It is the business of the rural reformer to create the rural community. It is the antecedent to the creation of a rural civilization. We have to organize the community so that it can act as one body. It is not enough to organize farmers in a district for one purpose only—in a credit society, a dairy society, a fruit society, a bacon factory, or in a co-operative store. All these may be and must be beginnings; but if they do not develop and absorb all rural business into their organization they will have little effect on character. No true social organism will have been created. If people unite as consumers to buy together they only come into contact on this one point; there is no general identity of interest. If co-operative societies are specialized for this purpose or that—as in Great Britain or on the Continent—to a large extent the limitation of objects prevents a true social organism from being formed. The latter has a tremendous effect on human character. The specialized society only develops economic efficiency. The evolution of humanity beyond its present level depends absolutely on its power to unite and create true social organisms. Life in its higher forms is only possible because of the union of myriads of tiny lives to form a larger being, which manifests will, intelligence, affection, and the spiritual powers. The life of the amoeba or any other unicellular organism is low compared with the life in more complex organisms, like the ant or bee. Man is the most highly developed living organism on the globe; yet his body is built up of innumerable cells, each of which might be described as a tiny life in itself. But they are built up in man into such a close association that what affects one part of the body affects all. The pain which the whole being feels if a part is wounded, if one cell in the human body is hurt, should prove that to the least intelligent. The nervous system binds all the tiny cells together, and they form in this totality a being infinitely higher, more powerful, than the cells which compose it. They are able to act together and achieve things impossible to the separated cells. Now humanity today is, to some extent, like the individual cells. It is trying to unite together to form a real organism, which will manifest higher qualities of life than the individual can manifest. But very few of the organisms created by society enable the individual to do this. The joint-stock companies or capitalist concerns which bring men together at this work or that do not yet make them feel their unity. Existence under a common government effects this still less. Our modern states have not yet succeeded in building up that true national life where all feel the identity of interest; where the true civic or social feeling is engendered and the individual bends all his efforts to the success of the community on which his own depends; where, in fact, the ancient Greek conception of citizenship is realized, and individuals are created who are ever conscious of the identity of interest between themselves and their race. In the old Greek civilizations this was possible because their States were small, indeed their ideal State contained no more citizens than could be affected by the voice of a single orator. Such small States, though they produced the highest quality of life within themselves, are no longer possible as political entities. We have to see whether we could not, within our widespread nationalities, create communities by economic means, where something of the same sense of solidarity of interest might be engendered and the same quality of life maintained. I am greatly ambitious for the rural community. But it is no use having mean ambitions. Unless people believe the result of their labors will result in their equaling or surpassing the best that has been done elsewhere, they will never get very far. We in Ireland are in quest of a civilization. It is a great adventure, the building up of a civilization—the noblest which could be undertaken by any persons. It is at once the noblest and the most practical of all enterprises, and I can conceive of no greater exaltation for the spirit of man than the feeling that his race is acting nobly; and that all together are performing a service, not only to each other, but to humanity and those who come after them, and that their deeds will be remembered. It may seem a grotesque juxtaposition of things essentially different in character, to talk of national idealism and then of farming, but it is not so. They are inseparable. The national idealism which will not go out into the fields and deal with the fortunes of the working farmers is false dealism. Our conception of a civilization must include, nay, must begin with the life of the humblest, the life of the average man or manual worker, for if we neglect them we will build in sand. The neglected classes will wreck our civilization. The pioneers of a new social order must think first of the average man in field or factory, and so unite these and so inspire them that the noblest life will be possible through their companionship. If you will not offer people the noblest and best they will go in search of it. Unless the countryside can offer to young men and women some satisfactory food for soul as well as body, it will fail to attract or hold its population, and they will go to the already overcrowded towns; and the lessening of rural production will affect production in the cities and factories, and the problem of the unemployed will get still keener. The problem is not only an economic problem. It is a human one. Man does not live by cash alone, but by every gift of fellowship and brotherly feeling society offers him. The final urgings of men and women are towards humanity. Their desires are for the perfecting of their own life, and as Whitman says, where the best men and women are there the great city stands, though it is only a village. It is one of the illusions of modern materialistic thought to suppose that as high a quality of life is not possible in a village as in a great city, and it ought to be one of the aims of rural reformers to dissipate this fallacy, and to show that it is possible—not indeed to concentrate wealth in country communities as in the cities—but that it is possible to bring comfort enough to satisfy any reasonable person, and to create a society where there will be intellectual life and human interests. We will hear little then of the rural exodus. The country will retain and increase its population and productiveness. Like attracts like. Life draws life to itself. Intellect awakens intellect, and the country will hold its own tug for tug with the towns.
