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inferior goods. And the great distributing capitalist will make great profits; but he also confers a service, and those who do not like him are free to patronize their own co-operative stores. The sale of drink, food, drugs, and the like, may be interfered with to secure purity and good quality to the public, but there would be no advantage gained by the State or municipalities undertaking the work of distribution, and substituting its officials for the existing ones. In fact if the State is not the universal producer, it could not with any advantage be the general distributor, though by appointing inspectors to certify as to quality, it performs a useful and necessary work in protecting the public, while leaving the work in the hands otherwise best suited to it.

The public might also require protection from high prices due to monopoly through the combination of distributors, which is more possible in the sphere of distribution than in that of production, and to which, moreover, there is a distinctly increasing tendency at present in certain directions, and here it would seem desirable that the monopolists should have before their mind the possibility of State interference, and even of State expropriation as a salutary restraint to prevent too great abuse of their position.

There is one necessary, in addition to fuel, light and water, the production of which cannot be wholly left to private enterprise,-namely, houses, so far as intended for the working classes and the poor. The municipalities should in the first instance supply a certain proportion of houses of this description in order to break the monopoly of the present

owners, and to deliver the poor from exorbitant rents, amounting frequently to a quarter of their wages, for a bad house. The ground landlord, the builder, and the house owner between them divide a very large revenue, levied on every one in the form of rents, but which press especially on the poor, the rent of whose houses is raised to a scarcity price in many places, because they must live, or find it convenient to live, near their place of work, and because there are many applicants. The demand for houses and house ac'commodation exceeding the supply, forces up the rent, though the house be bad and unhealthy; and here is one case where the municipalities might counteract the selfishness, and stay the hand of the house-owner, by partly supplying houses for the lower classes at rents which would allow them only current interest.

II.

THERE is a large province of industry in which co-operative labour cannot be applied with any very decided advantage, and in which for other reasons it is not desirable to attempt it on a large scale. I mean agriculture, because in it the advantages of the large system of production so conspicuous in manufactures is disputed, and in any case is not great, while the application of it on a large scale in Europe generally, would amount not only to a universal agrarian revolution, but to a revolution in social habits and in daily private life. Here, therefore, there is no room for State enterprise, any more than for the extreme thing desired by the collectivist-socialists.

For hundreds of years the cultivators of the land have been living in France, Germany, and most countries in isolated farmhouses, or in villages, cultivating the soil with the help of the grown members of their families, and sometimes of hired labourers. This has been the case too in Ire'and, Scotland, Wales, and (though to a much less extent) in England also. The cultivators of the land are attached to their way of life, and everywhere are peculiarly conservative in habits and sentiments.

Now co-operative farming, as conceived by the Socialists, would require them to change their way of life, to live in a common residence, or at least in close proximity to each other, to abandon their traditional homesteads, to give up their sense of private proprietary rights, their sense of independence, the things, the most cherished and consecrated in their feelings, and that make the very essence of their life, and all for what? That by their united labour thrown into a common stock they might finally, aster re-division, have perhaps a little more than they would have had working on their own farm for themselves. For this doubtful gain added to the inseparable company of their fellow-co-operators, of which they might easily have too much, they are to submit to be officered and brigaded by the State. For a possible trifle extra per annum, they are to bring themselves, or let themselves be put into community enforced and distasteful, (for all this is gravely proposed by the Collectivist leaders, though for prudential reasons but slightly referred to in working- men's programmes). But however tempting the prospect is made, and however

the authority of the State is kept in the background, I do not think many peasant proprietors in France would be tempted to voluntarily enter the Co-operative and Collectivist Commonwealth so far as it embraces agriculture.

And now let the Authoritarian Socialist observe that the extra amount per annum would certainly not be forthcoming; since it is precisely in the case of peasant properties or good land tenures that the individual owner or tenant is stimulated to the maximum of industry and careful cultivation, because the resul s directly accrue to himself, while under co-operative farming it would not be his obvious interest to labour with such energy. On the contrary, it would be each one's interest to do least, provided the others did not act on the same rule, and there would be the fatal temptation to each to do less than his utmost, which not even the presence of the overseer (however necessary under the system) could overcome wholly; from which it follows that even aided by the best machines and the largest holdings, the quota of the co-operative farmer would be less than that of the individual farmer.

Let us add, to come near home, that in Ireland, or the Highlands, or in Wales, as it would be wholly impossible to get the present occupiers into the agricultural brigades, so even if it were tried with agricultural labourers it is much to be feared that they would disagree amongst themselves. And they certainly would do so, as well as take their work easy, unless the discipline of the brigades was of the strictest kind.

For these reasons, I should recommend the Socialist to give up the idea of including, merely for the sake of symmetry and universality, the farmers in the Co-operative Commonwealth. The older agrarian Socialism will suit them better- that which aimed at equality in the main and liberty, and which secured it by planting each one under his own vinė, at a convenient distance from his fellows, but not too far for neighbourly help and voluntary co-operation. This has succeeded in France, in the United States, and other countries, and it is a further development of this that we want in Ireland and parts of Great Britain, and not Co-operative Farming, which for political, social, and historical reasons, is out of the question.

Here, then, is one very large industrial province not suitable for State management, and a very large population that for a very long time must be exempted from citizenship in the Co-operative Commonwealth. The farming class of Europe and the United States are not indeed opposed to Socialism, but they will only be Socialists in their own fashion, and in the old sense. They are not, as a rule, opposed to the different Socialism of the town artisan, which aims at the control and possession of capital, only they think it does not concern them, provided it does not bring prolonged anarchy.

III.

AND here I find myself between the "points of mighty opposites," between Adam Smith and all the classical economists reinforced by Herbert Spencer

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