ven
mischievous. Such Departments devote a considerable part of their
efforts to promoting agricultural organisation. Short a time as this
Department has been in existence it has had some striking evidence of
the justice of these views. As will be seen from the First Annual Report
of the Department, it was only where the farmers were organised in
properly representative societies that many of the lessons the
Department had to teach could effectually reach the farming classes, or
that many of the agricultural experiments intended for their guidance
could be profitably carried out. Although these experiment schemes were
issued to the County Councils and the agricultural public generally, it
was only the farmers organised in societies who were really in a
position to take part in them. Some of these experiments, indeed, could
not be carried out at all except through such societies.

Both for the sake of efficiency in its educational work, and of economy
in administration, the Department would be obliged to lay stress on the
value of organisation.[45] But there are other reasons for its doing so:
industrial, moral, and social. In an able critique upon Bodley's
_France_ Madame Darmesteter, writing in the _Contemporary Review_, July,
1898, points out that even so well informed an observer of French life
as the author of that remarkable book failed to appreciate the steadying
influence exercised upon the French body politic by the network of
voluntary associations, the _syndicats agricoles_, which are the
analogues and, to some extent, the prototypes, in France of our
agricultural societies in Ireland. The late Mr. Hanbury, during his too
brief career as President of the Board of Agriculture, frequently dwelt
upon the importance of organising similar associations in England as a
necessary step in the development of the new agricultural policy which
he foreshadowed. His successor, Lord Onslow, has fully endorsed his
views, and in his speeches is to be found the same appreciation of the
exemplary self-reliance of the Irish farmers. I have already referred to
the keen interest which both agricultural reformers and English and
Welsh County Councils have been taking in the unexpectedly progressive
efforts of the Irish farmers to reorganise their industry and place
themselves in a position to take advantage of State assistance. I
believe that our farmers are going to the root of things, and that due
weight should be given to the sil