Now it may be said I have talked a long while round and round the rural community, but I have not suggested how it is to be created. I am coming to that. It really cannot be created. It is a natural growth when the right seed is planted. Co-operation is the seed. Let us consider Ireland. Twenty-five years ago there was not a single co-operative society in the country. Individualism was the mode of life. Every farmer manufactured and sold as seemed best in his eyes. It was generally the worst possible way he could have chosen. Then came Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues, preaching co-operation. A creamery was established here, an agricultural society there, and having planted the ideas it was some time before the economic expert could decide whether they were planted in fertile soil. But that question was decided many years ago. The co-operative society, started for whatever purpose originally, is an omnivorous feeder, and it exercises a magnetic influence on all agricultural activities; so that we now have societies which buy milk, manufacture and sell butter, deal in poultry and eggs, cure bacon, provide fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, seeds, and machinery for their members, and even cater for every requirement of the farmer's household. This magnetic power of attracting and absorbing to themselves the various rural activities which the properly constituted co-operative societies have, makes them develop rapidly, until in the course of a decade or a generation there is created a real social organism, where the members buy together, manufacture together, market together, where finally their entire interests are bound up with the interests of the community. I believe in half a century the whole business of rural Ireland will be done co-operatively. This is not a wild surmise, for we see exactly the same process going on in Denmark, Germany, Italy, and every country where the co-operative seed was planted. Let us suppose that in a generation all the rural industries are organized on co-operative lines, what kind of a community should we expect to find as the result? How would its members live? What would be their relations to one another and their community? The agricultural scientist is making great discoveries. The mechanical engineer goes from one triumph to another. The chemist already could work wonders in our fields if there was a machinery for him to work through. We cannot foretell the developments in each branch, but we can see clearly that the organized community can lay hold of discoveries and inventions which the individual farmer cannot. It is little for the co-operative society to buy expensive threshing sets and let its members have the use of them, but the individual farmer would have to save a long time before he could raise several hundred pounds. The society is a better buyer than the individual. It can buy things the individual cannot buy. It is a better producer also. The plant for a creamery is beyond the individual farmer; but our organized farmers in Ireland, small though they are, find it no trouble to erect and equip a creamery with plant costing two thousand pounds. 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, or there may be a co-operative bakery to which some of it may go. The pigs will be dealt with in the abattoir, sent as fresh pork to the market or be turned into bacon to feed the members. We may be certain that any intelligent rural community will try to feed itself first, and will only sell the surplus. It will realize that it will be unable to buy any food half as good as the food it produces. 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. There may be a laundry where the washing—a heavy burden for the women—will be done: for we may be sure that every scrap of power generated will be utilized. 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 might be a village choir or band. There would be a committee-room where the council of the community would meet once a week; for their enterprises would have grown, and the business of such a parish community might easily be over one hundred thousand pounds, and would require constant thought. There would be no slackness on the part of the council in attending, because their fortunes would depend on their communal enterprises, and they would have to consider reports from the managers and officials of the various departments. The co-operative community would be a busy place. 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.
