THE NATIONAL BEING

Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity

By "A. E. " [George William Russell]

To The Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett

A good many years ago you grafted a slip of poetry on your economictree. I do not know if you expected a hybrid. This essay may not beeconomics in your sense of the word. It certainly is not poetry in mysense. The Marriage of Heaven and Earth was foretold by the ancientprophets. I have seen no signs of that union taking place, but I havebeen led to speculate how they might be brought within hailing distanceof each other. In my philosophy of life, we are all responsible forthe results of our actions and their effects on others. This book isa consequence of your grafting operation, and so I dedicate it toyou. --A. E. 

I. 

In the year nineteen hundred and fourteen Anno Domini, amid a worldconflict, the birth of the infant State of Ireland was announced. Almostunnoticed this birth, which in other times had been cried over theearth with rejoicings or anger. Mars, the red planet of war, was in theascendant when it was born. Like other births famous in history, thechild had to be hidden away for a time, and could not with pride beshown to the people as royal children were wont to be shown. Its enemieswere unforgiving, and its friends were distracted with mighty happeningsin the world. Hardly did they know whether it would not be deformed ifit survived: whether this was the Promised, or another child yet tobe conceived in the womb of the Mother of Parliaments. Battles werethreatened between two hosts, secular champions of two spiritualtraditions, to decide its fate. That such a conflict threatened showedindeed that there was something of iron fibre in the infant, withoutwhich in their make-up individuals or nations do nothing worthy ofremembrance. Hercules wrestled with twin serpents in his cradle, andthere were twin serpents of sectarianism ready to strangle this infantState of ours if its guardians were not watchful, or if the infant wasnot itself strong enough to destroy them. 

It is about the State of Ireland, its character and future, I have herewritten some kind of imaginative meditation. The State is a physicalbody prepared for the incarnation of the soul of a race. The body of thenational soul may be spiritual or secular, aristocratic or democratic, civil or militarist predominantly. One or other will be most powerful, and the body of the race will by reflex action affect its soul, evenas through heredity the inherited tendencies and passions of the fleshaffect the indwelling spirit. Our brooding over the infant State mustbe dual, concerned not only with the body but the soul. When we essayself-government in Ireland our first ideas will, in all probability, beborrowed from the Mother of Parliaments, just as children before theygrow to have a character of their own repeat the sentiments of theirparents. After a time, if there is anything in the theory of Irishnationality, we will apply original principles as they are from timeto time discovered to be fundamental in Irish character. A child in thesame way makes discoveries about itself. The mood evoked by picture orpoem reveals a love of beauty; the harsh treatment of an animal provokesan outburst of pity; some curiosity of nature draws forth the spirit ofscientific inquiry, and so, as the incidents of life reveal the innateaffinities of a child to itself, do the adventures of a nation graduallyreveal to it its own character and the will which is in it. 

For all our passionate discussions over self-government we havehad little speculation over our own character or the nature of thecivilization we wished to create for ourselves. Nations rarely, if ever, start with a complete ideal. Certainly we have no national ideals, noprinciples of progress peculiar to ourselves in Ireland, which are acommon possession of our people. National ideals are the possession of afew people only. Yet we must spread them in wide commonalty over Irelandif we are to create a civilization worthy of our hopes and our ages ofstruggle and sacrifice to attain the power to build. We must spread themin wide commonalty because it is certain that democracy will prevailin Ireland. The aristocratic classes with traditions of government, themanufacturing classes with economic experience, will alike be secondaryin Ireland to the small farmers and the wage-earners in the towns. Wemust rely on the ideas common among our people, and on their powerto discern among their countrymen the aristocracy of character andintellect. 

Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character ofraces. They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty, imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people. Thatgreat mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded byenemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant inEurope simply by militarism. That military power depended on and wasfed by a vigorous intellectual life, and the most generally diffusededucation and science existing perhaps in the world. The national beinghad been enriched by a long succession of mighty thinkers. A greatsubjective life and centuries of dream preceded a great objectivemanifestation of power and wealth. The stir in the German Empire whichhas agitated Europe was, at its root, the necessity laid on a powerfulsoul to surround itself with equal external circumstance. That necessityis laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their external lifecorrespond in some measure to their internal dream. A lover of beautywill never contentedly live in a house where all things are devoid oftaste. An intellectual man will loathe a disordered society. 

We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people area measure of their inner life. Our mean and disordered little countrytowns in Ireland, with their drink-shops, their disregard of cleanlinessor beauty, accord with the character of the civilians who inhabit them. Whenever we develop an intellectual life these things will be altered, but not in priority to the spiritual mood. House by house, village byvillage, the character of a civilization changes as the character of theindividuals change. When we begin to build up a lofty world within thenational soul, soon the country becomes beautiful and worthy of respectin its externals. That building up of the inner world we have neglected. Our excited political controversies, our playing at militarism, havetended to bring men's thoughts from central depths to surfaces. Lifeis drawn to its frontiers away from its spiritual base, and behind thesurfaces we have little to fall back on. Few of our notorieties couldbe trusted to think out any economic or social problem thoroughlyand efficiently. They have been engaged in passionate attempts at thereadjustment of the superficies of things. What we require more thanmen of action at present are scholars, economists, scientists, thinkers, educationalists, and litterateurs, who will populate the desert depthsof national consciousness with real thought and turn the void into afullness. We have few reserves of intellectual life to draw upon whenwe come to the mighty labor of nation-building. It will be indignantlydenied, but I think it is true to say that the vast majority of peoplein Ireland do not know the difference between good and bad thinking, between the essential depths and the shallows in humanity. How couldpeople, who never read anything but the newspapers, have any genuineknowledge of any subject on earth or much imagination of anythingbeautiful in the heavens?

What too many people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feelings. Itis enough to them to vent like or dislike, inherited prejudices orpassions, and they think when they have expressed feeling they havegiven utterance to thought. The nature of our political controversiesprovoked passion, and passion has become dominant in our politics. Passion truly is a power in humanity, but it should never enter intonational policy. It is a dangerous element in human life, though it isan essential part of our strangely compounded nature. But in nationallife it is the most dangerous of all guides. There are springs of powerin ourselves which in passion we draw on and are amazed at their depthand intensity, yet we do not make these the master light of our being, but rather those divine laws which we have apprehended and brooded upon, and which shine with clear and steady light in our souls. As creaturesrise in the scale of being the dominant factor in life changes. Invegetation it may be appetite; instinct in bird and beast for man a lifeat once passionate and intellectual; but the greater beings, the starsand planets, must wheel in the heavens under the guidance of inexorableand inflexible law. Now the State is higher in the scale of beingthan the individual, and it should be dominated solely by moral andintellectual principles. These are not the outcome of passion orprejudice, but of arduous thought. National ideals must be built upwith the same conscious deliberation of purpose as the architect of theParthenon conceived its lofty harmony of shining marble lines, or as thearchitect of Rheims Cathedral designed its intricate magnificence andmystery. Nations which form their ideals and marry them in the hurry ofpassion are likely to repent without leisure, and they will not be ableto divorce those ideals without prolonged domestic squabbles and publiccleansing of dirty linen. If we are to build a body for the soulof Ireland it ought not to be a matter of reckless estimates orjerry-building. We have been told, during my lifetime at least, notto criticize leaders, to trust leaders, and so intellectual discussionceased and the high principles on which national action should be basedbecame less and less understood, less and less common possessions. Thenation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its lawsbut as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark andissuing orders. No doubt our political chieftains loved their country, but love has many degrees of expression from the basest to the highest. The basest love will wreck everything, even the life of the beloved, togratify ignoble desires. The highest love conspires with the imaginativereason to bring about every beautiful circumstance around the belovedwhich will permit of the highest development of its life. There is noreal love apart from this intellectual brooding. Men who love Irelandignobly brawl about her in their cups, quarrel about her with theirneighbor, allow no freedom of thought of her or service of her otherthan their own, take to the cudgel and the rifle, and join sectarianorders or lodges to ensure that Ireland will be made in their ownignoble image. Those who love Ireland nobly desire for her the highestof human destinies. They would ransack the ages and accumulate wisdom tomake Irish life seem as noble in men's eyes as any the world has known. The better minds in every race, eliminating passion and prejudice, bythe exercise of the imaginative reason have revealed to their countrymenideals which they recognized were implicit in national character. Itis such discoveries we have yet to make about ourselves to unite us tofulfill our destiny. We have to discover what is fundamental in Irishcharacter, the affections, leanings, tendencies towards one or more ofthe eternal principles which have governed and inspired all great humaneffort, all great civilizations from the dawn of history. A nation isbut a host of men united by some God-begotten mood, some hope of libertyor dream of power or beauty or justice or brotherhood, and until thatmaster idea is manifested to us there is no shining star to guide theship of our destinies. 

Our civilization must depend on the quality of thought engendered inthe national being. We have to do for Ireland--though we hope withless arrogance--what the long and illustrious line of German thinkers, scientists, poets, philosophers, and historians did for Germany, or whatthe poets and artists of Greece did for the Athenians: and that is, tocreate national ideals, which will dominate the policy of statesmen, the actions of citizens, the universities, the social organizations, theadministration of State departments, and unite in one spirit urban andrural life. Unless this is done Ireland will be like Portugal, or anyof the corrupt little penny-dreadful nationalities which so continuallydisturb the peace of the world with internal revolutions and externalbrawlings, and we shall only have achieved the mechanism of nationality, but the spirit will have eluded us. 

What I have written hereafter on the national being, my thoughts on anIrish polity, are not to be taken as an attempt to deal with more thana few essentials. I offer it to my countrymen, to start thoughtand discussion upon the principles which should prevail in an Irishcivilization. If to readers in other countries the thought appearsprimitive or elementary, I would like them to remember that we are atthe beginning of our activity as a nation, and we have yet to settlefundamentals. Races hoary with political wisdom may look with disdain onthe attempts at political thinking by a new self-governing nationality, or the theories of civilization discussed about the cradle of an infantState. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character of itsthought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist indeveloped manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earthtogether in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistinguished. Thisbook only begins a meditation in which, I hope, nobler imaginations andfiner intellects than mine will join hereafter, and help to raise thesoul of Ireland nigher to the ideal and its body nigher to its soul. 

II. 

