Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/87

 themselves intersecting themselves. So, in most matters corporations, having already become stateships, would remain as they now are. The only change they would require to bring them into line with their fellow stateships would be that their councils would need to be enlarged. In most cases this enlargement would not need to be considerable, for it is extremely probable that in the course of time the country stateships would outrival the city stateships in wealth, responsibility and the size of their respective corporate undertakings. Thus alone can the life of the country maintain its own against the life of the cities.

This corporate wealth and responsibility of the country stateships would be the greater, and they would better preserve their social and economic unity, if they decided to use the wealth of the whole for the equal advantage of each of their members, regarding themselves, as the old stateships apparently did in the fifteenth century, as great trading units for export. That is to say, their members would not, if they constituted themselves in this form, trade upon one another in an uneconomical and wasteful warfare; they would create great communal stores under the control of their assemblies, they would purchase all their materials, domestic, farming and industrial, at the lowest possible cost by the purchasing power of the whole stateship, and they would bend all their efforts, together with the other stateships under the Council of Trade, to capturing the markets of the world for their produce. Competition, instead of being a