. This can be done by every kind of co-operative effort where
combined action is better than individual action. The parish cannot take
care of the child as well as the parents, but you will find in most
of the labors of life combined action is more fruitful than individual
action. Some of you have found this out in many branches of agriculture,
of which your dairying, agricultural, credit, poultry, and flax
societies are witness. Some of you have combined to manufacture; some
to buy in common, some to sell in common. Some of you have the common
ownership of thousands of pounds' worth of expensive machinery. Some of
you have carried the idea of co-operation for economic ends farther, and
have used the power which combination gives you to erect village halls
and to have libraries of books, the windows through which the life
and wonder and power of humanity can be seen. Some of you have
light-heartedly, in the growing sympathy of unity, revived the dances
and songs and sports which are the right relaxation of labor. Some
Irishwomen here and there have heard beyond the four walls in which so
much of their lives are spent the music of a new day, and have started
out to help and inspire the men and be good comrades to them; and
calling themselves United Irish-women, they have joined, as men have
joined, to help their sisters who are in economic servitude, or who
suffer from the ignorance and indifference to their special needs in
life which pervade the administration of local government. We cannot
build up a rural civilization in Ireland without the aid of Irish women.
It will help life little if we have methods of the twentieth century in
the fields, and those of the fifth century in the home. A great writer
said: "Woman is the last thing man will civilize." If a woman had
written on that subject she would have said: "Woman is the last thing
a man thinks about when he is building up his empires." It is true that
the consciousness of woman has been always centered too close to the
dark and obscure roots of the Tree of Life, while men have branched
out more to the sun an wind, and today the starved soul of womanhood is
crying out over the world for an intellectual life and for more chance
of earning a living. If Ireland will not listen to this cry, its
daughters will go on slipping silently away to other countries, as they
have been doing--all the best of them, all the bravest, all those most
mentally alive, all those who would