One might like to endow the village school with a chemical laboratory, another might want to decorate the village hall with reproductions of famous pictures, another might suggest removing all the hedges and planting the roadsides and lanes with gooseberry bushes, currant bushes, and fruit trees, as they do in some German communes today. There would be eloquent pleadings for this or that, for an intellectual heat would be engendered in this human hive, and there would be no more illiterates or ignoramuses. The teaching in the village school would be altered to suit the new social order, and the children of the community would, we may be certain, be instructed in everything necessary for the intelligent conduct of the communal business. The spirit of rivalry between one community and another, which exists today between neighboring creameries, would excite the imagination of the members, and the organized community would be as swift to act as the unorganized community is slow to act. Intelligence would be organized as well as business. The women would have their own associations, to promote domestic economy, care of the sick and the children. The girls would have their own industries of embroidery, crochet, lace, dress-making, weaving, spinning, or whatever new industries the awakened intelligence of women may devise and lay hold of as the peculiar labor of their sex. The business of distribution of the produce and industries of the community would be carried on by great federations, which would attend to export and sale of the products of thousands of societies. Such communities would be real social organisms. The individual would be free to do as he willed, but he would find that communal activity would be infinitely more profitable than individual activity. We would then have a real democracy carrying on its own business, and bringing about reforms without pleading to, or begging of, the State, or intriguing with or imploring the aid of political middlemen to get this, that, or the other done for them. They would be self-respecting, because they would be self-helping above all things. The national councils and meetings of national federations would finally become the real Parliament of the nation; for wherever all the economic power is centered, there also is centered all the political power. And no politician would dare to interfere with the organized industry of a nation.
There is nothing to prevent such communities being formed. They would be a natural growth once the seed was planted. We see such communities naturally growing up in Ireland, with perhaps a little stimulus from outside from rural reformers and social enthusiasts. If this ideal of the organized rural community is accepted there will be difficulties, of course, and enemies to be encountered. The agricultural middleman is a powerful person. He will rage furiously. He will organize all his forces to keep the farmers in subjection, and to retain his peculiar functions of fleecing the farmer as producer and the general public as consumer. But unless we are determined to eliminate the middleman in agriculture we will fall to effect anything worth while attempting. I would lay down certain fundamental propositions which, I think, should be accepted without reserve as a basis of reform. First, that the farmers must be organized to have complete control over all the business connected with their industry. Dual control is intolerable. Agriculture will never be in a satisfactory condition if the farmer is relegated to the position of a manual worker on his land; if he is denied the right of a manufacturer to buy the raw materials of his industry on trade terms; if other people are to deal with his raw materials, his milk, cream, fruit, vegetables, live stock, grain, and other produce; and if these capitalist middle agencies are to manufacture the farmers' raw material into butter, bacon, or whatever else are to do all the marketing and export, paying farmers what they please on the one hand, and charging the public as much as they can on the other hand. The existence of these middle agencies is responsible for a large proportion of the increased cost of living, which is the most acute domestic problem of modern industrial communities. They have too much power over the farmer, and are too expensive a luxury for the consumer. It would be very unbusinesslike for any country to contemplate the permanence in national life of a class whose personal interests are always leading them to fleece both producer and consumer alike. So the first fundamental idea for reformers to get into their minds is that farmers, through their own co-operative organizations, must control the entire business connected with agriculture. There will not be so much objection to co-operative sale as to co-operative purchase by the farmers. But one is as necessary as the other. We must bear in mind, what is too often forgotten, that farmers are manufacturers, and as such are entitled to buy the raw materials for their industry at wholesale prices. Every other kind of manufacturer in the world gets trade terms when he buys. Those who buy—not to consume, but to manufacture and sell again—get their requirements at wholesale terms in every country in the world. If a publisher of books is approached by a bookseller he gives that bookseller trade terms, because he buys to sell again. If I, as a private individual, want one of those books I must pay the full retail price. Even the cobbler, the carpenter, the solitary artist, get trade terms. The farmer, who is as much a manufacturer as the shipbuilder, or the factory proprietor, is as much entitled to trade terms when he buys the raw materials for his industry. His seeds, fertilizers, ploughs, implements, cake, feeding-stuffs are the raw materials of his industry, which he uses to produce wheat, beef, mutton, pork, or whatever else; and, in my opinion, there should be no differentiation between the farmer when he buys and any other kind of manufacturer. Is it any wonder that agriculture decays in countries where the farmers are expected to buy at retail prices and sell at wholesale prices? We must not, to save any friction, sell the rights of farmers. The second proposition I lay down is that this necessary organization work among the farmers must be carried on by an organizing body which is entirely controlled by those interested in agriculture—farmers and their friends. To ask the State or a State Department to undertake this work is to ask a body influenced and often controlled by powerful capitalists, and middle agencies which it should be the aim of the organization to eliminate. The State can, without obstruction from any quarter, give farmers a technical education in the science of farming; but let it once interfere with business, and a horde of angry interests set to work to hamper and limit by every possible means and compromises on matters of principle, where no compromise ought to be permitted, are almost inevitable.
