the co-operative principle the basis of a national civilization. How are
we to prevent them fighting the old battle between producer and
consumer? I think that this can best be brought about by co-operative
federations, which will act for both in manufacture, purchase, and sale,
and with which both rural and urban associations will find it to their
interest to be affiliated. Now the townsman cannot to any extent supply
food for his stores by buying farms. To control agricultural production
in that way would necessitate a financial operation which the State
would shrink from, and which it would be impossible for urban
cooperators to finance. We had better make up our minds to let farmers
be syndicalists, controlling entirely the processes of agricultural
production themselves. They will do it better than the townsman could,
more efficiently and more economically. They will never be able, with
the world in competition, to put up prices artificially. How can the
two main divisions of national life be brought together in a national
solidarity? We can find an answer if we remember that farmers are not
only producers but consumers. They do not go about naked in the fields.
They require clothes, furniture, tea, coffee, sugar, oil, soap, candles,
pots and pans--in fact the farmer's wife needs nearly all the things the
townsman's wife needs, except that she purchases a little less food.
But even here modern conditions are driving the farmer to buy food in
the shops rather than to produce it for himself on the farm. Country
bread is made in the bakery more and more. Butter, cheese, and bacon
are made in factories, and the farmer's tendency is to buy what bread,
bacon, and butter he requires, selling the milk to be made into butter
to a creamery, the grain to make the bread to a miller, and the pigs to
a factory. Co-operative distribution would be as advantageous to the
country as in the town. Already in Ireland a considerable number of
farmers' societies are enlarging their objects, and are turning what
originally were purely agricultural associations into general purposes