ciencies, ignorance,
and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we can
wisely enlarge his boundaries. The centre of the citizen is the home.
His circumference ought to be the nation. The vast majority of Irish
citizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital
relations with their circumference which alone entitle them to the
privileges of citizenship, and enable them to act with political wisdom.
An emotional relationship is not enough. Our poets sang of a united
Ireland, but the unity they sang of was only a metaphor. It mainly meant
separation from another country. In that imaginary unity men were really
separate from each other. Individualism, fanatically centering itself on
its family and family interests, interfered on public boards to do jobs
in the interests of its kith and kin. The co-operative movement connects
with living links the home, the centre of Patrick's being, to the
nation, the circumference of his being. It connects him with the
nation through membership of a national movement, not for the political
purposes which call on him for a vote once every few years, but
for economic purposes which affect him in the course of his daily
occupations. This organization of the most numerous section of the Irish
democracy into co-operative associations, as it develops and embraces
the majority, will tend to make the nation one and indivisible and
conscious of its unity. The individual, however meagre his natural
endowment of altruism, will be led to think of his community as himself;
because his income, his social pleasures even, depend on the success
of the local and national organizations with which he is connected. The
small farmers of former times pursued a petty business of barter and
haggle, fighting for their own hand against half the world about them.
The farmers of the new generation will grow up in a social order,
where all the transactions which narrowed their fathers' hearts will be
communal and national enterprises. How much that will mean in a change
of national character we can hardly realize, we who were born in an
Ireland where petty individualism was rampant, and where every child had
it borne in upon him that it had to fight its own corner in the world,
where the whole atmosphere about it tended to the hardening of the
personality.

We may hope and believe that this transformation of the social
order will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation,