preparing the way for the true prophet when he will come. The fight now
is not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who are on
the land contented, happy, and prosperous. And we must begin by
organizing them to defend what is left to them; to take back, industry
by industry, what was stolen from them. We must organize the country
people into communities, for without some kind of communal life men hold
no more together than the drifting sands by the seashore. There is a
natural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves from
the dawn of time. It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees
to build their hexagonal cells. If we read the history of civilization
we will find people in every land forming little clans co-operating
together. Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up; the
greed of powerful men puts an end to them. But, whether broken or not,
the moment the rural dweller is left to himself he begins again, with
nature prompting him, to form little clans--or nations rather--with his
fellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancient
Ireland. The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and the
counties are survivals of these old co-operative colonies, where the men
owned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed their
own social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections. It
was so in every land under the sun. It was so in ancient India and in
ancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them,
are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in
nature--the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. And
it is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that I
have put together these thoughts on the rural community.