The building up of a civilization is at once the noblest and the mostpractical of all enterprises, in which human faculties are exalted totheir highest, and beauties and majesties are manifested in multitude asthey are never by solitary man or by disunited peoples. In the highestcivilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and madepart of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He entersinto it, and it becomes in oversoul to him, and gives to all his worksa character and grandeur and a relation to the works of hisfellow-citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labors ofothers for unity and magnificence of effect. So ancient Egypt, with itstemples, sphinxes, pyramids, and symbolic decorations, seems to us asif it had been created by one grandiose imagination; for even the lessercraftsmen, working on the mummy case for the tomb, had much of themystery and solemnity in their work which is manifest in temple andpyramid. So the city States in ancient Greece in their day were unitedby ideals to a harmony of art and architecture and literature. Among theAthenians at their highest the ideal of the State so wrought upon theindividual that its service became the overmastering passion of life, and in that great oration of Pericles, where he told how the Athenianideal inspired the citizens so that they gave their bodies for thecommonwealth, it seems to have been conceived of as a kind of oversoul, a being made up of immortal deeds and heroic spirits, influencing theliving, a life within their life, molding their spirits to its likeness. It appears almost as if in some of these ancient famous communities thenational ideal became a kind of tribal deity, that began first withsome great hero who died and was immortalized by the poets, and whosecharacter, continually glorified by them, grew at last so great in songthat he could not be regarded as less than a demi-god. We can see inancient Ireland that Cuchulain, the dark sad man of the earlier tales, was rapidly becoming a divinity, a being who summed up in himself allthat the bards thought noblest in the spirit of their race; andif Ireland had a happier history no doubt one generation of bardicchroniclers after another would have molded that half-mythical figureinto the Irish ideal of all that was chivalrous, tender, heroic, andmagnanimous, and it would have been a star to youth, and the thought ofit a staff to the very noblest. Even as Cuchulain alone at the ford heldit against a host, so the ideal would have upheld the national soul inits darkest hours, and stood in many a lonely place in the heart. Thenational soul in a theocratic State is a god; in an aristocratic ageit assumes the character of a hero; and in a democracy it becomes amultitudinous being, definite in character if the democracy is a realsocial organism. But where the democracy is only loosely held togetherby the social order, the national being is vague in character, is a moodtoo feeble to inspire large masses of men to high policies in times ofpeace, and in times of war it communicates frenzy, panic, and delirium. 

None of our modern States create in us such an impression of beingspiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancientworld. The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that manyleaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor themas divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attributethis degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame. In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about greatkings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalryand generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a greatman was like; and men were influenced by the ideal created, and stroveto win the praise of the bards and to be recrowned by them a second timein great poetry. So we had Cuchulain and Oscar in Ireland; Hector ofTroy, Theseus in Greece; Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, allbard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is thegreat defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types. How hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of anepic. It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of agenuine lyric. Whitman, himself the most democratic poet of the modernworld, felt this deficiency in the literature of the later democracies, and lamented the absence of great heroic figures. The poets have droppedout of the divine procession, and sing a solitary song. They inspirenobody to be great, and failing any finger-post in literature pointingto true greatness our democracies too often take the huckster from hisstall, the drunkard from his pot, the lawyer from his court, andthe company promoter from the director's chair, and elect them asrepresentative men. We certainly do this in Ireland. It is--how manyhundred years since greatness guided us? In Ireland our history beginswith the most ancient of any in a mythical era when earth mingled withheaven. The gods departed, the half-gods also, hero and saint afterthat, and we have dwindled down to a petty peasant nationality, ruraland urban life alike mean in their externals. Yet the cavalcade, for allits tattered habiliments, has not lost spiritual dignity. There is stillsome incorruptible spiritual atom in our people. We are still in somerelation to the divine order; and while that uncorrupted spiritual atomstill remains all things are possible if by some inspiration there couldbe revealed to us a way back or forward to greatness, an Irish polity inaccord with national character. 

III. 

In formulating an Irish polity we have to take into account the changein world conditions. A theocratic State we shall have no more. Everynation, and our own along with them, is now made up of varied sects, and the practical dominance of one religious idea would let looseillimitable passions, the most intense the human spirit can feel. Theway out of the theocratic State was by the drawn sword and was lit bythe martyr's fires. The way back is unthinkable for all Protestantfears or Catholic aspirations. Aristocracies, too, become impossibleas rulers. The aristocracy of character and intellect we may hope shallfinally lead us, but no aristocracy so by birth will renew its authorityover us. The character of great historic personages is graduallyreflected in the mass. The divine right of kings is followed by theidea of the divine right of the people, and democracies finally becomeungovernable save by themselves. They have seen and heard too muchof pride and greatness not to have become, in some measure, proud anddefiant of all authority except their own. It may be said the history ofdemocracies is not one to fill us with confidence, but the truth is theworld has yet to see the democratic State, and of the yet untried wemay think with hope. Beneath the Athenian and other ancient democraticStates lay a substratum of humanity in slavery, and the culture, beauty, and bravery of these extraordinary peoples were made possible by theworkers in an underworld who had no part in the bright civic life. 

We have no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy inpolitics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. Westill have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne astheocratic king ruling in the name of a god, or aristocracy ruling bymilitary power; and the forces represented by these twain, supersededby the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power whichtook their place of pride. Religion and rank, whether content or notwith the subsidiary place they now occupy, are most often courtiers ofMammon and support him on his throne. For all the talk about democracyour social order is truly little more democratic than Rome was under theCaesars, and our new rulers have not, with all their wealth, createda beauty which we could imagine after-generations brooding over withuplifted heart. 

The people in theocratic States like Egypt or Chaldea, ruled in thename of gods, saw rising out of the plains in which they lived anarchitecture so mysterious and awe-inspiring that they might wellbelieve the master-minds who designed the temples were inspired from theOversoul. The aristocratic States reflected the love of beauty which isassociated with aristocracies. The oligarchies of wealth in our time, who have no divine sanction to give dignity to their rule nor traditionsof lordly life like the aristocracies, have not in our day createdbeauty in the world. But whatever of worth the ancient systems producedwas not good enough to make permanent their social order. Theircivilizations, like ours, were built on the unstable basis of a vastworking-class with no real share in the wealth and grandeur it helpedto create. The character of his kingdom was revealed in dream toNebuchadnezzar by an image with a golden head and feet of clay, and thatimage might stand as symbol of the empires the world has known. There isin all a vast population living in an underworld of labor whose freedomto vote confers on them no real power, and who are most often scornedand neglected by those who profit by their labors. Indifference turnsto fear and hatred if labor organizes and gathers power, or makes onemotion of its myriad hands towards the sceptre held by the autocrats ofindustry. When this class is maddened and revolts, civilizationshakes and totters like cities when the earthquake stirs beneath theirfoundations. Can we master these arcane human forces? Can we, by anydevice, draw this submerged humanity into the light and make them realpartners in the social order, not partners merely in the political lifeof the nation, but, what is of more importance, in its economic life?If we build our civilization without integrating labor into its economicstructure, it will wreck that civilization, and it will do that moreswiftly today than two thousand years ago, because there is no longerthe disparity of culture between high and low which existed in pastcenturies. The son of the artisan, if he cares to read, may becomealmost as fully master of the wisdom of Plato or Aristotle as if hehad been at a university. Emerson will speak to him of his divinity;Whitman, drunken with the sun, will chant to him of his inheritance ofthe earth. He is elevated by the poets and instructed by the economists. But there are not thrones enough for all who are made wise in our socialorder, and failing even to serve in the social heaven these men willspread revolt and reign in the social hell. They are becoming too manyfor higher places to be found for them in the national economy. They areincreasing to a multitude which must be considered, and the framers ofa national polity must devise a life for them where their new-founddignity of spirit will not be abased. Men no more will be content underrulers of industry they do not elect themselves than they were underpolitical rulers claiming their obedience in the name of God. They willnot for long labor in industries where they have no power to fixthe conditions of their employment, as they were not content with apolitical system which allowed them no power to control legislation. Ireland must begin its imaginative reconstruction of a civilization byfirst considering that type which, in the earlier civilizations of theworld, has been slave, serf, or servile, working either on land or atindustry, and must construct with reference to it. These workers must bethe central figures, and how their material, intellectual, and spiritualneeds are met must be the test of value of the social order we evolve. 

IV. 

In Ireland we begin naturally our consideration of this problem with thefolk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal--the linkingup of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since thedestruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factorin rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other andfrom the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action; and that wasso until the movement for the organization of agriculture was initiatedby Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in that patriotic association, the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Though its actualachievement is great; though it may be said to be the pivot round whichIreland has begun to swing back to its traditional and natural communismin work, we still have over the larger part of Ireland conditionsprevailing which tend to isolate the individual from the community. 

When we examine rural Ireland, outside this new movement, we findeverywhere isolated and individualistic agricultural production, servedwith regard to purchase and sale by private traders and dealers, who areindependent of economic control from the consumers or producers, or theState. The tendency in the modern world to conduct industry in the grandmanner is not observable here. The first thing which strikes one whotravels through rural Ireland is the immense number of little shops. They are scattered along the highways and at the crossroads; and wherethere are a few families together in what is called a village, the number of little shops crowded round these consumers is almostincredible. What are all these little shops doing? They are supplyingthe farmers with domestic requirements: with tea, sugar, flour, oil, implements, vessels, clothing, and generally with drink. Every one ofthem almost is a little universal provider. Every one of them has itsown business organization, its relations with wholesale houses in thegreater towns. All of them procure separately from others their bagsof flour, their barrels of porter, their stocks of tea, sugar, raisins, pots, pans, nails, twine, fertilizers, and what not, and all thesethings come to them paying high rates to the carriers for little loads. The trader's cart meets them at the station, and at great expense thenecessaries of life are brought together. In the world-wide amalgamationof shoe-makers into boot factories, and smithies into ironworks, which is going on in Europe and America, these little shops have beenoverlooked. Nobody has tried to amalgamate them, or to economize humaneffort or cheapen the distribution of the necessaries of life. This workof distribution is carried on by all kinds of little traders competingwith each other, pulling the devil by the tail; doing the workeconomically, so far as they themselves are concerned, because theymust, but doing it expensively for the district because they cannothelp it. They do not serve Ireland well. The genius of amalgamation andorganization cannot afford to pass by these shops, which spring upin haphazard fashion, not because the country needs them, but becausefarmers or traders have children to be provided for. To the ignorantthis is the easiest form of trade, and so many are started in life inone of these little shops after an apprenticeship in another like it. These numerous competitors of each other do not keep down prices. Theyincrease them rather by the unavoidable multiplication of expenses;and many of them, taking advantage of the countryman's irregularity ofincome and his need for credit, allow credit to a point where the smallfarmer becomes a tied customer, who cannot pay all he owes, and whotherefore dares not deal elsewhere. These agencies for distribution donot by their nature enlarge the farmer's economic knowledge. His visionbeyond them to their sources of supply is blocked, and in this respecthe is debarred from any unity with national producers other than his ownclass. 

