ves out crying in the wilderness. We were told that Irishmen can
conspire but cannot combine. Economists assured us that even if we
succeeded in getting farmers to embark on the projected enterprises,
financial disaster would be the inevitable result of our attempts to
substitute in industrial undertakings, ever becoming more technical and
requiring more and more commercial knowledge and experience, democratic
management for one-man control.

On the other hand there were some favouring conditions, the importance
of which our studies of the human problems already discussed will have
made my readers realise. Isolated, the Irish farmer is conservative,
sceptical of innovations, a believer in routine and tradition. In union
with his fellows, he is progressive, open to ideas, and wonderfully keen
at grasping the essential features of any new proposal for his
advancement. He was, then, himself eminently a subject for co-operative
treatment, and his circumstances were equally so. The smallness of his
holding, the lack of capital, and the backwardness of his methods made
him helpless in competition with his rivals abroad. The process of
organisation was also, to some extent, facilitated by the insight the
people had been given by the Land League into the power of combination,
and by the education they had received in the conduct of meetings. It
was a great advantage that there was a machinery ready at hand for
getting people together, and a procedure fully understood for giving
expression to the sense of the meeting. On the other hand, the
domination of a powerful central body, which was held to be essential to
the success of the political and agrarian movement, had exercised an
influence which added enormously to the difficulty of getting the people
to act on their own initiative.

Though the economic conditions of the Irish farmer clearly indicated a
need for the application of co-operative effort to all branches of his
industry, it was necessary at the beginning to embrace a more limited
aim. It happened at the time we commenced our Irish work that one branch
of farming, the dairying industry, presented features admirably adapted
to our methods. This industry was, so to speak, ripe for its industrial
development, for its change from a home to a factory industry. New
machinery, costly but highly efficient, had enabled the factory product,
notably that of Denmark and Sweden, to compete successfully with the
home-made article,