We have descended from the national soul to the material plane, and we must still continue here for a time, because the doctrine that a sane mind can only manifest through a sane body is as true in reference to the State as to the individual, and necessitates a study of social fabrics. The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and the body repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soul again with its old desires. Our religious hatreds created sectarian organizations, and these react again in the national soul, which would, I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itself incarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and its energies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly. So a drunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature is conquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul in rebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body. The individualism in our economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents concerted action for the general good. We have yet to create harmony of purpose in our economic life, and to bring together interests long separated and unmindful of each other, and make them realize that their interests are identical. It is one of the commonplaces of economics that urban and rural interests are identical: but in truth the townsman and the countryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed, and they know very little of each other. I never like to let these commonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give the countersign to the challenge for truth. People declare in the same way that the interests of labor and capital are identical, and implore them not to fight with one another. But the truth of that statement seems to me to depend largely on whether capital owns labor or labor owns capital. As an abstract proposition it is one of the economic formulae I would leave instructions at my frontiers to have detained until further inquiry as to its antecedents. All these statements may be true, but to make them operative, to give them a dynamic rather than a static character, we must convince people they are true by close argument and still more so by realistic illustration.
To bring about a high nobility in the national soul we must make harmony in its economic life, and the two main currents of economic energy—the agricultural and urban—must be made to flow so that their action will not defeat each other. Let us take the farmer first. How ought he to wish to see life in the towns develop? Should he wish for the triumph of labor or capital: the success of the co-operative movement, the triumph of the multiple shop or the private trader, of guilds of workers or autocrats of industry? Economic desires generally depend on the nature of the industry men are engaged in. The jeweler would probably desire the permanence of the social order which created most wealthy people who could afford to buy his wares. The farmer's industry, if we consider it closely, is the most democratic of any in its application to society. The produce of the farm, in its final distribution, is divided into portions more or less equal and conditioned in quantity by the digestive powers of an individual. The wealthiest millionaire cannot eat more bread, butter, meat, vegetables, or fruit than the manual laborer would eat if the latter could afford to get such things. In fact he would eat rather less, because the manual worker has a much better appetite, indeed requires more food. It appears to be the interest of the farmer to support any urban movement whose object it is to see that every worker in the towns is remunerated so that he, his wife, and his children can procure as much food as they require. Any underpaid worker in the towns is a wrong to the farmer—a willing customer who yet cannot buy. If there is, let us say, a sum of fifteen hundred pounds a week to be paid away in a town, it is to the interest of farmers that that sum should be paid to a thousand men at the rate of thirty shillings a week rather than to fifty men at thirty pounds a week. In the case of the workers a greater part of the money will be spent on food. But if fifty men have thirty pounds a week each, it will be spent to satisfy the appetites of a much smaller number of people. A larger proportion will be spent on furniture, pictures, motor-cars and what not. It may be spent so as to give some kind of employment, but it will not be a division of the money so much to the interests of the farmer. However we analyze the problem it appears to be to the farmer's interests to support democratic movements in the cities, certainly up to the point where every worker in the towns has a wage which enables himself and his family to eat all they require for health. It is also to the interests of farmers to support any system of distribution of goods which eliminates the element of profit in the sale. After the farmer gets his price it is to his interests that food should be increased in cost as little as possible when the article is transferred to the consumer, because if farm produce has to bear too many profits it will be expensive for the consumer, and there will be a lessened demand. So associations like the co-operative stores, which aim at the elimination of the element of profit in distribution, should be approved of by the farmers.
Now we come to the townsman again. Is it his interest to support the farmers in his own country or to regard the world as his farm? The argument on the economic side is not so clear, but it is, I think, just as sound. If agriculture is neglected in any country the rural population pour into the towns. The country becomes a fountain of blackleg labor. Rural labor has no traditions of trade unionism, and takes any work at any price. There are fewer people engaged in producing food, and its cost rises. Food must be imported from abroad; and there is national insecurity, as in times of war their is always the danger of the trade routes overseas being blocked by an enemy, and this again has to be provided against by heavy expenditure for militarist purposes. The farther away an army is from its base the more insecure is its position, and the same thing is true in the industrial life of nations. International trade there must always be. It is one of the means by which the larger solidarity of humanity is to be achieved; but that will never come about until there is a nobler and more human life within the states, and we must begin by perfecting national life before we consider empires and world federations. So in this essay only the national being is considered.
