The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 1909. IRELAND IN THE NEW CENTURY

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2413, 30 January 1909, Page 4

The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 1909. IRELAND IN THE NEW CENTURY

It is unfortunate that the dependence upon a cable service for news cf the outside world is sometimes apt to- give an entirely erroneous impression of tlie condition of other countries, but the methods of modern journalism seem to have that effect. Thus in regard to Ireland we hear so much of cattle-driving episodes and political disputes that it is easy to believe that the Emerald Isle is Still a country of stagnation land seething discontent. The cable .agent sends alcross the wires only the sensational items of interest, giving scant attention to those which deal with the country’s material development. As a matter of fact there are many indications that Ireland is at lost making a steady and .permanent progress along the lines that will ultimately spell national prosperity, and in this connection co-operation . in agriculture is plHyiug a very important part. Twenty, years ago Horace Plunkett, -a co-operator with all his interests in the rural districts, was as a voice crying in the wilderness. Now, ho is a prophet who 'lias come to honor in his own country. If, in a day of reprints, there is any shillingsworth

more inspiring to a- student, of our own times, than Mr Otfurray’s cheap edition-of ‘‘lreland in the New Century,” which tells the simple story of Plunkett's achievement, we cannot think of it. When we remember wlrat Ireland used to be and then turn and behold Catholics and Presbyterians, Nationalists, Ulstermen, and Dunravenites, tenants and .lb-mi-lords being agreeable to one another on the committees of the societies which have been sprinkled all over the country by the Irish Agricultural Organisation movement, when wo see small farmers bridling a taste for oratory in order to concentrate on the details of credit banking and creamery management, we get a notion of the kind of miracle that has been wrought by unlimited patience, by a grip of bottom facts, by unquestioning faith in human goodness and common sense, by tlie best kind of statesmanship, and by .an unquenchable spirit of humor. Moro than threequarters of the delegates at the annual meeting of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, the president and secretary of which are Protestants, were Catholics. On tho platform, on either side of Sir 'Horace Plunkett, there stood a Jesuit priest and a Presbyterian minister.

In the matter of Agricultural Cooperation (Ireland loads and England and Scotland follow. Americans, people from tho Continent of Europe, brown men and bhek men go to /Dublin to study tho ways and works of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society. It is the largest trading body of agriculturists within the Empire. Its 348 creameries, its 260 credit banks, its 165 (agricultural societies, and its poultry, llax, bee-keep-ing, Bacon-curing, and other organisations, making up a grand total which is close on a thousand, do an .annual trade of moro than two millions. Tho ' attitude of Sir JToraco Plunkett and those who arc working with him 'for tho welilire of Ireland was ably put at a recent gathering bv Father Finlay, a Catholic priest, who asid :

When the glamor of successful manufacture and successful trade is beginning to be a little hirnishcd, when the evils which follow in t-lic train of the concentration of the industry of a nation upon processes of manufacture is being brought home to the minds of men, when we see masses of people trooping through the .streets of English towns ’ooking for work aud bread while in tho country round about deserted fields call for energetic and intelligent labor, it may be realised, .perhaps, that in well-tilled fields prosperity is likely to he found, aud that in agricultural industry there is room for the exercise of the intelligence and the- ingenuity that man possesses. Let manufacturers come and flourish in Ireland; when they come they will afford employment to the surplus population of the farms and homesteads, hut it will be a sad day for this country if the multiplication of Belfasts should obscure the greattruth that it is not in the manufactures but in the fields of the country that the real prosperity of

the nation is to be sought. If Agricultural Co-operation were merely a means of putting cottagers in the way of getting a copper or two more for their eggs and of saving farmers so much per cent on tlieir implements, feeding-stuffs, >and manures, there would be little in it to interest the urban reader. But in Ireland, England, and Scotland, .as in Denmark, wo see it doing more. It is widening the sympathies of a conservative class; it is an educative influence; it is a. means of making country life fuller, freer, and brighter. The old country life has been broken in upon by'a manufacturing age. To attempt, incited 'by a- -false aestheticism, to reconstruct a rural society which is out of date, would be idle; but to revive the old .friendliness land interest of tho country, along with all that -modern knowledge and improvements are 'able to furnish, is not impossible and only by such a revival will there be retained in the rural districts a selfrespecting population in the strength of which the nation may bo strong.