and that we should wear ourselves out crying in the wilderness.  We were told that Irishmen can conspire but cannot combine.  Economists assured us that even if we succeeded in getting farmers to embark on the projected enterprises, financial disaster would be the inevitable result of our attempts to substitute in industrial undertakings, ever becoming more technical and requiring more and more commercial knowledge and experience, democratic management for one-man control.

On the other hand there were some favouring conditions, the importance of which our studies of the human problems already discussed will have made my readers realise.  Isolated, the Irish farmer is conservative, sceptical of innovations, a believer in routine and tradition.  In union with his fellows, he is progressive, open to ideas, and wonderfully keen at grasping the essential features of any new proposal for his advancement.  He was, then, himself eminently a subject for co-operative treatment, and his circumstances were equally so.  The smallness of his holding, the lack of capital, and the backwardness of his methods made him helpless in competition with his rivals abroad.  The process of organisation was also, to some extent, facilitated by the insight the people had been given by the Land League into the power of combination, and by the education they had received in the conduct of meetings.  It was a great advantage that there was a machinery ready at hand for getting people together, and a procedure fully understood for giving expression to the sense of the meeting.  On the other hand, the domination of a powerful central body, which was held to be essential to the success of the political and agrarian movement, had exercised an influence which added enormously to the difficulty of getting the people to act on their own initiative.

Though the economic conditions of the Irish farmer clearly indicated a need for the application of co-operative effort to all branches of his industry, it was necessary at the beginning to embrace a more limited aim.  It happened at the time we commenced our Irish work that one branch of farming, the dairying industry, presented features admirably adapted to our methods.  This industry was, so to speak, ripe for its industrial development, for its change from a home to a factory industry.  New machinery, costly but highly efficient, had enabled the factory product, notably that of Denmark and Sweden, to compete successfully with the home-made article, both in quality and cost of production.  Here, it will be observed, was an opportunity for an experiment in co-operative production, under modern industrial conditions, which would put the associative qualities of the Irish farmer to a test which the British artisan had not stood quite as well as the founders of the co-operative movement had anticipated.  To add to the interest of the situation, capitalists had seized upon the material advantages which the abundant supply of Irish milk afforded, and the green pastures