ve store, while admitting to membership all who will apply,
ought to be and would be sympathetic with the efforts of labor to
emancipate itself, and would be a powerful lever in its hands. As the
stores increase in number, an analysis of their trade will reveal
year by year in what directions co-operative production of particular
articles may safely be attempted. More and more by this means the
producing power and the capital at the disposal of the worker will
be placed at the service of democracy. The first steps are the most
difficult. In due time the workers will have educated a number of their
members, and will have attached to themselves men of proved capacity
to be the leaders in fresh enterprises, manufactures of one kind or
another, democratic banking institutions, all supporting each other and
leaning on each other and playing into each other's hands.

The extent to which this may be carried, and the opportunities for
making Ireland a co-operative democracy, I shall presently explain. I do
not regard any of these forms of co-operative organization as ideal or
permanent. The co-operative movement must be regarded rather as a
great turning movement on the part of humanity towards the ideal. The
co-operative organizations now being formed in Ireland and over the
world will, I am certain, persist and outlast this generation and the
next, and will grow into vaster things than we dream of; but the really
important change they will bring about in the minds of men will be
psychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of common
action for the common good. To get so far in civil life is a great
step. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests
and competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast
turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them
face round to the Delectable City. When this psychological change takes
place the democratic associations--which have grown up haphazard as the
workers found it easiest to create them--will be changed and remodeled
by men who will have the mass of people behind them in their efforts
to make a more majestic structure of society for the enlargement of the
lives and spirits of men.

XII.

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 Stat