A voluntary organizing body like the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, which was the first to attempt the co-operative organization of farmers in these islands, is the only kind of body which can pursue its work fearlessly, unhampered by alien interests. The moment such a body declares its aims, its declaration automatically separates the sheep from the goats, and its enemies are outside and not inside. The organizing body should be the heart and centre of the farmers' movement, and if the heart has its allegiance divided, its work will be poor and ineffectual, and very soon the farmers will fall away from it to follow more single-hearted leaders. No trades union would admit representatives of capitalist employers on its committee, and no organization of farmers should allow alien or opposing interest on their councils to clog the machine or betray the cause. This is the best advice I can give reformers. It is the result of many years' experience in this work. An industry must have the same freedom of movement as an individual in possession of all his powers. An industry divided against itself can no more prosper than a household divided against itself. By the means I have indicated the farmers can become the masters of their own destinies, just as the urban workers can, I think, by steadfastly applying the same principles, emancipate themselves. It is a battle in which, as in all other battles, numbers and moral superiority united are irresistible; and in the Irish struggle to create a true democracy numbers and the power of moral ideas are with the insurgents.
It would be a bitter reproach on the household of our nation if there were any unconsidered, who were left in poverty and without hope and outside our brotherhood. We have not yet considered the agricultural laborer—the proletarian of the countryside. His is, in a sense, the most difficult problem of any. The basis of economic independence in his industry is the possession of land, and that is not readily to be obtained in Ireland. The earth does not upheave itself from beneath the sea and add new land to that already above water in response to our need for it. Yet I would not pass away from the rural laborer without, however inadequately, indicating some curves in his future evolution. These laborers are not in Ireland half so numerous as farmers, for it is a country of small holdings, where the farmer and his family are themselves laborers. Labor is badly paid, and, owing to the lack of continuous cropping of the land, it is often left without employment at seasons when employment is most needed. No class which is taken up today and dropped tomorrow will in modern times remain long in a country. Employers often act as if they thought labor could be taken up and laid down again like a pipe and tobacco. None have contributed so to thicken the horde of Irish exiles as the rural laborers. Three hundred thousand of them in less than my lifetime have left the fields of Ireland for the factories of the new world. Yet I can only rejoice if Irishmen, who are badly dealt with in their motherland, find an ampler life and a more prosperous career in another land. A wage of ten or eleven shillings a week will bind none but the unaspiring lout to his country. But I would like to make Ireland a land which, because of the human kindness in it, few would willingly leave. The agricultural proletarian, like all other labor, should be organized in a national union. That is bound to come. But the agricultural laborer should, I think, no more than labor in the cities, make the raising of wages his main or only object. He should rather strive to make himself economically independent; or, in the alternative, seek for status by integration into the co-operative communities of farmers by becoming a member, and by pressing for permanent employment by the community rather than casual employment by the individual. Agricultural labor undoubtedly will have to struggle for better remuneration. Yet it has to be remembered that agriculture is a protean industry. It is not like mining, where the colliery produces coal and nothing but coal, and where the miners have a practical monopoly of supply. If miners are dissatisfied with wages and are well organized they can enforce their terms, and the colliery owners may almost be indifferent, because they can charge the increased cost of working to the public. But agriculture, as I said, is protean and changes its forms perpetually. If tillage does not pay this year, next year the farmer may have his land in grass. He reverts to the cheapest methods of farming when prices are low, or labor asks a wage which the farmer believes it would be unprofitable to pay. In this way pressure on the farmer for extra wages might result in two men being employed to herd cows where a dozen men were previously employed at tillage. The farmer cannot easily—as the mine-owner—unload his burden on the general public by the increase of prices. There are many difficulties, which seem almost insoluble, if we propose to ourselves to integrate the rural laborer into the general economic life of the country by making him a partner in the industry he works on. But what I hope for most is first that the natural evolution of the rural community, and the concentration of individual manufacture, purchase and sale, into communal enterprises, will lead to a very large co-operative ownership of expensive machinery, which will necessitate the communal employment of labor. If this takes place, as I hope it will, the rural laborer, instead of being a manual worker using primitive implements, will have the status of a skilled mechanic employed permanently by a cooperative community. He should be a member of the society which employs him, and in the division of profits receive in proportion to his wage, as the farmers in proportion to their trade.
A second policy open to agricultural labor when it becomes organized is the policy of collective farming. This I believe will and ought to receive attention in the future. Co-operative societies of agricultural laborers in Italy, Roumania, and elsewhere have rented land from landowners. They then reallotted the land among themselves for individual cultivation, or else worked it as a true co-operative enterprise with labor, purchase and sale all communal enterprises, with considerable benefit to the members. We can well understand a landowner not liking to divide his land into small holdings, with all the attendant troubles which in Ireland beset a landlord with small farmers on his estate. But I think landowners in Ireland could be found who would rent land to a co-operative society of skilled laborers who approached the owner with a well-thought-out scheme. The success of one colony would lead to others being started, as happened in Italy.
This solution of the problem of agricultural labor will be forced on us for many reasons. The economic effects of the great European War, the burden of debt piled on the participating nations, will make Ministers shun schemes of reform involving a large use of national credit, or which would increase the sum of national obligations. Land purchase on the old term I believe cannot be continued. Yet we will demand the intensive cultivation of the national estate, and increased production of wealth, especially of food-stuffs. The large area of agricultural land laid down for pasture is not so productive as tilled land, does not sustain so large a population, and there will be more reasons in the future than in the past for changing the character of farming in these areas. The policy of collective farming offers a solution, and whatever Government is in power should facilitate the settlement of men in cooperative colonies and provide expert instructors as managers for the first year or two if necessary. Such a policy would not be so expensive as land purchase, and with fair rent fixed, hundreds of thousands of people could be planted comfortably on the land in Ireland and produce more wealth from it than could ever be produced from grazing lands, and agricultural workers and the sons of farmers who now emigrate could become economically independent.
I hope, also, that farmers, becoming more brotherly as their own enterprises flourish, will welcome laborers into their co-operative stores, credit banks, poultry and bee-keeping societies, and allow them the benefits of cheap purchase, cheap credit, and of efficient marketing of whatever the laborer may produce on his allotment. The growth of national conscience and the spirit of human brotherhood, and a feeling of shame that any should be poor and neglected in the national household, will be needed to bring the rural laborer into the circle of national life, and make him a willing worker in the general scheme. If farmers will not, on their part, advance towards their laborers and bring them into the co-operative community, then labor will be organized outside their community and will be hostile, and will be always brooding and scheming to strike a blow when the farmer can least bear it,—when the ground must be tilled or the harvest gathered. And this, if peace cannot be made, will result in a still greater decline of tillage and the continued flight of the rural laborers, and the increase of the area in grass, and the impoverishing of human life and national well-being.
Some policy to bring contentment to small holders and rural workers must be formulated and acted upon. Agriculture is of more importance to the nation than industry. Our task is to truly democratize civilization and its agencies; to spread in widest commonalty culture, comfort, intelligence, and happiness, and to give to the average man those things which in an earlier age were the privileges of a few. The country is the fountain of the life and health of a race. And this organization of the country people into co-operative communities will educate them and make them citizens in the true sense of the word, that is, people continually conscious of their identity of interest with those about them.
