Two decades of steady development have confirmed the soundness of the original scheme, and a brief account of agricultural coöperation in Ireland will be of interest to any reader who has persevered so far. The conditions were in some respects favourable. The farms are small and their owners belong to the class to which coöperation brings most immediate benefit. The Irish peasantry are highly intelligent. They lack the strong individualism of the English, but they have highly developed associative instincts. For this reason coöperation, an alternative to communism,--which they abhor,--comes naturally to them. On the other hand, the ease with which they can be organised makes them peculiarly amenable to political influence. In backward rural communities the trader is almost invariably the political boss. He is a leader of agrarian agitation, in which he can safely advocate principles he would not like to see applied to the relations between himself and his customers. He bitterly opposes coöperation, which throws inconvenient light upon those relations. We are able to persuade the more enlightened rural traders that economies effected in agricultural production will raise the standard of living of his customers and make them larger consumers of general commodities and more punctual in their payments. But in the majority of cases the agricultural organiser finds politics in sharp conflict with business, and has a hard row to hoe. So, while we have advantages in organising Irish farmers, we have also, largely owing to well-known historical causes, to overcome difficulties which have no counterpart in the United States or England.
Nevertheless, we managed to make progress. We began with the dairying industry, and already half the export of Irish butter comes from the coöperative societies we established. Organised bodies of farmers are learning to purchase their agricultural requirements intelligently and economically. They are also beginning to adopt the methods of the organised foreign farmer in controlling the sale of their butter, eggs and poultry in the British markets. And they not only combine in agricultural production and distribution, but are also making a promising beginning in grappling with the problem of agricultural finance. It is in this last portion of the Irish programme that by far the most interesting study of the coöperative system can be made, on account of its success in the poorest parts of the Island. Furthermore, the attempt to enable the most embarrassed section of the Irish peasantry to procure working capital illustrates some features of agricultural coöperation which will have suggestive value for American farmers. I will therefore give a brief description of our agricultural coöperative credit associations.