I desire to unite countryman and townsman in one movement, and to make the co-operative principle the basis of a national civilization. How are we to prevent them fighting the old battle between producer and consumer? I think that this can best be brought about by co-operative federations, which will act for both in manufacture, purchase, and sale, and with which both rural and urban associations will find it to their interest to be affiliated. Now the townsman cannot to any extent supply food for his stores by buying farms. To control agricultural production in that way would necessitate a financial operation which the State would shrink from, and which it would be impossible for urban cooperators to finance. We had better make up our minds to let farmers be syndicalists, controlling entirely the processes of agricultural production themselves. They will do it better than the townsman could, more efficiently and more economically. They will never be able, with the world in competition, to put up prices artificially. How can the two main divisions of national life be brought together in a national solidarity? We can find an answer if we remember that farmers are not only producers but consumers. They do not go about naked in the fields. They require clothes, furniture, tea, coffee, sugar, oil, soap, candles, pots and pans—in fact the farmer's wife needs nearly all the things the townsman's wife needs, except that she purchases a little less food. But even here modern conditions are driving the farmer to buy food in the shops rather than to produce it for himself on the farm. Country bread is made in the bakery more and more. Butter, cheese, and bacon are made in factories, and the farmer's tendency is to buy what bread, bacon, and butter he requires, selling the milk to be made into butter to a creamery, the grain to make the bread to a miller, and the pigs to a factory. Co-operative distribution would be as advantageous to the country as in the town. Already in Ireland a considerable number of farmers' societies are enlarging their objects, and are turning what originally were purely agricultural associations into general purposes societies, where the farmer's wife can purchase her domestic requirements as well as her man his machinery, fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, and seeds. It would be to the interest of rural societies to deal with co-operative wholesales just as much as it is in the interest of urban stores to do so. It would be to their interest to take shares in these wholesales and productive federations, and see that they cater for the farmer's interests as much as for the townsman's.
The urban co-operators, on their side, will see the opportunities for productive co-operation the union of rural and urban movements would create. They naturally will desire to employ as many people as possible in co-operative production. Farmers are surrounded by rings of all kinds: machinery manufacturers who will not sell to their societies, manure manufacturers' alliances who keep up prices. It is a great industry, this of supplying the farmer with his fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, cake, machinery. These rural co-operative societies are increasing in number year by year. Farmers want clothes, hats, and boots: and the necessary machinery for their industry is almost entirely of urban manufacture—ploughs, binders, separators, harrows, and many other implements of tillage. It is an immense industry and yet to be co-operatively exploited. In the towns some progress has been made in distribution. But a nation depends upon its wealth producers and not upon its consumers. Co-operators might double, treble, or quadruple the distributive trade, and still occupy only a very secondary position in national life unless they enter more largely upon production. We will never make the co-operative idea the fundamental one in the civilization of Ireland until we employ a very large part of the population in production. Now we have at present, thanks to the energy of the pioneers of agricultural co-operation, a new market opening in the country for things which the townsman can produce. Does not this suggest new productive urban enterprises? Does it not favor an evolution of manufacturing industry, so that democratic control may finally replace the autocratic control of the capitalist? The trades unions cannot do this alone by following up any of their traditional policies. They cannot go into trade on their own account with any guarantee of success unless they are associated with agencies of distribution. But if co-operators—urban and rural—through their federations invade more and more the field of production they will draw to themselves the hearts and hopes of the workers and idealists in the nation. People are really more concerned about the making of an income than about the spending of it. It is a necessity of our policy if it is to bring about the co-operative commonwealth, that co-operators must adventure much more largely into production than they have hitherto done.
Now let us see what we have come to. There is a country movement which is not merely one for agricultural production. It is rapidly taking up the distribution of goods. There is an urban movement not merely concerned with distribution but entering upon production. They can be brought into harmony if the same federations act for both branches of the movement. The meeting-place of the two armies should be there. If this policy is adopted there will gradually grow-up that unity of purpose between country and urban workers which is the psychological basis and necessary precedent for national action for the common good. The policy of identity of interest must be real, and it can only be real when the identity of interest is obvious, and it can only be made obvious when the symbols of that unity and identity are visible day by day in buildings and manufactures, things which are handled and seen, and in transactions which daily bring that unity to mind. The old poetic ideal of a United Ireland was and could only be a geographical expression, and not a human reality, so long as men were individualist in economics and were competing and struggling with each other for mastery.
By the co-operative commonwealth more is meant than a series of organizations for economic purposes. We hope to create finally, by the close texture of our organizations, that vivid sense of the identity of interest of the people in this island which is the basis of citizenship, and without which there can be no noble national life. Our great nation-states have grown so large, so myriad are their populations, so complicated are their interests, that most people in them really feel no sense of brotherhood with each other. We have yet to create inside our great nation-states social and economic organizations, which will make this identity of interest real and evident, and not seem merely a metaphor, as it does to most people today. The more the co-operative movement does this for its members, the more points of contact they find in it, the more will we tend to make out of it and its branches real social organisms, which will become as closely knit psychically as physically the cells in a human body are knit together. Our Irish diversities of interest have made us world-famous; but such industrial and agricultural organizations would swallow up these antagonisms, as the serpents created by the black art of the Egyptian magicians were swallowed up by the rod Aaron cast on the floor, and which was made animate by the white magic of the Lord.
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