It is by this conscious sense of solidarity of interest, which only the organized co-operative community can engender in modern times, that the higher achievements of humanity become possible. Religion has created this spirit at times—witness the majestic cathedrals the Middle Ages raised to manifest their faith. Political organization engendered the passion of citizenship in the Greek States, and the Parthenon and a host of lordly buildings crowned the hills and uplifted and filled with pride the heart of the citizen. Our big countries, our big empires, and republics, for all their military strength and science, and the wealth which science has made it possible for man to win, do not create citizenship because of the loose organization of society; because individualism is rampant, and men, failing to understand the intricacies of the vast and complex life of their country, fall back on private life and private ambitions, and leave the honor of their country and the making of laws and the application of the national revenues to a class of professional politicians, in their turn in servitude to the interests which supply party funds, and so we find corruption in high places and cynicism in the people. It is necessary for the creation of citizens, for the building up of a noble national life, that the social order should be so organized that this sense of interdependence will be constantly felt. It is also necessary for the preservation of the physical health and beauty of our race that our people should live more in the country and less in the cities. I believe it would be an excellent thing for humanity if its civilization could be based on rural industry mainly and not on urban industry. More and more men and women in our modern civilization drift out of Nature, out of sweet air, health, strength, beauty, into the cities, where in the third generation there is a rickety population, mean in stature, vulgar or depraved in character, with the image of the devil in mind and matter more than the image of Deity. Those who go like it at first; but city life is like the roll spoken of by the prophet, which was sweet in the mouth but bitter in the belly. The first generation are intoxicated by the new life, but in the third generation the cord is cut which connected them with Nature, the Great Mother, and life shrivels up, sundered from the source of life. Is there any prophet, any statesman, any leader, who will—as Moses once led the Israelites out of the Egyptian bondage—excite the human imagination and lead humanity back to Nature, to sunlight, starlight, earth-breath, sweet air, beauty, gaiety, and health? Is it impossible now to move humanity by great ideas, as Mahomet fired his dark hosts to forgetfulness of life; or as Peter the Hermit awakened Europe to a frenzy, so that it hurried its hot chivalry across a continent to the Holy Land? Is not the earth mother of us all? Are not our spirits clothed round with the substance of earth? Is it not from Nature we draw life? Do we not perish without sunlight and fresh air? Let us have no breath of air and in five minutes life is extinct. Yet in the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on day by day. The lover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any big city and may look into ten thousand faces and see none that is lovely. Is not the return of man to a natural life on the earth a great enough idea to inspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid the green trees and fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but men say there is no intellectual life working on the land. No intellectual life when man is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When the mysterious forces which bring to birth and life are yet undiscovered; when the earth is teeming with life, and the dumb brown lips of the ridges are breathing mystery! Is not the growth of a tree from a tiny cell hidden in the earth as provocative of thought as the things men learn at the schools? Is not thought on these things more interesting than the sophistries of the newspapers? It is only in Nature, and by thought on the problems of Nature, that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to the Mighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world.
Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities? The memory lies on one "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." It is terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements; the depletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from the flaring drink-shops. The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it while it moves amid such things. And outside these places the clouds are flying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, the winds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leaf to leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk. The creation of a rural civilization is the greatest need of our time. It may not come in our days, but we can lay the foundations of it, preparing the way for the true prophet when he will come. The fight now is not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who are on the land contented, happy, and prosperous. And we must begin by organizing them to defend what is left to them; to take back, industry by industry, what was stolen from them. We must organize the country people into communities, for without some kind of communal life men hold no more together than the drifting sands by the seashore. There is a natural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves from the dawn of time. It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees to build their hexagonal cells. If we read the history of civilization we will find people in every land forming little clans co-operating together. Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up; the greed of powerful men puts an end to them. But, whether broken or not, the moment the rural dweller is left to himself he begins again, with nature prompting him, to form little clans—or nations rather—with his fellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancient Ireland. The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and the counties are survivals of these old co-operative colonies, where the men owned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed their own social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections. It was so in every land under the sun. It was so in ancient India and in ancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in nature—the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. And it is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that I have put together these thoughts on the rural community.
