will welcome laborers into their co-operative
stores, credit banks, poultry and bee-keeping societies, and allow them
the benefits of cheap purchase, cheap credit, and of efficient marketing
of whatever the laborer may produce on his allotment. The growth of
national conscience and the spirit of human brotherhood, and a
feeling of shame that any should be poor and neglected in the national
household, will be needed to bring the rural laborer into the circle of
national life, and make him a willing worker in the general scheme.
If farmers will not, on their part, advance towards their laborers and
bring them into the co-operative community, then labor will be organized
outside their community and will be hostile, and will be always brooding
and scheming to strike a blow when the farmer can least bear it,--when
the ground must be tilled or the harvest gathered. And this, if peace
cannot be made, will result in a still greater decline of tillage and
the continued flight of the rural laborers, and the increase of the area
in grass, and the impoverishing of human life and national well-being.

Some policy to bring contentment to small holders and rural workers must
be formulated and acted upon. Agriculture is of more importance to the
nation than industry. Our task is to truly democratize civilization
and its agencies; to spread in widest commonalty culture, comfort,
intelligence, and happiness, and to give to the average man those things
which in an earlier age were the privileges of a few. The country is the
fountain of the life and health of a race. And this organization of the
country people into co-operative communities will educate them and make
them citizens in the true sense of the word, that is, people continually
conscious of their identity of interest with those about them.

It is by this conscious sense of solidarity of interest, which only the
organized co-operative community can engender in modern times, that the
higher achievements of humanity become possible. Religion has created
this spirit at times--witness the majestic cathedrals the Middle Ages
raised to manifest their faith. Political organization engendered the
passion of citizenship in the Greek States, and the Parthenon and a host
of lordly buildings crowned the hills and uplifted and filled with
pride the heart of the citizen. Our big countries, our big empires, and
republics, for all their military strength and science, and the wealth
which science