Let us now for a little consider the small farmer around whom have gathered these multitudinous little agencies of distribution. What kind of a being is he? We must deal with averages, and the small farmer is the typical Irish countryman. The average area of an Irish farm is twenty-five acres or thereabouts. There are hundreds of thousands who have more or less. But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer with twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a drift of sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal: call him Patrick Maloney and accept him as symbol of his class. We will view him outside the operation of the new cooperative policy, trying to obey the command to be fruitful and replenish the earth. He is fruitful enough. There is no race suicide in Ireland. His agriculture is largely traditional. It varied little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and the beginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite of a huge department of agriculture. His butter, his eggs, his cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers. He rarely knows where his produce goes to—whether it is devoured in the next county or is sent across the Channel. It might be pitched into the void for all he knows about its destiny. He might be described almost as the primitive economic caveman, the darkness of his cave unillumined by any ray of general principles. As he is obstructed by the traders in a general vision of production other than his own, so he is obstructed by these dealers in a general vision of the final markets for his produce. His reading is limited to the local papers, and these, following the example of the modern press, carefully eliminate serious thought as likely to deprive them of readers. But Patrick, for all his economic backwardness, has a soul. The culture of the Gaelic poets and storytellers, while not often actually remembered, still lingers like a fragrance about his mind. He lives and moves and has his being in the loveliest nature, the skies over him ever cloudy like an opal; and the mountains flow across his horizon in wave on wave of amethyst and pearl. He has the unconscious depth of character of all who live and labor much in the open air, in constant fellowship with the great companions—with the earth and the sky and the fire in the sky. We ponder over Patrick, his race and his country, brooding whether there is the seed of a Pericles in Patrick’s loins. Could we carve an Attica out of Ireland?
Before Patrick can become the father of a Pericles, before Ireland can become an Attica, Patrick must be led out of his economic cave: his low cunning in barter must be expanded into a knowledge of economic law—his fanatical concentration on his family—begotten by the isolation and individualism of his life—be sublimed into national affections; his unconscious depths be sounded, his feeling for beauty be awakened by contact with some of the great literature of the world. His mind is virgin soil, and we may hope that, like all virgin soil, it will be immensely fruitful when it is cultivated. How does the policy of co-working make Patrick pass away from his old self? We can imagine him as a member of a committee getting hints of a strange doctrine called science from his creamery manager. He hears about bacteria, and these dark invisibles replace, as the cause of bad butter-making, the wicked fairies of his childhood. Watching this manager of