We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in our modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The lordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the least the relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancient wisdom, as it is recounted to him on God's day, assures him of his immortality: that the divine signature is over all his being, that in some way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in a likeness to It. He is a symbol of God Himself. He is the child of Deity. His life is Its very breath. The Habitations of Eternity await his coming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling within him of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self. So proud a tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after the day of God he finds that none will pay him reverence. He, the destined comrade of Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children of the King in fetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his many mansions, where light and air, the great purifiers, are already dimmed and corrupted before they do him service. He is insecure in the labor by which he lives. He works today, and tomorrow he may be told there is no further need for him, and his fate and the fate of those dependent on him are not remembered by those who dismissed him. If he dies, leaving wife or children, the social order makes but the most inhuman provision for them. How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State for its poor the workhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn loving-kindness into official acts and make legal and formal what should be natural impulse and the overflow of the heart. So great a disparity exists between spiritual theory and the realities of the social order that it might almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all on our civilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point where we could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery. Here God possesses the world."
The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, sees him laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, on strike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringing children into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliest years, a pauper when his days of strength are passed. He dies in charitable institutions. Though his labors are necessary he is yet not integrated into the national economy. He has no share of his own in the wealth of the nation. He cannot claim work as a right from the holders of economic power, and this absolute dependence upon the autocrats of industry for a livelihood is the greatest evil of any, for it puts a spiritual curse on him and makes him in effect a slave. Instinctively he adopts a servile attitude to those who can sentence him and his children to poverty and hunger without trial or judgment by his peers. A hasty word, and he may be told to draw his pay and begone. The spiritual wrong done him by the social order is greater than the material ill, and that spiritual wrong is no less a wrong because generation after generation of workers have grown up and are habituated to it, and do not realize the oppression; because in childhood circumstance and the black art of education alike conspire to make the worker humble in heart and to take the crown and sceptre from his spirit, and his elders are already tamed and obsequious.
Yet the workers in the modern world have great qualities. This class in great masses will continually make sacrifices for the sake of a principle. They have lived so long in the depths: many of them have reached the very end of all the pain which is the utmost life can bear and have in their character that fearlessness which comes from long endurance and familiarity with the worst hardships. I am a literary man, a lover of ideas, and I have found few people in my life who would sacrifice anything for a social principle; but I will never forget the exultation with which I realized in a great labor trouble, when the masters of industry issued a document asking men on peril of dismissal to swear never to join a trades union, that there were thousands of men in my own city who refused to obey, though they had no membership or connection with the objectionable association. Nearly all the real manhood of Dublin I found was among the obscure myriads who are paid from twenty to thirty shillings a week. The men who will sacrifice anything for brotherhood get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth. These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose their own heroes and their own ideals. Most of them had no strike funds to fall back on. They had wives and children depending on them. Quietly and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yet nobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows. Beneath their rags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit. It is in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the hope of Ireland lies. The poor have always helped each other, and it is they who listen eagerly to the preachers of a social order based on brotherhood in industry. It is these workers, always necessary but never yet integrated into the social order, who must be educated, who must be provided for, who must be accepted fully as comrade in any scheme of life to be devised and which would call itself Christian. That word, expressing the noblest and most spiritual conception of humanity, has been so degraded by misuse in the world that we could almost hate it with the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know that Hell can as disguise put on the outward garments of Heaven. Yet what is eternally true remains pure and uncorrupted, and those who turn to it find it there—as all finally must turn to it to fulfill their destiny of inevitable beauty.
