e me a picture of what he considered to be an ideal
economic state for the country. If two more Belfasts could be
established on the east coast, and the rest of the country divided into
five hundred acre farms, grazing being adopted wherever permanent grass
would grow, the limits of Irish productivity would be reached. On the
other hand, Dr. O'Donnell, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Raphoe, who may
be taken as an authoritative exponent of the trend of popular thought in
the country, not long ago advocated ploughing the grazing lands of
Leinster right up to the slopes of Tara.[6] Moreover, many theories have
been advanced to show that the decline of tillage, whatever be its
cause, involves an enormous waste of national resources. But of
practical suggestion, making for a remedy, there is very little
forthcoming.

The solution of all such problems largely depends upon certain
developments which, for many reasons, I regard as absolutely essential
to the success of the new agrarian order. One of these developments is
the spread of agricultural co-operation through voluntary associations.
Without this agency of social and economic progress, small landholders
in Ireland will be but a body of isolated units, having all the
drawbacks of individualism, and none of its virtues, unorganised and
singularly ill-equipped for that great international struggle of our
time, which we know as agricultural competition. Moreover, there is
another equally important, if less obvious, consideration which renders
urgent the organisation of our rural communities. From Russia, with its
half-communistic Mir to France with its modern village commune, there is
no country in Europe except the United Kingdom where the peasant
land-holders have not some form of corporate existence. In Ireland the
transition from landlordism to a peasant proprietary not only does not
create any corporate existence among the occupying peasantry but rather
deprives them of the slight social coherence which they formerly
possessed as tenants of the same landlord. The estate office has its
uses as well as its disadvantages, and the landlord or agent is by no
means without his value as a business adviser to those from whom he
collects the rent.

The organisation of the peasantry by an extension of voluntary
associations, which is a condition precedent of social and economic
progress, will not, however, suffice to enable them to face and solve
the problems with which they are