Let us now for a little consider the small farmer around whom havegathered these multitudinous little agencies of distribution. What kindof a being is he? We must deal with averages, and the small farmeris the typical Irish countryman. The average area of an Irish farm istwenty-five acres or thereabouts. There are hundreds of thousands whohave more or less. But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer withtwenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a driftof sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal: call him PatrickMaloney and accept him as symbol of his class. We will view him outsidethe operation of the new co-operative policy, trying to obey the commandto be fruitful and replenish the earth. He is fruitful enough. There isno race suicide in Ireland. His agriculture is largely traditional. Itvaried little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and thebeginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite ofa huge department of agriculture. His butter, his eggs, his cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers. He rarely knows wherehis produce goes to--whether it is devoured in the next county or issent across the Channel. It might be pitched into the void for all heknows about its destiny. He might be described almost as the primitiveeconomic cave-man, the darkness of his cave unillumined by any ray ofgeneral principles. As he is obstructed by the traders in a generalvision of production other than his own, so he is obstructed by thesedealers in a general vision of the final markets for his produce. Hisreading is limited to the local papers, and these, following the exampleof the modern press, carefully eliminate serious thought as likely todeprive them of readers. But Patrick, for all his economic backwardness, has a soul. The culture of the Gaelic poets and story-tellers, whilenot often actually remembered, still lingers like a fragrance about hismind. He lives and moves and has his being in the loveliest nature, theskies over him ever cloudy like an opal; and the mountains flowacross his horizon in wave on wave of amethyst and pearl. He has theunconscious depth of character of all who live and labor much in theopen air, in constant fellowship with the great companions--with theearth and the sky and the fire in the sky. We ponder over Patrick, hisrace and his country, brooding whether there is the seed of a Periclesin Patrick's loins. Could we carve an Attica out of Ireland?

Before Patrick can become the father of a Pericles, before Ireland canbecome an Attica, Patrick must be led out of his economic cave: his lowcunning in barter must be expanded into a knowledge of economic law--hisfanatical concentration on his family--begotten by the isolation andindividualism of his life--be sublimed into national affections; hisunconscious depths be sounded, his feeling for beauty be awakened bycontact with some of the great literature of the world. His mind isvirgin soil, and we may hope that, like all virgin soil, it willbe immensely fruitful when it is cultivated. How does the policy ofco-working make Patrick pass away from his old self? We can imagine himas a member of a committee getting hints of a strange doctrine calledscience from his creamery manager. He hears about bacteria, and thesedark invisibles replace, as the cause of bad butter-making, the wickedfairies of his childhood. Watching this manager of his society he learnsa new respect for the man of special or expert knowledge. Discussing thebusiness of his association with other members he becomes something of apractical economist. He knows now where his produce goes. He learns thathe has to compete with Americans, Europeans, and Colonials--indeedwith the farmers of the world, hitherto concealed from his view by amountainous mass of middle-men. He begins to be interested in thesecountries and reads about them. He becomes a citizen of the world. His horizon is no longer bounded by the wave of blue hills beyond hisvillage. The roar of the planet begins to sound in his ears. Whatis more important is that he is becoming a better citizen of hisown country. He meets on his committee his religious and politicalopponents, not now discussing differences out identities of interest. Healso meets the delegates from other societies in district conferencesor general congresses, and those who meet thus find their interests arecommon, and a new friendliness springs up between North and South, and local co-operation leads on to national co-operation. The bestintellects, the best business men in the societies, meet in the bigcentres as directors of federations and wholesales, and they get anall-Ireland view of their industry. They see the parish from the pointof view of the nation, and this vision does not desert them when they goback to the parish. They realize that their interests are bound up withnational interests, and they discuss legislation and administration withpractical knowledge. Eyes getting keener every year, minds getting moreinstructed, begin to concentrate on Irish public men. Presently Patrickwill begin to seek for men of special knowledge and administrativeability to manage Irish affairs. Ireland has hitherto been to Patricka legend, a being mentioned in romantic poetry, a little dark Rose, amystic maiden, a vague but very simple creature of tears and aspirationsand revolts. He now knows what a multitudinous being a nation is, and incontact with its complexities Patrick's politics take on a new gravity, thoughtfulness, and intellectual character. 

Under the influence of these associations and the ideas pervading themour typical Irish farmer gets drawn out of his agricultural sleep ofthe ages, developing rapidly as mummy-wheat brought out of the tomb andexposed to the eternal forces which stimulate and bring to life. I havetaken an individual as a type, and described the original circumstanceand illustrated the playing of the new forces on his mind. It is theonly way we can create a social order which will fit our character asthe glove fits the hand. Reasoning solely from abstract principles aboutjustice, democracy, the rights of man and the like, often leads us intofutilities, if not into dangerous political experiments. We have to seeour typical citizen in clear light, realize his deficiencies, ignorance, and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we canwisely enlarge his boundaries. The centre of the citizen is the home. His circumference ought to be the nation. The vast majority of Irishcitizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vitalrelations with their circumference which alone entitle them to theprivileges of citizenship, and enable them to act with political wisdom. An emotional relationship is not enough. Our poets sang of a unitedIreland, but the unity they sang of was only a metaphor. It mainly meantseparation from another country. In that imaginary unity men were reallyseparate from each other. Individualism, fanatically centering itself onits family and family interests, interfered on public boards to do jobsin the interests of its kith and kin. The co-operative movement connectswith living links the home, the centre of Patrick's being, to thenation, the circumference of his being. It connects him with thenation through membership of a national movement, not for the politicalpurposes which call on him for a vote once every few years, butfor economic purposes which affect him in the course of his dailyoccupations. This organization of the most numerous section of the Irishdemocracy into co-operative associations, as it develops and embracesthe majority, will tend to make the nation one and indivisible andconscious of its unity. The individual, however meagre his naturalendowment of altruism, will be led to think of his community as himself;because his income, his social pleasures even, depend on the successof the local and national organizations with which he is connected. Thesmall farmers of former times pursued a petty business of barter andhaggle, fighting for their own hand against half the world about them. The farmers of the new generation will grow up in a social order, where all the transactions which narrowed their fathers' hearts will becommunal and national enterprises. How much that will mean in a changeof national character we can hardly realize, we who were born in anIreland where petty individualism was rampant, and where every child hadit borne in upon him that it had to fight its own corner in the world, where the whole atmosphere about it tended to the hardening of thepersonality. 

We may hope and believe that this transformation of the socialorder will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation, identifying national with personal interests. For those who believethere is a divine seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they mayhope will promote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in thepast, in favorable airs, has made beauty or grandeur or spiritualitythe characteristics of ancient civilizations in Greece, in Egypt, and inIndia. No one can work for his race without the hope that the highest, or more than the highest, humanity has reached will be within reach ofhis race also. We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting therough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the loftyedifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious. And inIreland, for all its melancholy history, we may, knowing that we arehuman, dream that there is the seed of a Pericles in Patrick's loins, and that we might carve an Attica out of Ireland. 

V. 

In Ireland we must of necessity give special thought to the needs of thecountryman, because our main industry is agriculture. We have few bigcities. Our great cities are almost all outside our own borders. Theyare across the Atlantic. The surplus population of the countrysidedo not go to our own towns but emigrate. The exodus does not enrichLimerick or Galway, but New York. The absorption of life in greatcities is really the danger which most threatens the modern State with adecadence of its humanity. In the United States, even in Canada, hardlyhas the pioneer made a home in the wilderness when his sons and hisdaughters are allured by the distant gleam of cities beyond the plains. In England the countryside has almost ceased to be the mother of men--atleast a fruitful mother. We are face to face in Ireland with thisproblem, with no crowded and towering cities to disguise the emptinessof the fields. It is not a problem which lends itself to legislativesolution. Whether there be fair rents or no rents at all, the childof the peasant, yearning for a fuller life, goes where life is atits fullest. We all desire life, and that we might have it moreabundantly, --the peasant as much as the mystic thirsting for infinitebeing, --and in rural Ireland the needs of life have been neglected. 

The chief problem of Ireland--the problem which every nation in greateror lesser measure will have to solve--is how to enable the country-man, without journeying, to satisfy to the full his economic, social, intellectual, and spiritual needs. We have made some tentative efforts. The long war over the land, which resulted in the transference of theland from landlord to cultivator, has advanced us part of the way, but the Land Acts offered no complete solution. We were assured by hotenthusiasts of the magic of proprietorship, but Ireland has not tilleda single acre more since the Land Acts were passed. Our rural exoduscontinued without any Moses to lead us to Jerusalems of our own. Atevery station boys and girls bade farewell to their friends; and hardlyhad the train steamed out when the natural exultation of adventure madethe faces of the emigrants glow because the world lay before them, andhuman appetites the country could not satisfy were to be appeased at theend of the journey. 

How can we make the countryside in Ireland a place which nobody wouldwillingly emigrate from? When we begin to discuss this problem we soonmake the discovery that neither in the new world nor the old has therebeen much first-class thinking on the life of the countryman. This willbe apparent if we compare the quality of thought which has been devotedto the problems of the city State, or the constitution of widespreaddominions, from the days of Solon and Aristotle down to the time ofAlexander Hamilton, and compare it with the quality of thought which hasbeen brought to bear on the problems of the rural community. 

On the labors of the countryman depend the whole strength and health, nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country, politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and thecountryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. It seems to be so in Canada and the States even, countries which we inEurope for long regarded as mainly agricultural. It seems only yesterdayto the imagination that they were colonized, and yet we find theMinister of Agriculture in Canada announcing a decline in the ruralpopulation in Eastern Canada. As children sprung from the loins ofdiseased parents manifest at an early age the same defects in theirconstitution, so Canada and the States, though in their nationalchildhood, seem already threatened by the same disease from whichclassic Italy perished, and whose ravages today make Great Britain seemto the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit--ruddywithout, but eaten away within and rotten at the core. One expectsdisease in old age, but not in youth. We expect young countries to sowtheir wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle downto national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles--theresult of excessive energy--as we are by symptoms of premature decay. Nonation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry, contentedwith rural employments, however discontented with other things, existson its soil. The disease which has attacked our great populations hereand in America is a discontent with rural life. Nothing which has beendone hitherto seems able to promote content. It is true, indeed, thatscience has gone out into the fields, but the labors of the chemist, the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer are not enough toensure health. What is required is the art of the political thinker, theimagination which creates a social order and adjusts it to human needs. The physician who understands the general laws of human health is ofmore importance to us here than the specialist. The genius of rural lifehas not yet appeared. We have no fundamental philosophy concerning it, but we have treasures of political wisdom dealing with humanity as asocial organism in the city States or as great nationalities. It mightbe worth while inquiring to what extent the wisdom of a Solon, anAristotle, a Rousseau, or an Alexander Hamilton might be applied to theproblem of the rural community. After all, men are not so completelychanged in character by their rural environment that their social needsdo not, to a large extent, coincide with the needs of the townsman. Theycannot be considered as creatures of a different species. Yet statesmenwho have devoted so much thought to the constitution of empires and theorganization of great cities, who have studied their psychology, havealmost always treated the rural problem purely as an economic problem, as if agriculture was a business only and not a life. 

