National Being | Page 7

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