Often with sadness I hear people speak of industrial development in Ireland, for I feel they contemplate no different system than that which fills workers with despair in countries where it is more successfully applied. All these energetic people are conspiring to build factories and mills and to fill them with human labor, and they believe the more they do this the better it will be for Ireland. They talk of Ireland as if it was only admirable as a quantity rather than a quality. They express delight at swelling statistics and increased trade, but where do we hear any reflection on the quality of life engendered by this industrial development? Our civilization is to differ in no way from any other. No new ideal of life is suggested to differentiate us. We are to go on exploiting human labor. Our working classes are to increase and multiply and earn profits for an employing class, as labor has one from time immemorial in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Rome, and in London today. But a choice yet remains to us, because the character of our civilization is not yet fixed. It is mainly germinal. It fills the spirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path, without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and more beautiful life. Every now and then, when the world was still vast and full of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor, and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities and over unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer and ampler than that they had known. Is the old daring gone? Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures—the building up of a civilization—so that the human might reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will it is most united with all other life. Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motion about the heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as its adorers. But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has the dividing quality of the prism, which resolves pure light into distinct rays; and so on earth we get the principle of freedom and the virtue of solidarity as separated ideals continually at warfare with each other, and the reconcilement on earth of these principles in man is the conquest of matter by the spirit. This dramatic sundering on earth of virtues in unison in the heavens explains the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism, between nationality and imperialism, between individualist and socialist, between dynamic and static in philosophy. Indeed in the last analysis all human conflicts are the balancing on earth of the manifestation of divine principles which are one in the unmanifest spirit.
The civilization we create, the social order we build up, must provide for essential freedom for the individual and for solidarity of the nation. Now essential freedom is denied to men if they are in their condition servile. Can we contemplate the permanent existence of a servile class in Ireland? For, disguise it how we will, our present industrial system is practically a form of slavery for the workers, differing in externals only from the ages when the serf had a collar round his neck. He has now freedom to change from master to master, and can even seek for a master in other countries; but he must, in any case, accept the relation of servant to master. The old slave could be whipped. In the new order the wage slave can be starved, and the fact that many of the rulers of industry use their power benevolently does not make the existing relation between employer and employed right, or the social order one whose permanence can be justified. Men will gladly labor if they feel that their labor conspires with that of all other workers for the general good; but there is something loathsome to the spirit in the condition of the labor market, where labor is regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold like soap or candles. For that truly describes how it is with labor in our industrial system: we can buy labor, which means we can buy human life and thought, a portion of God's being, and make a profit out of it. By so selling himself the worker is enslaved and limited in a thousand ways. The power of dismissal of one person by another at whim acts against independence of character, or the free expression or opinion in thought, in politics, and in religion. The soul is stunted in its growth, and spiritual life made subordinate to material interests. To deny essential freedom to the soul is the greatest of all crimes, and such denial has in all ages evoked the deepest anger among men. When freedom has been threatened nations have risen up maddened and exultant, and the clang of martial arms has been heard and the stony kings of the past have been encountered in battle. In Ireland we shall have our greatest fight of all to gain this freedom: not alone material independence for man, but the freedom of the soul, its right to choose its own heroes and its own ideals without let or hindrance by other men.
We have many of the vices of a slave race, and we treat others as we have been treated. Our national aspirations were overborne by material power, and we in turn use cudgel and curse on our countrymen when they differ from us in opinion and policy. Men, when they cannot match their intellect against another's, suppress him and howl him down, putting faith in their own brainlessness. I would make the most passionate plea for freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel or know. What right have we to ask for ourselves what we deny to another? The bludgeon at meetings is a blow struck against heaven. Those who will not argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are prowling back again on all fours in their minds to the brute. It matters not in what holy name men war with violence on freedom of thought, whether in the name of God or nation they are enemies of both. We are only right in controversy when we overcome by a superior beauty or truth. The first fundamental idea inspiring an Irish polity should be this idea of freedom in all spheres of thought, and it is most necessary to fight for this because the devil and hell have organized their forces in this unfortunate land in sectarian and secret societies, of which it might be written they love darkness rather than light for the old God-given reasons.