Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/63

 the co-operative idea among farmers as a means by which they could combat the great organised farming of the Americas, the people took slowly to the idea as a foreign economic theory. Then they seized it, and turned their co-operative societies into rural communities that were a re-birth in modern conditions of their old stateships. Most of them, as the fruit of the Land War, were now beginning to own their farms, and that gave them the foundation of which the stateships had been built. In the central hall of the co-operative society the economic business of the community was discussed, and around it its artisans and artificers collected. That was done naturally, as the result of instinct, but then intellect saw the natural drift, and (not too bravely perhaps, through fear of "political" consequences) sought to guide it definitely in the direction indicated by history.

If there were greater courage and clearer thought, together with the freedom within which thought and courage could act, such communities, instead of being, as they now are, only economic and social units of the national life, could also become the recognised political units of that life. In other words, they could become stateships awaiting their final integration into a State that would equally be a translation into modern conditions of the old Irish State. Though they are social units their social life is stagnant, because (again for what are called "political" reasons) those who control their guidance are afraid to guide it into the only cultural life any nation can know and within which can find