I do not feel competent to decide between these two views, but I offer one consideration with which I think many rural reformers will agree. The attempt to bring the advantages of the city within the reach of the dwellers in the country cannot, of itself, counteract the townward tendency in so far as it is due to the causes summarised above. However rapidly, in this respect, the country may be improved, the city is sure to advance more rapidly and the gap between them to be widened. The new rural civilisation should aim at trying to develop in the country the things of the country, the very existence of which seems to have been forgotten. But, after all, it is the world within us rather than the world without us that matters in the making of society, and I must give to the social influence of the coöperative idea what I believe to be its real importance.
In Ireland, from which so much of my experience is drawn, we have found a tendency growing among farmers whose combinations are successful, to gather into one strong local association all those varied objects and activities which I have described as advocated by the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society. These local associations are ceasing to have one special purpose or one object only. They absorb more and more of the business of the district. One large, well-organised institution is being substituted for the numerous petty transactions of farmers with middlemen and small country traders. Gradually the Society becomes the most important institution in the district, the 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 mediæval 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.