most important in a
social as well as in an economic sense. The members feel a pride in its
material expansion. They accumulate large profits, which in time become
a kind of communal fund. In some cases this is used for the erection of
village halls where social entertainments, concerts and dances are held,
lectures delivered and libraries stored. Finally, the association
assumes the character of a rural commune, where, instead of the old
basis of the commune, the joint ownership of land, a new basis for union
is found in the voluntary communism of effort.

A true social organism is thus being created with common human and
economic interests, and the clan feeling, which was so powerful an
influence in early and mediaeval civilisations, with all its power of
generating passionate loyalties, is born anew in the modern world. Our
ancient Irish records show little clans with a common ownership of land
hardly larger than a parish, but with all the patriotic feeling of large
nations held with an intensity rare in our modern states. The history of
these clans and of very small nations like the ancient Greek states
shows that the social feeling assumes its most binding and powerful
character where the community is large enough to allow free play to the
various interests of human life, but is not so large that it becomes an
abstraction to the imagination. Most of us feel no greater thrill in
being one of a State with fifty million inhabitants than we do in
recognising we are citizens of the solar system. The rural commune and
the very small States exhibit the feeling of human solidarity in its
most intense manifestations, working on itself, regenerating itself and
seeking its own perfection. Combinations of agriculturists, when the
rural organisation is complete, re-create in a new way the conditions
where these social instincts germinate best, and it is only by this
complete organisation of rural life that we can hope to build up a rural
civilisation, and create those counter-attractions to urban life which
will stay the exodus from the land.

I do not wish to exaggerate the interest which the rural life of my own
little island may have for those who are concerned for the vast and
wealthy expanses of the American farm lands. But, even here there is a
genuine desire for the really simple life, which in its commonest
manifestation is a thing that rather simple people talk about. In a
properly organised rural neighbourhood could