The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. George William Russell
soil. The disease which has attacked our great populations here and in America is a discontent with rural life. Nothing which has been done hitherto seems able to promote content. It is true, indeed, that science has gone out into the fields, but the labors of the chemist, the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer are not enough to ensure health. What is required is the art of the political thinker, the imagination which creates a social order and adjusts it to human needs. The physician who understands the general laws of human health is of more importance to us here than the specialist. The genius of rural life has not yet appeared. We have no fundamental philosophy concerning it, but we have treasures of political wisdom dealing with humanity as a social organism in the city States or as great nationalities. It might be worth while inquiring to what extent the wisdom of a Solon, an Aristotle, a Rousseau, or an Alexander Hamilton might be applied to the problem of the rural community. After all, men are not so completely changed in character by their rural environment that their social needs do not, to a large extent, coincide with the needs of the townsman. They cannot be considered as creatures of a different species. Yet statesmen who have devoted so much thought to the constitution of empires and the organization of great cities, who have studied their psychology, have almost always treated the rural problem purely as an economic problem, as if agriculture was a business only and not a life.
Our great nations and widespread empires arose in a haphazard fashion out of city States and scattered tribal communities. The fusion of these into larger entities, which could act jointly for offence or defense, so much occupied the thoughts of their rulers that everything else was subordinated to it. As a result, the details of our modern civilizations are all wrong. There is an intensive life at a few great political or industrial centres, and wide areas where there is stagnation and decay. Stagnation is most obvious in rural districts. It is so general that it has been often assumed that there was something inherent in rural life which made the countryman slow in mind as his own cattle. But this is not so, as I think can be shown. There is no reason why as intense, intellectual, and progressive a life should not be possible in the country as in the towns. The real reason for the stagnation is that the country population is not organized. We often hear the expression, "the rural community," but where do we find rural communities? There are rural populations, but that is altogether a different thing. The word "community" implies an association of people having common interests and common possessions, bound together by laws and regulations which express these common interests and ideals, and define the relation of the individual to the community. Our rural populations are no more closely connected, for the most part, than the shifting sands on the seashore. Their life is almost entirely individualistic. There are personal friendships, of course, but few economic or social partnerships. Everybody pursues his own occupation without regard to the occupation of his neighbors. If a man emigrates it does not affect the occupation of those who farm the land all about him. They go on ploughing and digging, buying and selling, just as before. They suffer no perceptible economic loss by the departure of half-a-dozen men from the district. A true community would, of course, be affected by the loss of its members. A co-operative society, if it loses a dozen members, the milk of their cows, their orders for fertilizers, seeds, and feeding-stuffs, receives serious injury to its prosperity. There is a minimum of trade below which its business cannot fall without bringing about a complete stoppage of its work and an inability to pay its employees. That is the difference between a community and an unorganized population. In the first the interests of the community make a conscious and direct appeal to the individual, and the community, in its turn, rapidly develops an interest in the welfare of the member. In the second, the interest of the individual in the community is only sentimental, and as there is no organization the community lets its units slip away or disappear without comment or action. We had true rural communities in ancient Ireland, though the organization was rather military than economic. But the members of a clan had common interests. They owned the land in common. It was a common interest to preserve it intact. It was to their interest to have a numerous membership of the clan, because it made it less liable to attack. Men were drawn by the social order out of merely personal interests into a larger life. In their organizations they were unconsciously groping, as all human organizations are, towards the final solidarity of humanity—the federation of the world.
Well, these old rural communities disappeared. The greater organizations of nation or empire regarded the smaller communities jealously in the past, and broke them up and gathered all the strings of power into capital cities. The result was a growth of the State, with a local decay of civic, patriotic, or public feeling, ending in bureaucracies and State departments, where paid officials, devoid of intimacy with local needs, replaced the services naturally and voluntarily rendered in an earlier period. The rural population, no longer existing as a rural community, sank into stagnation. There was no longer a common interest, a social order turning their minds to larger than individual ends. Where feudalism was preserved, the feudal chief, if the feeling of noblesse oblige was strong, might act as a centre of progress, but where this was lacking social decay set in. The difficulty of moving the countryman, which has become traditional, is not due to the fact that he lives in the country, but to the fact that he lives in an unorganized society. If in a city people want an art gallery or public baths or recreation grounds, there is a machinery which can be set in motion; there are corporations and urban councils which can be approached. If public opinion is evident—and it is easy to organize public opinion in a town—the city representatives will consider the scheme, and if they approve and it is within their power as a council, they are able to levy rates to finance the art gallery, recreation grounds, public gardens, or whatever else. Now let us go to a country district where there is no organization. It may be obvious to one or two people that the place is perishing and the intelligence of its humanity is decaying, lacking some centre of life. They want a village hall, but how is it to be obtained? They begin talking about it to this person or that. They ask these people to talk to their friends, and the ripples go out weakening and widening for months, perhaps for years. I know of districts where this has happened. There are hundreds of parishes in Ireland where one or two men want co-operative societies or village halls or rural libraries. They discuss the matter with their neighbors, but find a complete ignorance on the subject, and consequent lethargy. There is no social organism with a central life to stir. Before enthusiasm can be kindled there must be some knowledge. The countryman reads little, and it is a long and tedious business before enough people are excited to bring them to the point of appealing to some expert to come in and advise.
More changes often take place within a dozen years after a co-operative society is first started than have taken place for a century previous. I am familiar with a district—in the northwest of Ireland. It was a most wretchedly poor district. The farmers were at the mercy of the gombeen traders and the agricultural middlemen. Then a dozen years ago a co-operative society was formed. I am sure that the oldest inhabitant would agree with me that more changes for the better for farmers have taken place since the co-operative society was started than he could remember in all his previous life. The reign of the gombeen man is over. The farmers control their own buying and selling. Their organization markets for them the eggs and poultry. It procures seeds, fertilizers, and domestic requirements. It turns the members' pigs into bacon. They have a village hall and a woman's organization. They sell the products of the women's industry. They have a co-operative band, social gatherings, and concerts. They have spread out into half-a-dozen parishes, going southward and westward with their propaganda, and in half-a-dozen years, in all that district, previously without organization, there will be well-organized farmers' guilds, concentrating in themselves the trade of their district, having meeting-places where the opinion of the members can be taken, having a machinery, committees, and executive officers to carry out whatever may be decided on: and having funds, or profits, the joint property of the community, which can be drawn upon to finance their undertakings. It ought to be evident what a tremendous advantage it is to farmers in a district to have such organizations, what a lever they can pull and control. I have tried to indicate the difference between a rural population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who are closely knit together in an association and who form a true social organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find expression and society is malleable to the general will. I assert that there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real prosperity without such farmers' organizations or guilds. Wherever rural prosperity is reported