at patriotic association,
the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Though its actual
achievement is great; though it may be said to be the pivot round which
Ireland has begun to swing back to its traditional and natural communism
in work, we still have over the larger part of Ireland conditions
prevailing which tend to isolate the individual from the community.

When we examine rural Ireland, outside this new movement, we find
everywhere isolated and individualistic agricultural production, served
with regard to purchase and sale by private traders and dealers, who are
independent of economic control from the consumers or producers, or the
State. The tendency in the modern world to conduct industry in the grand
manner is not observable here. The first thing which strikes one who
travels through rural Ireland is the immense number of little shops.
They are scattered along the highways and at the crossroads; and where
there are a few families together in what is called a village,
the number of little shops crowded round these consumers is almost
incredible. What are all these little shops doing? They are supplying
the farmers with domestic requirements: with tea, sugar, flour, oil,
implements, vessels, clothing, and generally with drink. Every one of
them almost is a little universal provider. Every one of them has its
own business organization, its relations with wholesale houses in the
greater towns. All of them procure separately from others their bags
of flour, their barrels of porter, their stocks of tea, sugar, raisins,
pots, pans, nails, twine, fertilizers, and what not, and all these
things come to them paying high rates to the carriers for little loads.
The trader's cart meets them at the station, and at great expense the
necessaries of life are brought together. In the world-wide amalgamation
of shoe-makers into boot factories, and smithies into ironworks,
which is going on in Europe and America, these little shops have been
overlooked. Nobody has tried to amalgamate them, or to economize human
effort or cheapen the distribution of the necessaries of life. This work
of distribution is carried on by all kinds of little traders competing
with each other, pulling the devil by the tail; doing the work
economically, so far as they themselves are concerned, because they
must, but doing it expensively for the district because they cannot
help it. They do not serve Ireland well. The genius of amalgamation and
organi