Excerpt from Ireland, Agriculture and the War: An Open Letter to Irish Farmers

I feel impelled this week to speak to you personally and directly on the circumstances brought about by the war which affect you as farmers, because from reports which have reached me by many channels, public and private, I am certain that immense numbers of you are unaware of, or do not realise, the new situation created, and that time is hurrying on rapidly to a point where a light will beat strongly on you and all your doings and the attention of the nation will be concentrated upon your class and the Way in which you discharge your functions in the national life. You all know that half the world is at war. Many of you realise it painfully and intimately through brothers, sons, kin or friends who are actual participants in the fighting. In that sense you need no more reminder that the world is at war, but you do not yet realise that you are more than onlookers, that you are called on to be participators in the struggle, not as combatants, but as part of that other noble army whose business it is in many ways to heal up the wounds of the combatants, to make good the wastage in society, and to ameliorate the evil effects of the war. What those working under the Red Cross do for all combatants alike, without distino tion betwe-em friend or foe of their country, you are called upon to do for society at large. Your occupation, always necessary in times of peace, in time of war, in periods of great human necessity stands out prominently and assumes its eternal position as the foremost, the most necessary, of all human occupations. The longer war continues the more does farming, normally hidden behind a hundred other occupations, come to the front. Men think little in times of plenty of the labours which bring them the food that enables them to live and work; but let there be shortage and a wild apprehension springs up in society and people realise that it is upon you and your labours that they depend altogether. You become the staff on which they lean. Every[ other occupation almost might disappear, but' yours never, without humanity disappearing! And any failure of yours in time of necessity to equal the need of the world inflicts the most terrible suffering on the world. Any neglect of duty in a time of necessity would be as ignoble as the act of a Red Cross contingent who on the battlefield neglected to attend to the wounded. The longer the war continues the more insistent will be the claims of the world upon you who can farm, you over whose fields no armies have marched, to supply the shortage of food brought about by the withdrawal of millions of your class in Europe to take part in a redder reaping than any the world has hitherto known.

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