The extent to which this may be carried, and the opportunities for making Ireland a co-operative democracy, I shall presently explain. I do not regard any of these forms of co-operative organization as ideal or permanent. The co-operative movement must be regarded rather as a great turning movement on the part of humanity towards the ideal. The co-operative organizations now being formed in Ireland and over the world will, I am certain, persist and outlast this generation and the next, and will grow into vaster things than we dream of; but the really important change they will bring about in the minds of men will be psychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of common action for the common good. To get so far in civil life is a great step. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests and competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them face round to the Delectable City. When this psychological change takes place the democratic associations--which have grown up haphazard as the workers found it easiest to create them--will be changed and remodeled by men who will have the mass of people behind them in their efforts to make a more majestic structure of society for the enlargement of the lives and spirits of men. XII. We have descended from the national soul to the material plane, and we must still continue here for a time, because the doctrine that a sane mind can only manifest through a sane body is as true in reference to the State as to the individual, and necessitates a study of social fabrics. The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and the body repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soul again with its old desires. Our religious hatreds created sectarian organizations, and these react again in the national soul, which would, I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itself incarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and its energies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly. So a drunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature is conquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul in rebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body. The individualism in our economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents concerted action for the general good. We have yet to create harmony of purpose in our economic life, and to bring together interests long separated and unmindful of each other, and make them realize that their interests are identical. It is one of the commonplaces of economics that urban and rural interests are identical: but in truth the townsman and the countryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed, and they know very little of each other. I never like to let these commonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give the countersign to the challenge for truth.