g the other activities of the Congested
Districts Board, I have specially mentioned the work of promoting
co-operative credit by means of village banks managed on the Raffeisen
system. The actual work of organising these co-operative banking
associations has not been carried out directly by the Board, but through
the agency of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (generally
known by the shorter title of the I.A.O.S.), to which the Board has for
many years past paid a small subsidy--a subsidy which might well have
been on a more generous scale, having regard to the immense advantages
which co-operation is capable of conferring on the small farmer.

The I.A.O.S. is a voluntary association of a strictly non-political
character. "Business, not politics," has been its principle of action;
and partly, perhaps, for this very reason it may claim to have
contributed more than any other single agency towards the prosperity of
rural Ireland. To its work I now turn.

THE I.A.O.S.

The movement which the I.A.O.S. represents was started by Sir Horace
Plunkett, and he has remained the most prominent figure in it ever
since. Sir Horace Plunkett bears an honoured name wherever the rural
problem is seriously studied; but, like other prophets, he has received
perhaps less honour in his own country than elsewhere. At all events, in
the task to which he has devoted his life, he has had to encounter the
tacit, and indeed at times the open opposition, of powerful sections of
Nationalist opinion. Happily he belongs to the stamp of men whom no
obstacles can discourage, and who find in the work itself their
sufficient reward.

Sir Horace Plunkett's leading idea was a simple one, and has become
to-day almost a commonplace. He compared the backward state of
agriculture in Ireland with the great advance that had been made in
various continental countries, where the natural conditions were not
dissimilar to those of Ireland, and asked himself the secret of the
difference. That secret he found in the word _organisation_, and he set
himself to organise. The establishment of co-operative creameries seemed
to afford the most hopeful opening, and it was to this that Sir Horace
Plunkett and a few personal friends, in the year 1889, directed their
earliest missionary efforts. The difficulties to be overcome were at
first very great. "My own diary," writes Sir Horace, "records attendance
at fifty meetings before a single society had resulted th