and country life policy.) Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of the Bureau of Forestry introduced Plunkett to Roosevelt in 1906. Roosevelt had recently set up the National Conservation Commission and was also interested in Irish cooperatives. Arguing that it was not enough to conserve natural resources without tackling the problems of rural life, Plunkett and Pinchot helped draft Roosevelt's letter recommending the Commission on Country Life's report to congress. The Dictionary of Irish Biography credits Plunket with persuading Roosevelt to establish the commission as a complement to the conservation work. Success and opposition Public opinion, initially lukewarm, grew hostile in some sectors as the cooperative movement developed, and shopkeepers, butter-buyers and sections of the press led a campaign of virulent opposition. Cooperatives and Plunkett were denounced for supposedly ruining the dairy industry but the movement caught hold, with the mass of farmers benefitting. Plunkett and his colleagues including the poet and painter George William Russell ("Æ") made a good working team, writing widely on economic and cultural development, and on the role of labour. As early as 1894, when his campaign reached a size too big to be directed by a few individuals, Plunkett founded the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), with Lord Monteagle, Thomas A. Finlay and others. Robert A. Anderson acted as secretary, with Æ and PJ Hannon his assistants. IAOS soon became the powerhouse of cooperation, with 33 affiliated dairy cooperative societies and cooperative banks, introducing cooperation among Irish farmers by proving the benefits obtainable through more economical and efficient management. The following year he and Russell began publishing its journal The Irish Homestead to spread information on farming. Four years later there were 243 affiliated societies. Within a decade 800 societies were in existence, with a trade turnover of three million pounds sterling (over 300 million sterling in today's money, and the turnover of the resulting companies is in excess of a billion euro). Plunkett's task was frustrating. He was a pioneer of the concept of systematic rural development, who, in spite of his role in Irish affairs being often overlooked, influenced many international reformers, and can be credited as one of the few who had a long-term vision for the development of rural Ireland. He was apt to remind audiences that, even if full peasant proprietorship was achieved and Home Rule was implemented, rural underdevelopment would still have to be faced. But class conflict between