has been accomplished in Ireland through agricultural
cooeperation. The Irish have discovered that it is not good for the
farmer to work alone. Since 1894 they have been organizing agricultural
societies to give the farmer a chance to sell at the right time and at
the right price. The result is impressive. In Ireland the cooeperative
creameries produce about half the butter exported. There are 40,000
farmers in the societies for cooeperative selling, which, as we know in
this country, means better prices. There are about 300 agricultural
credit societies with a membership of 15,000 and a capital of more than
$200,000. In a word, in Ireland, which we have been apt to consider as
far behind us in all that relates to agriculture, there are nearly 1,000
agricultural societies with a total membership of 100,000 persons. Since
1894 their total business has been more than $300,000,000.

But, after the farmer has begun to make use of his right to combine for
his advantage in selling his products and buying his supplies, is there
nothing else he can do? As well might we say that, after the body and
the mind of a boy have been trained, he should be deprived of all those
associations with his fellows which make life worth living, and to which
every child has an inborn right. Life is something more than a matter
of business. No man can make his life what it ought to be by living it
merely on a business basis. There are things higher than business. What
is the reason for the enormous movement from the farms into the cities?
Not simply that the business advantages in the city are better, but that
the city has more conveniences, more excitement, and more facility for
contact with friends and neighbors: in a word, more life. There ought
then to be attractiveness in country life such as will make the country
boy or girl want to live and work in the country, such that the farmer
will understand that there is no more dignified calling than his own,
none that makes life better worth living. The social or community life
of the country should be put by the farmer--for no one but himself can
do it for him--on the same basis as social life in the city, through the
country churches and societies, through better roads, country
telephones, rural free delivery, parcels post, and whatever else will
help. The problem is not merely to get better crops, not merely to
dispose of crops better, but in the last analysis to have happier and
richer lives of