Our great nations and widespread empires arose in a haphazard fashionout of city States and scattered tribal communities. The fusion of theseinto larger entities, which could act jointly for offence or defense, so much occupied the thoughts of their rulers that everything else wassubordinated to it. As a result, the details of our modern civilizationsare all wrong. There is an intensive life at a few great political orindustrial centres, and wide areas where there is stagnation and decay. Stagnation is most obvious in rural districts. It is so general that ithas been often assumed that there was something inherent in rural lifewhich made the countryman slow in mind as his own cattle. But this isnot so, as I think can be shown. There is no reason why as intense, intellectual, and progressive a life should not be possible in thecountry as in the towns. The real reason for the stagnation is that thecountry population is not organized. We often hear the expression, "therural community, " but where do we find rural communities? There arerural populations, but that is altogether a different thing. The word"community" implies an association of people having common interests andcommon possessions, bound together by laws and regulations which expressthese common interests and ideals, and define the relation of theindividual to the community. Our rural populations are no more closelyconnected, for the most part, than the shifting sands on the seashore. Their life is almost entirely individualistic. There are personalfriendships, of course, but few economic or social partnerships. Everybody pursues his own occupation without regard to the occupation ofhis neighbors. If a man emigrates it does not affect the occupation ofthose who farm the land all about him. They go on ploughing and digging, buying and selling, just as before. They suffer no perceptible economicloss by the departure of half-a-dozen men from the district. A truecommunity would, of course, be affected by the loss of its members. Aco-operative society, if it loses a dozen members, the milk of theircows, their orders for fertilizers, seeds, and feeding-stuffs, receivesserious injury to its prosperity. There is a minimum of trade belowwhich its business cannot fall without bringing about a completestoppage of its work and an inability to pay its employees. That is thedifference between a community and an unorganized population. In thefirst the interests of the community make a conscious and direct appealto the individual, and the community, in its turn, rapidly develops aninterest in the welfare of the member. In the second, the interest ofthe individual in the community is only sentimental, and as there is noorganization the community lets its units slip away or disappear withoutcomment or action. We had true rural communities in ancient Ireland, though the organization was rather military than economic. But themembers of a clan had common interests. They owned the land in common. It was a common interest to preserve it intact. It was to their interestto have a numerous membership of the clan, because it made it lessliable to attack. Men were drawn by the social order out of merelypersonal interests into a larger life. In their organizations they wereunconsciously groping, as all human organizations are, towards the finalsolidarity of humanity--the federation of the world. 

Well, these old rural communities disappeared. The greater organizationsof nation or empire regarded the smaller communities jealously in thepast, and broke them up and gathered all the strings of power intocapital cities. The result was a growth of the State, with a local decayof civic, patriotic, or public feeling, ending in bureaucracies andState departments, where paid officials, devoid of intimacy with localneeds, replaced the services naturally and voluntarily rendered in anearlier period. The rural population, no longer existing as a ruralcommunity, sank into stagnation. There was no longer a common interest, a social order turning their minds to larger than individual ends. Wherefeudalism was preserved, the feudal chief, if the feeling of noblesseoblige was strong, might act as a centre of progress, but where this waslacking social decay set in. The difficulty of moving the countryman, which has become traditional, is not due to the fact that he lives inthe country, but to the fact that he lives in an unorganized society. If in a city people want an art gallery or public baths or recreationgrounds, there is a machinery which can be set in motion; there arecorporations and urban councils which can be approached. If publicopinion is evident--and it is easy to organize public opinion in atown--the city representatives will consider the scheme, and if theyapprove and it is within their power as a council, they are able to levyrates to finance the art gallery, recreation grounds, public gardens, or whatever else. Now let us go to a country district where there is noorganization. It may be obvious to one or two people that the place isperishing and the intelligence of its humanity is decaying, lacking somecentre of life. They want a village hall, but how is it to be obtained?They begin talking about it to this person or that. They ask thesepeople to talk to their friends, and the ripples go out weakening andwidening for months, perhaps for years. I know of districts where thishas happened. There are hundreds of parishes in Ireland where one ortwo men want co-operative societies or village halls or rural libraries. They discuss the matter with their neighbors, but find a completeignorance on the subject, and consequent lethargy. There is no socialorganism with a central life to stir. Before enthusiasm can be kindledthere must be some knowledge. The countryman reads little, and it is along and tedious business before enough people are excited to bring themto the point of appealing to some expert to come in and advise. 

More changes often take place within a dozen years after a co-operativesociety is first started than have taken place for a century previous. Iam familiar with a district--in the northwest of Ireland. It was a mostwretchedly poor district. The farmers were at the mercy of the gombeentraders and the agricultural middlemen. Then a dozen years ago aco-operative society was formed. I am sure that the oldest inhabitantwould agree with me that more changes for the better for farmers havetaken place since the co-operative society was started than he couldremember in all his previous life. The reign of the gombeen man is over. The farmers control their own buying and selling. Their organizationmarkets for them the eggs and poultry. It procures seeds, fertilizers, and domestic requirements. It turns the members' pigs into bacon. Theyhave a village hall and a woman's organization. They sell the productsof the women's industry. They have a co-operative band, socialgatherings, and concerts. They have spread out into half-a-dozenparishes, going southward and westward with their propaganda, andin half-a-dozen years, in all that district, previously withoutorganization, there will be well-organized farmers' guilds, concentrating in themselves the trade of their district, havingmeeting-places where the opinion of the members can be taken, having amachinery, committees, and executive officers to carry out whatever maybe decided on: and having funds, or profits, the joint property of thecommunity, which can be drawn upon to finance their undertakings. Itought to be evident what a tremendous advantage it is to farmers ina district to have such organizations, what a lever they can pulland control. I have tried to indicate the difference between a ruralpopulation and a rural community, between a people loosely knit togetherby the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people whoare closely knit together in an association and who form a true socialorganism, a true rural community, where the general will can findexpression and society is malleable to the general will. I assertthat there never can be any progress in rural districts or any realprosperity without such farmers' organizations or guilds. Wherever ruralprosperity is reported of any country inquire into it, and it will befound that it depends on rural organization. Wherever there is ruraldecay, if it is inquired into, it will be found that there was a ruralpopulation but no rural community, no organization, no guild to promotecommon interests and unite the countrymen in defense of them. 

VI. 

It is the business of the rural reformer to create the rural community. It is the antecedent to the creation of a rural civilization. We have toorganize the community so that it can act as one body. It is not enoughto organize farmers in a district for one purpose only--in a creditsociety, a dairy society, a fruit society, a bacon factory, or in aco-operative store. All these may be and must be beginnings; but if theydo not develop and absorb all rural business into their organizationthey will have little effect on character. No true social organism willhave been created. If people unite as consumers to buy together theyonly come into contact on this one point; there is no general identityof interest. If co-operative societies are specialized for this purposeor that--as in Great Britain or on the Continent--to a large extent thelimitation of objects prevents a true social organism from being formed. The latter has a tremendous effect on human character. The specializedsociety only develops economic efficiency. The evolution of humanitybeyond its present level depends absolutely on its power to unite andcreate true social organisms. Life in its higher forms is only possiblebecause of the union of myriads of tiny lives to form a larger being, which manifests will, intelligence, affection, and the spiritual powers. The life of the amoeba or any other unicellular organism is low comparedwith the life in more complex organisms, like the ant or bee. Man isthe most highly developed living organism on the globe; yet his bodyis built up of innumerable cells, each of which might be described asa tiny life in itself. But they are built up in man into such a closeassociation that what affects one part of the body affects all. The painwhich the whole being feels if a part is wounded, if one cell in thehuman body is hurt, should prove that to the least intelligent. Thenervous system binds all the tiny cells together, and they form in thistotality a being infinitely higher, more powerful, than the cells whichcompose it. They are able to act together and achieve things impossibleto the separated cells. Now humanity today is, to some extent, likethe individual cells. It is trying to unite together to form a realorganism, which will manifest higher qualities of life than theindividual can manifest. But very few of the organisms created bysociety enable the individual to do this. The joint-stock companies orcapitalist concerns which bring men together at this work or that donot yet make them feel their unity. Existence under a common governmenteffects this still less. Our modern states have not yet succeeded inbuilding up that true national life where all feel the identity ofinterest; where the true civic or social feeling is engendered and theindividual bends all his efforts to the success of the community onwhich his own depends; where, in fact, the ancient Greek conceptionof citizenship is realized, and individuals are created who are everconscious of the identity of interest between themselves and their race. In the old Greek civilizations this was possible because their Stateswere small, indeed their ideal State contained no more citizens thancould be affected by the voice of a single orator. Such small States, though they produced the highest quality of life within themselves, are no longer possible as political entities. We have to see whether wecould not, within our widespread nationalities, create communitiesby economic means, where something of the same sense of solidarity ofinterest might be engendered and the same quality of life maintained. I am greatly ambitious for the rural community. But it is no use havingmean ambitions. Unless people believe the result of their labors willresult in their equaling or surpassing the best that has been doneelsewhere, they will never get very far. We in Ireland are in quest ofa civilization. It is a great adventure, the building up of acivilization--the noblest which could be undertaken by any persons. Itis at once the noblest and the most practical of all enterprises, andI can conceive of no greater exaltation for the spirit of man thanthe feeling that his race is acting nobly; and that all together areperforming a service, not only to each other, but to humanity and thosewho come after them, and that their deeds will be remembered. It mayseem a grotesque juxtaposition of things essentially different incharacter, to talk of national idealism and then of farming, but it isnot so. They are inseparable. The national idealism which will not goout into the fields and deal with the fortunes of the working farmers isfalse dealism. Our conception of a civilization must include, nay, mustbegin with the life of the humblest, the life of the average manor manual worker, for if we neglect them we will build in sand. Theneglected classes will wreck our civilization. The pioneers of a newsocial order must think first of the average man in field or factory, and so unite these and so inspire them that the noblest life will bepossible through their companionship. If you will not offer people thenoblest and best they will go in search of it. Unless the countrysidecan offer to young men and women some satisfactory food for soul as wellas body, it will fail to attract or hold its population, and theywill go to the already overcrowded towns; and the lessening of ruralproduction will affect production in the cities and factories, and theproblem of the unemployed will get still keener. The problem is not onlyan economic problem. It is a human one. Man does not live by cash alone, but by every gift of fellowship and brotherly feeling society offershim. The final urgings of men and women are towards humanity. Theirdesires are for the perfecting of their own life, and as Whitman says, where the best men and women are there the great city stands, though itis only a village. It is one of the illusions of modern materialisticthought to suppose that as high a quality of life is not possible in avillage as in a great city, and it ought to be one of the aims ofrural reformers to dissipate this fallacy, and to show that it ispossible--not indeed to concentrate wealth in country communities as inthe cities--but that it is possible to bring comfort enough to satisfyany reasonable person, and to create a society where there will beintellectual life and human interests. We will hear little then of therural exodus. The country will retain and increase its population andproductiveness. Like attracts like. Life draws life to itself. Intellectawakens intellect, and the country will hold its own tug for tug withthe towns. 

