ficiently 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, separato