commonly supposed, a visitation of Providence upon the farmers of the
British Islands, but a natural economic revolution of permanent effect.
Our message to Irish farmers was that they must imitate the methods of
their Continental competitors, who were defeating them in their own
markets simply by superior organisation. After five years of individual
propagandism, the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society was formed in
1894 to meet the demand for instruction as to the formation and the
working of cooperative societies, a demand to which it was beyond the
means of the few pioneers to respond.

Two decades of steady development have confirmed the soundness of the
original scheme, and a brief account of agricultural cooperation in
Ireland will be of interest to any reader who has persevered so far. The
conditions were in some respects favourable. The farms are small and
their owners belong to the class to which cooperation brings most
immediate benefit. The Irish peasantry are highly intelligent. They lack
the strong individualism of the English, but they have highly developed
associative instincts. For this reason cooperation, an alternative to
communism,--which they abhor,--comes naturally to them. On the other
hand, the ease with which they can be organised makes them peculiarly
amenable to political influence. In backward rural communities the
trader is almost invariably the political boss. He is a leader of
agrarian agitation, in which he can safely advocate principles he would
not like to see applied to the relations between himself and his
customers. He bitterly opposes cooperation, which throws inconvenient
light upon those relations. We are able to persuade the more enlightened
rural traders that economies effected in agricultural production will
raise the standard of living of his customers and make them larger
consumers of general commodities and more punctual in their payments.
But in the majority of cases the agricultural organiser finds politics
in sharp conflict with business, and has a hard row to hoe. So, while we
have advantages in organising Irish farmers, we have also, largely owing
to well-known historical causes, to overcome difficulties which have no
counterpart in the United States or England.

Nevertheless, we managed to make progress. We began with the dairying
industry, and already half the export of Irish butter comes from the
cooperative societies we established. Organised bodies of farmers a