Now it may be said I have talked a long while round and round the ruralcommunity, but I have not suggested how it is to be created. I am comingto that. It really cannot be created. It is a natural growth whenthe right seed is planted. Co-operation is the seed. Let us considerIreland. Twenty-five years ago there was not a single co-operativesociety in the country. Individualism was the mode of life. Every farmermanufactured and sold as seemed best in his eyes. It was generally theworst possible way he could have chosen. Then came Sir Horace Plunkettand his colleagues, preaching co-operation. A creamery was establishedhere, an agricultural society there, and having planted the ideas itwas some time before the economic expert could decide whether they wereplanted in fertile soil. But that question was decided many years ago. The co-operative society, started for whatever purpose originally, isan omnivorous feeder, and it exercises a magnetic influence on allagricultural activities; so that we now have societies which buy milk, manufacture and sell butter, deal in poultry and eggs, cure bacon, provide fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, seeds, and machinery for theirmembers, and even cater for every requirement of the farmer's household. This magnetic power of attracting and absorbing to themselves thevarious rural activities which the properly constituted co-operativesocieties have, makes them develop rapidly, until in the course of adecade or a generation there is created a real social organism, wherethe members buy together, manufacture together, market together, wherefinally their entire interests are bound up with the interests of thecommunity. I believe in half a century the whole business of ruralIreland will be done co-operatively. This is not a wild surmise, for wesee exactly the same process going on in Denmark, Germany, Italy, andevery country where the co-operative seed was planted. Let us supposethat in a generation all the rural industries are organized onco-operative lines, what kind of a community should we expect to find asthe result? How would its members live? What would be their relationsto one another and their community? The agricultural scientist is makinggreat discoveries. The mechanical engineer goes from one triumph toanother. The chemist already could work wonders in our fields ifthere was a machinery for him to work through. We cannot foretell thedevelopments in each branch, but we can see clearly that the organizedcommunity can lay hold of discoveries and inventions which theindividual farmer cannot. It is little for the co-operative society tobuy expensive threshing sets and let its members have the use of them, but the individual farmer would have to save a long time before he couldraise several hundred pounds. The society is a better buyer than theindividual. It can buy things the individual cannot buy. It is a betterproducer also. The plant for a creamery is beyond the individual farmer;but our organized farmers in Ireland, small though they are, find it notrouble to erect and equip a creamery with plant costing two thousandpounds. The organized rural community of the future will generate itsown electricity at its central buildings, and run not only its factoriesand other enterprises by this power, but will supply light to the housesof its members and also mechanical power to run machinery on the farm. One of our Irish societies already supplies electric light for the townit works in. In the organized rural community the eggs, milk, poultry, pigs, cattle, grain, and wheat produced on the farm and not consumed, or required for further agricultural production, will automatically bedelivered to the co-operative business centre of the district, where themanager of the dairy will turn the milk into butter or cheese, and theskim milk will be returned to feed the community's pigs. The poultry andegg department will pack and dispatch the fowl and eggs to market. Themill will grind the corn and return it ground to the member, or theremay be a co-operative bakery to which some of it may go. The pigs willbe dealt with in the abattoir, sent as fresh pork to the market orbe turned into bacon to feed the members. We may be certain that anyintelligent rural community will try to feed itself first, and will onlysell the surplus. It will realize that it will be unable to buy any foodhalf as good as the food it produces. The community will hold incommon all the best machinery too expensive for the members to buyindividually. The agricultural laborers will gradually become skilledmechanics, able to direct threshers, binders, diggers, cultivators, andnew implements we have no conception of now. They will be members of thesociety, sharing in its profits in proportion to their wages, even asthe farmer will in proportion to his trade. The co-operative communitywill have its own carpenters, smiths, mechanics, employed in itsworkshop at repairs or in making those things which can profitably bemade locally. There may be a laundry where the washing--a heavy burdenfor the women--will be done: for we may be sure that every scrap ofpower generated will be utilized. One happy invention after another willcome to lighten the labor of life. There will be, of course, a villagehall with a library and gymnasium, where the boys and girls will be madestraight, athletic, and graceful. In the evenings, when the work ofthe day is done, if we went into the village hall we would find a dancegoing on or perhaps a concert. There might be a village choir or band. There would be a committee-room where the council of the communitywould meet once a week; for their enterprises would have grown, and thebusiness of such a parish community might easily be over one hundredthousand pounds, and would require constant thought. There would beno slackness on the part of the council in attending, because theirfortunes would depend on their communal enterprises, and they wouldhave to consider reports from the managers and officials of the variousdepartments. The co-operative community would be a busy place. In yearswhen the society was exceptionally prosperous, and earned larger profitsthan usual on its trade, we should expect to find discussions in whichall the members would join as to the use to be made of these profits:whether they should be altogether divided or what portion of them shouldbe devoted to some public purpose. We may be certain that there wouldbe animated discussions, because a real solidarity of feeling would havearisen and a pride in the work of the community engendered, and theywould like to be able to outdo the good work done by the neighboringcommunities. 

One might like to endow the village school with a chemical laboratory, another might want to decorate the village hall with reproductionsof famous pictures, another might suggest removing all the hedges andplanting the roadsides and lanes with gooseberry bushes, currant bushes, and fruit trees, as they do in some German communes today. There wouldbe eloquent pleadings for this or that, for an intellectual heat wouldbe engendered in this human hive, and there would be no more illiteratesor ignoramuses. The teaching in the village school would be altered tosuit the new social order, and the children of the community would, we may be certain, be instructed in everything necessary for theintelligent conduct of the communal business. The spirit of rivalrybetween one community and another, which exists today betweenneighboring creameries, would excite the imagination of the members, and the organized community would be as swift to act as the unorganizedcommunity is slow to act. Intelligence would be organized as wellas business. The women would have their own associations, to promotedomestic economy, care of the sick and the children. The girls wouldhave their own industries of embroidery, crochet, lace, dress-making, weaving, spinning, or whatever new industries the awakened intelligenceof women may devise and lay hold of as the peculiar labor of theirsex. The business of distribution of the produce and industries of thecommunity would be carried on by great federations, which would attendto export and sale of the products of thousands of societies. Suchcommunities would be real social organisms. The individual would be freeto do as he willed, but he would find that communal activity would beinfinitely more profitable than individual activity. We would thenhave a real democracy carrying on its own business, and bringing aboutreforms without pleading to, or begging of, the State, or intriguingwith or imploring the aid of political middlemen to get this, that, orthe other done for them. They would be self-respecting, because theywould be self-helping above all things. The national councils andmeetings of national federations would finally become the realParliament of the nation; for wherever all the economic power iscentered, there also is centered all the political power. And nopolitician would dare to interfere with the organized industry of anation. 

There is nothing to prevent such communities being formed. They wouldbe a natural growth once the seed was planted. We see such communitiesnaturally growing up in Ireland, with perhaps a little stimulus fromoutside from rural reformers and social enthusiasts. If this ideal ofthe organized rural community is accepted there will be difficulties, ofcourse, and enemies to be encountered. The agricultural middleman is apowerful person. He will rage furiously. He will organize all his forcesto keep the farmers in subjection, and to retain his peculiar functionsof fleecing the farmer as producer and the general public as consumer. But unless we are determined to eliminate the middleman in agriculturewe will fall to effect anything worth while attempting. I would laydown certain fundamental propositions which, I think, should be acceptedwithout reserve as a basis of reform. First, that the farmers must beorganized to have complete control over all the business connected withtheir industry. Dual control is intolerable. Agriculture will never bein a satisfactory condition if the farmer is relegated to the positionof a manual worker on his land; if he is denied the right of amanufacturer to buy the raw materials of his industry on trade terms; ifother people are to deal with his raw materials, his milk, cream, fruit, vegetables, live stock, grain, and other produce; and if thesecapitalist middle agencies are to manufacture the farmers' raw materialinto butter, bacon, or whatever else are to do all the marketing andexport, paying farmers what they please on the one hand, and chargingthe public as much as they can on the other hand. The existence of thesemiddle agencies is responsible for a large proportion of the increasedcost of living, which is the most acute domestic problem of modernindustrial communities. They have too much power over the farmer, and are too expensive a luxury for the consumer. It would be veryunbusinesslike for any country to contemplate the permanence in nationallife of a class whose personal interests are always leading them tofleece both producer and consumer alike. So the first fundamental ideafor reformers to get into their minds is that farmers, through their ownco-operative organizations, must control the entire business connectedwith agriculture. There will not be so much objection to co-operativesale as to co-operative purchase by the farmers. But one is as necessaryas the other. We must bear in mind, what is too often forgotten, thatfarmers are manufacturers, and as such are entitled to buy the rawmaterials for their industry at wholesale prices. Every other kindof manufacturer in the world gets trade terms when he buys. Thosewho buy--not to consume, but to manufacture and sell again--get theirrequirements at wholesale terms in every country in the world. Ifa publisher of books is approached by a bookseller he gives thatbookseller trade terms, because he buys to sell again. If I, as aprivate individual, want one of those books I must pay the full retailprice. Even the cobbler, the carpenter, the solitary artist, get tradeterms. The farmer, who is as much a manufacturer as the shipbuilder, orthe factory proprietor, is as much entitled to trade terms when he buysthe raw materials for his industry. His seeds, fertilizers, ploughs, implements, cake, feeding-stuffs are the raw materials of his industry, which he uses to produce wheat, beef, mutton, pork, or whatever else;and, in my opinion, there should be no differentiation between thefarmer when he buys and any other kind of manufacturer. Is it any wonderthat agriculture decays in countries where the farmers are expected tobuy at retail prices and sell at wholesale prices? We must not, to saveany friction, sell the rights of farmers. The second proposition I laydown is that this necessary organization work among the farmers must becarried on by an organizing body which is entirely controlled by thoseinterested in agriculture--farmers and their friends. To ask the Stateor a State Department to undertake this work is to ask a body influencedand often controlled by powerful capitalists, and middle agencies whichit should be the aim of the organization to eliminate. The State can, without obstruction from any quarter, give farmers a technical educationin the science of farming; but let it once interfere with business, and a horde of angry interests set to work to hamper and limit byevery possible means and compromises on matters of principle, where nocompromise ought to be permitted, are almost inevitable. 

