For eight years, commencing in 1892, I was a Member of Parliament. My legislative ambition was to get something done for Irish industry, and especially Irish agriculture. Having secured the assistance of an unprecedented combination of representative Irishmen, known as the Recess Committee (because it sat during the Parliamentary recess), we succeeded in getting the addition we wanted to the machinery of Irish Government. The functions of the new institution are sufficiently indicated by its cumbrous Parliamentary title, "The Department of Agriculture and other Industries and for Technical Instruction for Ireland." I mention this official experience because it not only intensified my desire to study American conditions, but it also brought me frequently to Washington to study the working of those Federal institutions which are concerned for the welfare of the rural population. There I enjoyed the unfailing courtesy of American public servants to the foreign inquirer.
On one of these visits, in the winter of 1905-1906, I called upon President Roosevelt to pay him my respects, and to express to him my obligations to some members of his Administration. I wished especially to acknowledge my indebtedness to that veteran statesman, Secretary Wilson, the value of whose long service to the American farmer it would be hard to exaggerate. Mr. Roosevelt questioned me as to the exact object of my inquiries, and asked me to come again and discuss with him more fully than was possible at the moment certain economic and social questions which had engaged much of his own thoughts. He was greatly interested to learn that in Ireland we have been approaching many of these questions from his own point of view. He made me tell him the story of Irish land legislation, and of recent Irish movements for the improvement of agricultural conditions. Ever since, his interest in these Irish questions—to the Irish Question we gave a wide berth—has been maintained on account of their bearing upon his Rural Life policy, for I had shown him how the economic strengthening and social elevation of the Irish farmer had become a matter of urgent Irish concern. I recall many things he said on that occasion, which show that his two great policies of Conservation and Country Life reform were maturing in his mind. I need hardly say how deeply interesting these policies are to me, embracing as they do economic and social problems, the working out of which in my own country happens to be the task to which I have devoted the best years of my life.
I must now offer to the reader so much of the story of the Country Life movement in my own country as will enable him to understand its interest to Mr. Roosevelt and to many another worker upon the analogous problems of the United States. Ireland is passing through an agrarian revolution. There, as in many other European countries, the title to most of the agricultural land rested upon conquest. The English attempt to colonise Ireland never completely succeeded nor completely failed; consequently the Irish never ceased to repudiate the title of the alien landlord. In 1881 Mr. Gladstone introduced one of the greatest agrarian reforms in history—rent-fixing by judicial authority—which was certainly a bold attempt to put an end to a desolating conflict, centuries old.
The scheme failed,—whether, as some hold, from its inherent defects, or from the circumstances of the time, is an open question. It is but fair to its author to point out that a rapidly increasing foreign competition, chiefly from the newly opened tracts of virgin soil in the New World, led to a fall in agricultural prices, which made the first rents fixed appear too high. Quicker and cheaper transit, together with processes for keeping produce fresh over the longest routes, soon showed that the new market conditions had come to stay. A bad land system on a rising market might succeed better than a good one on a falling. The land tenure reforms begun in 1881, having broken down under stress of foreign competition, and Purchase Acts on a smaller scale having been tentatively tried in the interval, in 1903 Parliament finally decreed that sufficient money should be provided to buy out all the remaining agricultural land. In a not remote future, some two hundred million pounds sterling—a billion dollars—will have been advanced by the British Government to enable the tenants to purchase their holdings, the money to be repaid in easy instalments during periods averaging over sixty years.
Twenty years ago this general course of events was foreseen, and a few Irishmen conceived and set to work upon what has come to be Ireland's Rural Life policy. The position taken up was simple. What Parliament was about to do would pull down the whole structure of Ireland's agricultural economy, and would clear away the chief hindrance to economic and social progress. But upon the ground thus cleared the edifice of a new rural social economy would have to be built. This work, although it needs the fostering care of government, and liberal facilities for a system of education intimately related to the people's working lives, belongs mainly to the sphere of voluntary effort.
The new movement, which was started in 1889 to meet the circumstances I have indicated, was thus a movement for the up-building of country life. It anticipated the lines of the formula which Mr. Roosevelt adopted in his Message transmitting to Congress the Report of the Country Life Commission—better farming, better business, better living: we began with better business, which consisted in the introduction of agricultural coöperation into the farming industry, for several reasons which will appear later, and for one which I must mention here. We found that we could not develop in unorganised farmers a political influence strong enough to enable them to get the Government to do its part towards better farming. Owing to the new agricultural opinion which had been developed indirectly by organising the farmer, we were able to win from Parliament the department I have named above. This institution was so framed and endowed that it is able to give to the Irish farmers all the assistance which can be legitimately given by public agencies and at public expense. The assistance consists chiefly of education. But education is interpreted in the widest sense. Practical instruction to old and young, in schools, upon the farms, and at meetings, lectures, experiments, and demonstrations, the circulation of useful information and advice, and all the usual methods known to progressive governments, are being introduced with the chief aim of enabling the farmer to apply to the practice of farming the teachings of modern science. Better living, which includes making country life more interesting and attractive, is sought by using voluntary associations, some organised primarily for business purposes, and others, having no business aim, for social and intellectual ends. But Irish rural reformers are agreed that by far the most important step towards a higher and a better rural life would be a redirection of education in the country schools. To this I shall return in the proper place.
I can now proceed with my American experiences without leaving any doubt as to the point of view from which I approach the problem of rural life in the United States. Having engaged in actual work upon that problem in Ireland, where a combination of economic changes and political events has made its solution imperative, and having been long in personal touch with rural conditions in some Western States, my interest in certain policies which were maturing at Washington may be easily surmised. There I found that, with wholly different conditions to be dealt with, the thoughts of the President and of others in his confidence were, as regards the main issue, moving in the same direction as my own. They too had come to feel that the welfare of the rural population had been too long neglected, and that it was high time to consider how the neglect might be repaired. In his annual message to Congress in 1904, Mr. Roosevelt had made it clear that he was fully conscious of this necessity. "Nearly half of the people of this country," he wrote, "devote their energies to growing things from the soil. Until a recent date little has been done to prepare these millions for their life work." I did not realise at the time the full import of these sentences. Nor did I foresee that the problem of rural life was to be forced to the front by the awakening of public opinion, upon another issue differing from and yet closely related to the subject of these pages. Mr. Roosevelt was thinking out the Conservation idea, which I believe will some day be recognised as the greatest of his policies.