What kind
of a being is he? We must deal with averages, and the small farmer is
the typical Irish countryman. The average area of an Irish farm is
twenty-five acres or thereabouts. There are hundreds of thousands who
have more or less. But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer with
twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a drift
of sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal: call him Patrick
Maloney and accept him as symbol of his class. We will view him outside
the operation of the new co-operative policy, trying to obey the command
to be fruitful and replenish the earth. He is fruitful enough. There
is no race suicide in Ireland. His agriculture is largely traditional.
It varied little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and the
beginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite of a
huge department of agriculture. His butter, his eggs, his cattle,
horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers. He rarely knows
where his produce goes to--whether it is devoured in the next county or
is sent across the Channel.
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