A voluntary organizing body like the Irish Agricultural OrganizationSociety, which was the first to attempt the co-operative organization offarmers in these islands, is the only kind of body which can pursue itswork fearlessly, unhampered by alien interests. The moment such a bodydeclares its aims, its declaration automatically separates the sheepfrom the goats, and its enemies are outside and not inside. Theorganizing body should be the heart and centre of the farmers' movement, and if the heart has its allegiance divided, its work will be poor andineffectual, and very soon the farmers will fall away from it to followmore single-hearted leaders. No trades union would admit representativesof capitalist employers on its committee, and no organization of farmersshould allow alien or opposing interest on their councils to clogthe machine or betray the cause. This is the best advice I can givereformers. It is the result of many years' experience in this work. An industry must have the same freedom of movement as an individual inpossession of all his powers. An industry divided against itself canno more prosper than a household divided against itself. By the meansI have indicated the farmers can become the masters of their owndestinies, just as the urban workers can, I think, by steadfastlyapplying the same principles, emancipate themselves. It is a battle inwhich, as in all other battles, numbers and moral superiority unitedare irresistible; and in the Irish struggle to create a true democracynumbers and the power of moral ideas are with the insurgents. 

VII. 

It would be a bitter reproach on the household of our nation if therewere any unconsidered, who were left in poverty and without hope andoutside our brotherhood. We have not yet considered the agriculturallaborer--the proletarian of the countryside. His is, in a sense, themost difficult problem of any. The basis of economic independence inhis industry is the possession of land, and that is not readily to beobtained in Ireland. The earth does not upheave itself from beneath thesea and add new land to that already above water in response to ourneed for it. Yet I would not pass away from the rural laborer without, however inadequately, indicating some curves in his future evolution. These laborers are not in Ireland half so numerous as farmers, for itis a country of small holdings, where the farmer and his family arethemselves laborers. Labor is badly paid, and, owing to the lack ofcontinuous cropping of the land, it is often left without employment atseasons when employment is most needed. No class which is taken up todayand dropped tomorrow will in modern times remain long in a country. Employers often act as if they thought labor could be taken up and laiddown again like a pipe and tobacco. None have contributed so to thickenthe horde of Irish exiles as the rural laborers. Three hundred thousandof them in less than my lifetime have left the fields of Ireland for thefactories of the new world. Yet I can only rejoice if Irishmen, who arebadly dealt with in their motherland, find an ampler life and a moreprosperous career in another land. A wage of ten or eleven shillings aweek will bind none but the unaspiring lout to his country. But I wouldlike to make Ireland a land which, because of the human kindness in it, few would willingly leave. The agricultural proletarian, like all otherlabor, should be organized in a national union. That is bound to come. But the agricultural laborer should, I think, no more than labor in thecities, make the raising of wages his main or only object. He shouldrather strive to make himself economically independent; or, in thealternative, seek for status by integration into the co-operativecommunities of farmers by becoming a member, and by pressing forpermanent employment by the community rather than casual employment bythe individual. Agricultural labor undoubtedly will have to struggle forbetter remuneration. Yet it has to be remembered that agriculture isa protean industry. It is not like mining, where the colliery producescoal and nothing but coal, and where the miners have a practicalmonopoly of supply. If miners are dissatisfied with wages and are wellorganized they can enforce their terms, and the colliery owners mayalmost be indifferent, because they can charge the increased costof working to the public. But agriculture, as I said, is protean andchanges its forms perpetually. If tillage does not pay this year, nextyear the farmer may have his land in grass. He reverts to the cheapestmethods of farming when prices are low, or labor asks a wage which thefarmer believes it would be unprofitable to pay. In this way pressureon the farmer for extra wages might result in two men being employedto herd cows where a dozen men were previously employed at tillage. The farmer cannot easily--as the mine-owner--unload his burden on thegeneral public by the increase of prices. There are many difficulties, which seem almost insoluble, if we propose to ourselves to integrate therural laborer into the general economic life of the country by makinghim a partner in the industry he works on. But what I hope for mostis first that the natural evolution of the rural community, and theconcentration of individual manufacture, purchase and sale, intocommunal enterprises, will lead to a very large co-operative ownershipof expensive machinery, which will necessitate the communal employmentof labor. If this takes place, as I hope it will, the rural laborer, instead of being a manual worker using primitive implements, will havethe status of a skilled mechanic employed permanently by a cooperativecommunity. He should be a member of the society which employs him, andin the division of profits receive in proportion to his wage, as thefarmers in proportion to their trade. 

A second policy open to agricultural labor when it becomes organizedis the policy of collective farming. This I believe will and ought toreceive attention in the future. Co-operative societies of agriculturallaborers in Italy, Roumania, and elsewhere have rented land fromlandowners. They then reallotted the land among themselves forindividual cultivation, or else worked it as a true co-operativeenterprise with labor, purchase and sale all communal enterprises, withconsiderable benefit to the members. We can well understand a landownernot liking to divide his land into small holdings, with all theattendant troubles which in Ireland beset a landlord with small farmerson his estate. But I think landowners in Ireland could be found whowould rent land to a co-operative society of skilled laborers whoapproached the owner with a well-thought-out scheme. The success of onecolony would lead to others being started, as happened in Italy. 

This solution of the problem of agricultural labor will be forced on usfor many reasons. The economic effects of the great European War, theburden of debt piled on the participating nations, will make Ministersshun schemes of reform involving a large use of national credit, orwhich would increase the sum of national obligations. Land purchaseon the old term I believe cannot be continued. Yet we will demand theintensive cultivation of the national estate, and increased productionof wealth, especially of food-stuffs. The large area of agriculturalland laid down for pasture is not so productive as tilled land, doesnot sustain so large a population, and there will be more reasons in thefuture than in the past for changing the character of farming in theseareas. The policy of collective farming offers a solution, and whateverGovernment is in power should facilitate the settlement of men incooperative colonies and provide expert instructors as managers for thefirst year or two if necessary. Such a policy would not be so expensiveas land purchase, and with fair rent fixed, hundreds of thousands ofpeople could be planted comfortably on the land in Ireland and producemore wealth from it than could ever be produced from grazing lands, and agricultural workers and the sons of farmers who now emigrate couldbecome economically independent. 

I hope, also, that farmers, becoming more brotherly as their ownenterprises flourish, will welcome laborers into their co-operativestores, credit banks, poultry and bee-keeping societies, and allow themthe benefits of cheap purchase, cheap credit, and of efficient marketingof whatever the laborer may produce on his allotment. The growth ofnational conscience and the spirit of human brotherhood, and afeeling of shame that any should be poor and neglected in the nationalhousehold, will be needed to bring the rural laborer into the circle ofnational life, and make him a willing worker in the general scheme. If farmers will not, on their part, advance towards their laborers andbring them into the co-operative community, then labor will be organizedoutside their community and will be hostile, and will be always broodingand scheming to strike a blow when the farmer can least bear it, --whenthe ground must be tilled or the harvest gathered. And this, if peacecannot be made, will result in a still greater decline of tillage andthe continued flight of the rural laborers, and the increase of the areain grass, and the impoverishing of human life and national well-being. 

Some policy to bring contentment to small holders and rural workers mustbe formulated and acted upon. Agriculture is of more importance to thenation than industry. Our task is to truly democratize civilizationand its agencies; to spread in widest commonalty culture, comfort, intelligence, and happiness, and to give to the average man those thingswhich in an earlier age were the privileges of a few. The country is thefountain of the life and health of a race. And this organization of thecountry people into co-operative communities will educate them and makethem citizens in the true sense of the word, that is, people continuallyconscious of their identity of interest with those about them. 

It is by this conscious sense of solidarity of interest, which only theorganized co-operative community can engender in modern times, that thehigher achievements of humanity become possible. Religion has createdthis spirit at times--witness the majestic cathedrals the Middle Agesraised to manifest their faith. Political organization engendered thepassion of citizenship in the Greek States, and the Parthenon and a hostof lordly buildings crowned the hills and uplifted and filled withpride the heart of the citizen. Our big countries, our big empires, andrepublics, for all their military strength and science, and the wealthwhich science has made it possible for man to win, do not createcitizenship because of the loose organization of society; becauseindividualism is rampant, and men, failing to understand the intricaciesof the vast and complex life of their country, fall back on privatelife and private ambitions, and leave the honor of their country and themaking of laws and the application of the national revenues to a classof professional politicians, in their turn in servitude to the interestswhich supply party funds, and so we find corruption in high places andcynicism in the people. It is necessary for the creation of citizens, for the building up of a noble national life, that the social ordershould be so organized that this sense of interdependence will beconstantly felt. It is also necessary for the preservation of thephysical health and beauty of our race that our people should livemore in the country and less in the cities. I believe it would be anexcellent thing for humanity if its civilization could be based on ruralindustry mainly and not on urban industry. More and more men and womenin our modern civilization drift out of Nature, out of sweet air, health, strength, beauty, into the cities, where in the third generationthere is a rickety population, mean in stature, vulgar or depraved incharacter, with the image of the devil in mind and matter more than theimage of Deity. Those who go like it at first; but city life is like theroll spoken of by the prophet, which was sweet in the mouth but bitterin the belly. The first generation are intoxicated by the new life, but in the third generation the cord is cut which connected them withNature, the Great Mother, and life shrivels up, sundered from the sourceof life. Is there any prophet, any statesman, any leader, who will--asMoses once led the Israelites out of the Egyptian bondage--excitethe human imagination and lead humanity back to Nature, to sunlight, starlight, earth-breath, sweet air, beauty, gaiety, and health? Is itimpossible now to move humanity by great ideas, as Mahomet fired hisdark hosts to forgetfulness of life; or as Peter the Hermit awakenedEurope to a frenzy, so that it hurried its hot chivalry across acontinent to the Holy Land? Is not the earth mother of us all? Are notour spirits clothed round with the substance of earth? Is it not fromNature we draw life? Do we not perish without sunlight and fresh air?Let us have no breath of air and in five minutes life is extinct. Yetin the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on day by day. Thelover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any big city and maylook into ten thousand faces and see none that is lovely. Is not thereturn of man to a natural life on the earth a great enough idea toinspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid the green treesand fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but men say there isno intellectual life working on the land. No intellectual life when manis surrounded by mystery and miracle! When the mysterious forces whichbring to birth and life are yet undiscovered; when the earth is teemingwith life, and the dumb brown lips of the ridges are breathing mystery!Is not the growth of a tree from a tiny cell hidden in the earth asprovocative of thought as the things men learn at the schools? Is notthought on these things more interesting than the sophistries of thenewspapers? It is only in Nature, and by thought on the problems ofNature, that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to theMighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world. 

Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer thegrandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as theygrow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles ofpoverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities? Thememory lies on one "heavy as frost and deep almost as life. " Itis terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements; thedepletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from theflaring drink-shops. The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it whileit moves amid such things. And outside these places the clouds areflying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, thewinds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leafto leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk. Thecreation of a rural civilization is the greatest need of our time. It may not come in our days, but we can lay the foundations of it, preparing the way for the true prophet when he will come. The fight nowis not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who areon the land contented, happy, and prosperous. And we must begin byorganizing them to defend what is left to them; to take back, industryby industry, what was stolen from them. We must organize the countrypeople into communities, for without some kind of communal life men holdno more together than the drifting sands by the seashore. There is anatural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves fromthe dawn of time. It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees tobuild their hexagonal cells. If we read the history of civilizationwe will find people in every land forming little clans co-operatingtogether. Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up; thegreed of powerful men puts an end to them. But, whether broken or not, the moment the rural dweller is left to himself he begins again, withnature prompting him, to form little clans--or nations rather--with hisfellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancientIreland. The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and thecounties are survivals of these old co-operative colonies, where the menowned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed theirown social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections. Itwas so in every land under the sun. It was so in ancient India and inancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization innature--the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. Andit is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that Ihave put together these thoughts on the rural community. 

VIII. 

We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in ourmodern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. Thelordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the leastthe relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancientwisdom, as it is recounted to him on God's day, assures him of hisimmortality: that the divine signature is over all his being, that insome way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in alikeness to It. He is a symbol of God Himself. He is the child of Deity. His life is Its very breath. The Habitations of Eternity await hiscoming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling withinhim of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self. So prouda tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after the day ofGod he finds that none will pay him reverence. He, the destined comradeof Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children of the King infetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his many mansions, where light and air, the great purifiers, are already dimmed andcorrupted before they do him service. He is insecure in the labor bywhich he lives. He works today, and tomorrow he may be told there is nofurther need for him, and his fate and the fate of those dependent onhim are not remembered by those who dismissed him. If he dies, leavingwife or children, the social order makes but the most inhuman provisionfor them. How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State for its poor theworkhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn loving-kindnessinto official acts and make legal and formal what should be naturalimpulse and the overflow of the heart. So great a disparity existsbetween spiritual theory and the realities of the social order that itmight almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all on ourcivilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point wherewe could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery. Here God possesses theworld. "

The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, seeshim laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, onstrike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringingchildren into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliestyears, a pauper when his days of strength are passed. He dies incharitable institutions. Though his labors are necessary he is yet notintegrated into the national economy. He has no share of his own in thewealth of the nation. He cannot claim work as a right from the holdersof economic power, and this absolute dependence upon the autocrats ofindustry for a livelihood is the greatest evil of any, for it puts aspiritual curse on him and makes him in effect a slave. Instinctively headopts a servile attitude to those who can sentence him and his childrento poverty and hunger without trial or judgment by his peers. A hastyword, and he may be told to draw his pay and begone. The spiritual wrongdone him by the social order is greater than the material ill, and thatspiritual wrong is no less a wrong because generation after generationof workers have grown up and are habituated to it, and do not realizethe oppression; because in childhood circumstance and the black art ofeducation alike conspire to make the worker humble in heart and to takethe crown and sceptre from his spirit, and his elders are already tamedand obsequious. 

Yet the workers in the modern world have great qualities. This classin great masses will continually make sacrifices for the sake of aprinciple. They have lived so long in the depths: many of them havereached the very end of all the pain which is the utmost life can bearand have in their character that fearlessness which comes from longendurance and familiarity with the worst hardships. I am a literaryman, a lover of ideas, and I have found few people in my life who wouldsacrifice anything for a social principle; but I will never forget theexultation with which I realized in a great labor trouble, when themasters of industry issued a document asking men on peril of dismissalto swear never to join a trades union, that there were thousands of menin my own city who refused to obey, though they had no membership orconnection with the objectionable association. Nearly all the realmanhood of Dublin I found was among the obscure myriads who are paidfrom twenty to thirty shillings a week. The men who will sacrificeanything for brotherhood get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth. These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose theirown heroes and their own ideals. Most of them had no strike funds tofall back on. They had wives and children depending on them. Quietlyand grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yetnobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows. Beneath theirrags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit. Itis in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the hopeof Ireland lies. The poor have always helped each other, and it isthey who listen eagerly to the preachers of a social order based onbrotherhood in industry. It is these workers, always necessary but neveryet integrated into the social order, who must be educated, who mustbe provided for, who must be accepted fully as comrade in any schemeof life to be devised and which would call itself Christian. That word, expressing the noblest and most spiritual conception of humanity, hasbeen so degraded by misuse in the world that we could almost hate itwith the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know that Hell can asdisguise put on the outward garments of Heaven. Yet what is eternallytrue remains pure and uncorrupted, and those who turn to it find itthere--as all finally must turn to it to fulfill their destiny ofinevitable beauty. 

IX. 

Often with sadness I hear people speak of industrial development inIreland, for I feel they contemplate no different system than that whichfills workers with despair in countries where it is more successfullyapplied. All these energetic people are conspiring to build factoriesand mills and to fill them with human labor, and they believe the morethey do this the better it will be for Ireland. They talk of Irelandas if it was only admirable as a quantity rather than a quality. Theyexpress delight at swelling statistics and increased trade, but wheredo we hear any reflection on the quality of life engendered by thisindustrial development? Our civilization is to differ in no way from anyother. No new ideal of life is suggested to differentiate us. We are togo on exploiting human labor. Our working classes are to increase andmultiply and earn profits for an employing class, as labor has one fromtime immemorial in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Rome, and in Londontoday. But a choice yet remains to us, because the character of ourcivilization is not yet fixed. It is mainly germinal. It fills thespirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path, without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and morebeautiful life. Every now and then, when the world was still vast andfull of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor, and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities andover unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer andampler than that they had known. Is the old daring gone? Are therenot such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of alladventures--the building up of a civilization--so that the human mightreflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom andsolidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature tolove; and when it is free and acts by its own will it is most unitedwith all other life. Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motionabout the heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as itsadorers. But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has thedividing quality of the prism, which resolves pure light into distinctrays; and so on earth we get the principle of freedom and the virtue ofsolidarity as separated ideals continually at warfare with each other, and the reconcilement on earth of these principles in man is theconquest of matter by the spirit. This dramatic sundering on earthof virtues in unison in the heavens explains the struggle betweenProtestantism and Catholicism, between nationality and imperialism, between individualist and socialist, between dynamic and static inphilosophy. Indeed in the last analysis all human conflicts are thebalancing on earth of the manifestation of divine principles which areone in the unmanifest spirit. 

The civilization we create, the social order we build up, must providefor essential freedom for the individual and for solidarity of thenation. Now essential freedom is denied to men if they are in theircondition servile. Can we contemplate the permanent existence of aservile class in Ireland? For, disguise it how we will, our presentindustrial system is practically a form of slavery for the workers, differing in externals only from the ages when the serf had a collarround his neck. He has now freedom to change from master to master, andcan even seek for a master in other countries; but he must, in anycase, accept the relation of servant to master. The old slave could bewhipped. In the new order the wage slave can be starved, and the factthat many of the rulers of industry use their power benevolently doesnot make the existing relation between employer and employed right, orthe social order one whose permanence can be justified. Men will gladlylabor if they feel that their labor conspires with that of all otherworkers for the general good; but there is something loathsome to thespirit in the condition of the labor market, where labor is regarded asa commodity to be bought and sold like soap or candles. For that trulydescribes how it is with labor in our industrial system: we can buylabor, which means we can buy human life and thought, a portion of God'sbeing, and make a profit out of it. By so selling himself the worker isenslaved and limited in a thousand ways. The power of dismissal of oneperson by another at whim acts against independence of character, or thefree expression or opinion in thought, in politics, and in religion. Thesoul is stunted in its growth, and spiritual life made subordinateto material interests. To deny essential freedom to the soul is thegreatest of all crimes, and such denial has in all ages evoked thedeepest anger among men. When freedom has been threatened nations haverisen up maddened and exultant, and the clang of martial arms has beenheard and the stony kings of the past have been encountered in battle. In Ireland we shall have our greatest fight of all to gain this freedom:not alone material independence for man, but the freedom of the soul, its right to choose its own heroes and its own ideals without let orhindrance by other men. 

We have many of the vices of a slave race, and we treat others as wehave been treated. Our national aspirations were overborne by materialpower, and we in turn use cudgel and curse on our countrymen when theydiffer from us in opinion and policy. Men, when they cannot match theirintellect against another's, suppress him and howl him down, puttingfaith in their own brainlessness. I would make the most passionate pleafor freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel orknow. What right have we to ask for ourselves what we deny to another?The bludgeon at meetings is a blow struck against heaven. Those who willnot argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are prowlingback again on all fours in their minds to the brute. It matters not inwhat holy name men war with violence on freedom of thought, whether inthe name of God or nation they are enemies of both. We are only rightin controversy when we overcome by a superior beauty or truth. Thefirst fundamental idea inspiring an Irish polity should be this idea offreedom in all spheres of thought, and it is most necessary to fightfor this because the devil and hell have organized their forces in thisunfortunate land in sectarian and secret societies, of which it mightbe written they love darkness rather than light for the old God-givenreasons. 

X. 

Whenever in Ireland there has been a revolt of labor it too often findsarrayed against it the press, the law, and the police. All the greatpowers are in entente. The press, without inquiry, begins a detestablecant about labor agitators misleading ignorant men. Every wild phraseuttered by an exasperated worker is quoted against the cause of labor, and its grievances are suppressed. We are told nothing about howthe worker lives: what homes, what food, his wage will provide. Thejournalist holds up a moral umbrella, protecting society from the fieryhail of conscience. The baser sort of clergyman will take up the parableand begin advocating a servile peace, glibly misinterpreting the divineteaching of love to prove that the lamb should lie down inside the lion, and only so can it be saved soul and body, forgetful that the peacewhich was Christ's gift to humanity was the peace of God which passesall understanding, and that it was a spiritual quietude, and that onearth--the underworld--the gospel in realization was to bring not peacebut a sword. 

The law, assured of public opinion, then deals sternly with whateverunfortunate life is driven into its pens. I am putting very mildly thedevilish reality, for society is so constituted that the public, kept inignorance of the real facts, believes that it is acting rightly, and sothe devil has conscience on his side and that divine power is turnedto infernal uses. What can labor oppose to this federation of State andChurch, of press and law, of capital and physical force to back capital, when it sets about its own liberation and to institute a new socialorder to replace autocracy in industry? Its allies are few. A rarethinker, scientist, literary man, artist or clergyman, impelled byhatred of what is ugly in life, will speak on its behalf, and may rendersome aid and help to tear holes in that moral shield held up by thepress, and may here and there give to that blinded public a vision ofthe Hosts of the Lord arrayed against it. But the only real powerthe workers can truly rely on is their own. Nothing but a spiritualrevolution or an economic revolution will bring other classes intocomradeship with them. The ideal labor should set before itself is nota transitory improvement in its wage, because a wage war never truly orpermanently improves the position of labor. This section or that may, relatively to its own past or the position of other workers, improveitself; but capital is like a ship which, however the tide rises orfalls, floats upon it, and is not sunken more deeply in the water athigh tide than at low tide. Whenever any burden is placed upon capitalit immediately sets about unloading that burden on the public. Wagesmight be doubled by Act of Parliament, and the net result would beto double prices, if not to increase them still more. The more theautocrats of industry are federated the more easily can they unload onothers any burden placed on them. 

