half-a-dozen parishes, going southward and westward with their propaganda, and in half-a-dozen years, in all that district, previously without organization, there will be well-organized farmers’ guilds, concentrating in themselves the trade of their district, and having funds, or profits, the joint property of the community, which can be drawn upon to finance their undertakings. I assert that there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real prosperity without such farmers’ organizations or guilds. Wherever rural prosperity is reported of any country, inquire into it, and it will be found that it depends on rural organization. Wherever there is rural decay, if it is inquired into, it will be found that there was a rural population but no rural community, no organization, no guild to promote common interests and unite the countrymen in defense of them.”
Wherever in Ireland a Co-operative Society has been started there we see that farmers are able to do things which as individuals they would have found it impossible to do. The Society is in the first place a better buyer than the individual. It can buy an expensive threshing machine and let its members have the use of it, thus saving enormous labour. The individual farmer would not be able to purchase such a machine even with the savings of years. It can also buy the seed required by its members at wholesale prices and also the fertilisers for their fields. The Society is also a better producer, for in the same way it can afford to buy expensive plants for making butter, etc., which would be entirely beyond the purse of the individual farmer. I believe that in a certain zemindary in Bengal the ryots have combined to put chase a rice-husking machine, and that they have already saved the original cost of the machine by the saving effected by husking their own rice in bulk. The co-operative idea is capable of infinite variation, the most attractive of its many-sided influence being that which affects the social life of the village communities, bringing brightness and interest into the lives of those whose lives have hitherto been notoriously dull and uninteresting. Let A. E. give in his own words his vision of the future possibilities of the co-operative movement in Ireland —
“The organized rural community of the future will generate its own electricity at its central buildings, and run not only its factories and other enterprises by this power, but will supply light to the houses of its members and also mechanical power to run machinery on the farm. One of our Irish societies already supplies electric light for the town it works in. In the organized rural community the eggs, milk, poultry, pigs, cattle, grain, and wheat produced on the farm and not consumed, or required for further agricultural production, will automatically be delivered to the co-operative business centre of the district, where the manager of the dairy will turn the milk into butter or cheese, and the skim milk will be returned to feed the community's pigs. The poultry and egg department will pack and dispatch the fowl and eggs to market. The mill will grind the corn and return it ground to the member. The community will hold in common all the best machinery too expensive for the members to buy individually. The agricultural laborers will gradually become skilled mechanics, able to direct threshers, binders, diggers, cultivators, and new implements we have no conception of now. They will be members of the society, sharing in its profits in proportion to their wages, even as the farmer will in proportion to his trade. The co-operative community will have its own carpenters, smiths, mechanics, employed in its workshop at repairs or in making those things which can profitably be made locally. One happy invention after another will come to lighten the labor of life. There will be, of course, a village hall with a library and gymnasium, where the boys and girls will be made straight, athletic, and graceful. In the evenings, when the work of the day is done, if we went into the village hall we would find a dance going on or perhaps a concert. There would be a committee-room where the council of the community would meet once a week. In years when the society was exceptionally prosperous, and earned larger profits than usual on its trade, we should expect to find discussions in which all the members would join as to the use to be made of these profits: whether they should be altogether divided or what portion of them should be devoted to some public purpose. We may be certain that there would be animated discussions, because a real solidarity of feeling would have arisen and a pride in the work of the community engendered, and they would like to be able to outdo the good work done by the neighboring communities.”
