Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/84

 is to say, partly by certain obvious geographical necessities and partly by economic conditions. Rivers, lakes, mountain ranges and the sea would impose natural boundaries; and equal accessibility to both mountain pasture and tillage, or alternatively different stateships taking up different kinds of life, would suggest other boundaries. These things can in many cases be traced in the boundaries of the old stateships where they are discoverable as in many cases they are. Clearly since then the life of the people has changed in many ways, and the statesman thinking of modern conditions would find other boundaries naturally suggested to him. The transition from the modern artificial limits of local life to the proper communities, or fellowships, of the future would not be easy. Yet if certain boundaries, drawn from a comparison of the old stateships with the new requirements, were decreed, subsequent experience would soon suggest a revision of working areas where these were found necessary. At the present time these areas in many cases have already been found in great measure by the co-operative societies that have created petty stateships of their own. Such societies have been grouped round an economic idea that, embodying as it does the sense of unity and fellowship about which the new communities would be grouped, would probably be adopted in some form by the stateships of the future; but that would be for themselves to decide by debate in assembly. And when it is remembered that some of these societies have already undertaken from the power used for their factories to supply