The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. George William Russell
not for long labor in industries where they have no power to fix the conditions of their employment, as they were not content with a political system which allowed them no power to control legislation. Ireland must begin its imaginative reconstruction of a civilization by first considering that type which, in the earlier civilizations of the world, has been slave, serf, or servile, working either on land or at industry, and must construct with reference to it. These workers must be the central figures, and how their material, intellectual, and spiritual needs are met must be the test of value of the social order we evolve.
IV.
In Ireland we begin naturally our consideration of this problem with the folk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal—the linking up of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since the destruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factor in rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other and from the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action; and that was so until the movement for the organization of agriculture was initiated by Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in that 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 organization cannot afford to pass by these shops, which spring up in haphazard fashion, not because the country needs them, but because farmers or traders have children to be provided for. To the ignorant this is the easiest form of trade, and so many are started in life in one of these little shops after an apprenticeship in another like it. These numerous competitors of each other do not keep down prices. They increase them rather by the unavoidable multiplication of expenses; and many of them, taking advantage of the countryman's irregularity of income and his need for credit, allow credit to a point where the small farmer becomes a tied customer, who cannot pay all he owes, and who therefore dares not deal elsewhere. These agencies for distribution do not by their nature enlarge the farmer's economic knowledge. His vision beyond them to their sources of supply is blocked, and in this respect he is debarred from any unity with national producers other than his own class.
Let us now for a little consider the small farmer around whom have gathered these multitudinous little agencies of distribution. What kind of a being is he? We must deal with averages, and the small farmer is the typical Irish countryman. The average area of an Irish farm is twenty-five acres or thereabouts. There are hundreds of thousands who have more or less. But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer with twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a drift of sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal: call him Patrick Maloney and accept him as symbol of his class. We will view him outside the operation of the new co-operative policy, trying to obey the command to be fruitful and replenish the earth. He is fruitful enough. There is no race suicide in Ireland. His agriculture is largely traditional. It varied little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and the beginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite of a huge department of agriculture. His butter, his eggs, his cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers. He rarely knows where his produce goes to—whether it is devoured in the next county or is sent across the Channel. It might be pitched into the void for all he knows about its destiny. He might be described almost as the primitive economic cave-man, the darkness of his cave unillumined by any ray of general principles. As he is obstructed by the traders in a general vision of production other than his own, so he is obstructed by these dealers in a general vision of the final markets for his produce. His reading is limited to the local papers, and these, following the example of the modern press, carefully eliminate serious thought as likely to deprive them of readers. But Patrick, for all his economic backwardness, has a soul. The culture of the Gaelic poets and story-tellers, while not often actually remembered, still lingers like a fragrance about his mind. He lives and moves and has his being in the loveliest nature, the skies over him ever cloudy like an opal; and the mountains flow across his horizon in wave on wave of amethyst and pearl. He has the unconscious depth of character of all who live and labor much in the open air, in constant fellowship with the great companions—with the earth and the sky and the fire in the sky. We ponder over Patrick, his race and his country, brooding whether there is the seed of a Pericles in Patrick's loins. Could we carve an Attica out of Ireland?
Before Patrick can become the father of a Pericles, before Ireland can become an Attica, Patrick must be led out of his economic cave: his low cunning in barter must be expanded into a knowledge of economic law—his fanatical concentration on his family—begotten by the isolation and individualism of his life—be sublimed into national affections; his unconscious depths be sounded, his feeling for beauty be awakened by contact with some of the great literature of the world. His mind is virgin soil, and we may hope that, like all virgin soil, it will be immensely fruitful when it is cultivated. How does the policy of co-working make Patrick pass away from his old self? We can imagine him as a member of a committee getting hints of a strange doctrine called science from his creamery manager. He hears about bacteria, and these dark invisibles replace, as the cause of bad butter-making, the wicked fairies of his childhood. Watching this manager of his society he learns a new respect for the man of special or expert knowledge. Discussing the business of his association with other members he becomes something of a practical economist. He knows now where his produce goes. He learns that he has to compete with Americans, Europeans, and Colonials—indeed with the farmers of the world, hitherto concealed from his view by a mountainous mass of middle-men. He begins to be interested in these countries and reads about them. He becomes a citizen of the world. His horizon is no longer bounded by the wave of blue hills beyond his village. The roar of the planet begins to sound in his ears. What is more important is that he is becoming a better citizen of his own country. He meets on his committee his religious and political opponents, not now discussing differences out identities of interest. He also meets the delegates from other societies in district conferences or general congresses, and those who meet thus find their interests are common, and a new friendliness springs up between North and South, and local co-operation leads on to national co-operation. The best intellects, the best business men in the societies, meet in the big centres as directors of federations and wholesales, and they get an all-Ireland view of their industry. They see the parish from the