The value of money is simply what it will purchase at any time. Ifthe rulers of industry can halve the purchasing power of money whiledoubling wages at the command of the State, logic leads us to assumethat wages boards, arbitration boards and the like can only betransitory in their meliorating effect; and to pursue the attack on theautocrats of industry by the road of wages alone is to attack them wherethey are impregnable, and where, seeming to give way, they are all thewhile really losing nothing, and are only fixing the wage system morepermanently on those who attack them. There are fiery spirits among theproletarians who hope that militant labor will at last bring about thesocial revolution, taking the earthly paradise by violence. They believethat if every worker dropped his tools and absolutely refused to workunder the old system, it would be impossible to continue it. That istrue, but those who advocate this policy slur over many difficulties, and the relative power of endurance of both parties. They do not, Ithink, take into account the immense power in the hands of those whouphold the present system. Those who might be expected to strike arenot--at least in Ireland--a majority of the population. They would havefar fewer material resources to fall back on than those others whoseinterests would lead them to preserve the present social order. Itis clear, too, when we analyze the forces at the command of laborand capital, that the latter has attached to itself by the bonds ofself-interest the scientific men--engineers, inventors, chemists, bacteriologists, designers, organizers, all the intellect ofindustry--without which, in alliance with itself, revolting labor wouldbe unable to continue production as before. Labor so revolting mightindeed for a time bring the work of the nation to a standstill; butunless it could by some means attract to itself men of the classdescribed, it would not be able to take the helm of the ship of industryand guide it with knowledge as the holders of economic power have donein the past. A policy of emancipation should provide labor with ameans of attracting to itself that kind of knowledge which is gained inuniversities, laboratories, colleges of science, and, above all, inthe actual guidance of great industrial enterprises. In any trial ofendurance those who start with the greatest intellectual, moral, andmaterial resources will win. 

I do not deny that the strike is a powerful weapon in the hand of labor, but it is one with which it is difficult to imagine labor dealing aknock-out blow to the present social order. I believe in an orderlyevolution of society, at least in Ireland, and doubt whether byrevolution people can be raised to an intelligence, a humanity, or anobility of nature greater than they formerly possessed. Nobody canremain standing on tiptoe. After a little time disorder subsides andsome strong man leads the inevitable reaction. In France people revoltedagainst a decadent monarchy, and in a dozen years they had a newemperor. In England they beheaded a king as a protest against tyranny, and they got a dictator in his place who took little or no account ofparliaments; and finally a second Charles, rather worse than the first, came to the throne. The everlasting battle between light and darknessgoes on stubbornly all the time, and the gain of the Hosts of Light isinch by inch. Extraordinary efforts, impetuous charges, which seemto win for a moment, too often leave the attacking force tired andexhausted, and the forces of reaction set in and overwhelm them. I amthe friend of revolt if people cannot stand the conditions they liveunder, and if they can see no other way. It is better to be men thanslaves. The French Revolution was a tragic episode in history, butwhen people suffer intolerably and are insulted in their despair it isinevitable blood will be shed. One can only say with Whitman:

Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution?Could I wish humanity different Could I wish the people made of wood andstone, or that there be no justice in destiny or time?

There is danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much moreadvanced than the intellectual, and moral qualities which alonecan secure the success of a revolt. These intellectual and moralqualities--the skill to organize, the wisdom to control largeundertakings, are not natural gifts but the results of experience. Theyare evolutionary products. The emancipation of labor, I believe, willnot be gained by revolution but by prolonged effort, continued month bymonth and year by year, in which first this thing is adventured, thenthat: each enterprise brings its own gifts of wisdom and experience, and there is no reaction, because, instead of the violent use of certainpowers, the whole being is braced: experience, intellect, desire, allstrong and working harmoniously, press forward and support each other, and no enterprise is undertaken where the intellect to carry it out isnot present together with the desire. It requires great intellectualand moral qualities to bring about a revolution. A rage at presentconditions is not enough. 

XI. 

Our farmers are already free. The problem with them is not now concernedwith freedom, but how they may be brought into a solidarity with eachother and the nation. To make our proletarians free and masters of theirown energies, in unison with each other and the national being, is themost pressing labor of the many before us. Unless there be economicfreedom there can be no other freedom. The right of no individual tosubsistence should be at the good will of any other individual. Morethan mere comfort depends on it. There are eternal and august rights ofthe soul to be safeguarded, and the economic position of men should beprotected by organization and democratic law. I have already discussedsome of the avenues through which workers in our time have looked withhope. I have little belief that these roads lead anywhere but back tothe old City of Slavery, however they may seem to curve away at theoutset. The strike, on whatever scale, is no way to freedom, thoughthe strike--or the threat of it--may bring wages nearer to subsistencelevel. The art of warfare is too much in the hands of specialists fortrust to be placed in revolution. A machine-gun with a few expertsbehind it is worth a thousand revolutionary workers, however maddenedthey may be. Does political action, on which so many rely, promise more?I do not believe it does. I believe that to appeal to legislatures isto appeal to bodies dominated by those interested in maintaining thepresent social order, although they may act so as to redress the worstevils created by it. In Ireland, for this generation at least, itwould be impossible to secure in a legislative assembly majoritiesrepresentative of the class we wish to see emancipated. It may seem asif I had closed all the paths out of the social labyrinth; but theway to emancipation has, I think, already been surveyed by pioneers. A policy of social reconstruction is practical, and needs but steadypersistence for its realization. That policy--I refer to co-operativeaction--has been adopted in various forms by workers in many countries;and what is needed here is to study and coordinate these applications ofco-working, and to form a general staff of labor who will, on behalf ofthe workers, examine the weapons fashioned by their class elsewhere, andwho will draw up a plan of campaign as the staff of an army do previousto military operations. It will be found that economic action alongco-operative lines has, in one country, barriers placed before itsexpansion which could be set aside by supplementing this action bymethods elaborated by the genius of workers elsewhere. 

It is not my purpose here to repeat in detail methods of organization, partly technical, which can be found fully described in many admirablebooks, but rather to indicate the order of advance, the methods ofcoordination of these, and their final absorption and transformationin the national being. There is a great deal of ignorance about thingsessential to safe action. When men are filled with enthusiasm they areapt to apply their new principles rashly in schemes which are bound tofall, just as over-confident soldiers will in battle sometimes rush aposition prematurely which they cannot hold, because the general line oftheir army has not advanced sufficiently to support them. Sacrifices aremade with no permanent result, and the morale of the army is injured. 

In the rural districts the advance must, in the nature of things, befrom production to consumption, and with urban workers inversely froma control over distribution to a mastery over production. I have oftenwondered over the blindness of workers in towns in Ireland, who havemade so little use in the economic struggle of the freedom they have tospend their wage where they choose. They speak of this struggle as theclass war; but they carry on the conflict most energetically where it ismost difficult for them to succeed, and hardly at all where it wouldbe comparatively easy for them to weaken the resources of theirantagonists. In warfare much use is made of flanking movements, whichaim at cutting the enemy's communication with his base of supply. Frontal attacks are dangerous. It is equally true in economic warfare. The strike is a frontal attack, and those they fight are entrencheddeeply with all the artillery of the State, the press, science, andwealth on their side. What would we think of an army which, at theclose of each week's fighting, voluntarily surrendered to the enemy theground, guns, ammunition, and prisoners captured through the previoussix days? Yet this is what our workers do. The power opposed to them ismainly economic, though there is an intellectual basis for it also. Butthe wages of the workers, little for the individual, yet a large part ofthe national income if taken for the mass, goes back to strengthen thesystem they protest against through purchases of domestic requirements. The creation of co-operative stores ought to be the first constructivepolicy adopted by Irish labor. It ought to be as much a matter of classhonor with them to be members of stores as to be in the trade union oftheir craft. The store may be regarded as the commissariat departmentof the army of labor. Many a strike has failed of its object, andthe workers have gone back defeated, because their neglect of thecommissariat made them unable to hold out for that last week when bothsides are desperate and at the end of their resources. But it isnot mainly as an aid to the strike that I advocate democratizing thedistributive trade, but because control over distribution gives alarge measure of control over production. The history of co-operativeworkshops indicates that these have rarely been successful unlessworked in conjunction with distributive stores. The retail trader isnot sympathetic with co-operative production. As the cat is akin to thetiger, so is the individual trader--no matter on how small a scale heoperates--a kinsman of the great autocrats of industry, and he willsympathize with his economic kinsmen and will retail their goods inpreference to those produced in co-operative workshops. 

The control of agencies of distribution by the workers at a certainstage in their development enables them to start productive enterpriseswith more safety and less expense in regard to advertisement than thecapitalist can. In fact the co-operative store, properly organized, creates a tied trade for the output of co-operative workshops. It isa source of financial aid to these, and will invest funds in them andassist trades unions gradually to transform themselves into co-operativeguilds of producers which should be their ultimate ideal. As I shallshow later on, the store will enable the urban worker to enter intointimate alliance with the rural producer. Their interests arereally identical. In every town in Ireland efforts should be made todemocratize the distributive agencies, and the workers will have manyallies in this, driven by the increased cost of living to search out themost economical agencies of purchase. If the proletarians are not in amajority in Ireland--a nation where the farmers are the most numeroussingle class--they certainly form the majority in the cities; and theco-operative store, while admitting to membership all who will apply, ought to be and would be sympathetic with the efforts of labor toemancipate itself, and would be a powerful lever in its hands. As thestores increase in number, an analysis of their trade will revealyear by year in what directions co-operative production of particulararticles may safely be attempted. More and more by this means theproducing power and the capital at the disposal of the worker willbe placed at the service of democracy. The first steps are the mostdifficult. In due time the workers will have educated a number of theirmembers, and will have attached to themselves men of proved capacityto be the leaders in fresh enterprises, manufactures of one kind oranother, democratic banking institutions, all supporting each other andleaning on each other and playing into each other's hands. 

The extent to which this may be carried, and the opportunities formaking Ireland a co-operative democracy, I shall presently explain. I donot regard any of these forms of co-operative organization as ideal orpermanent. The co-operative movement must be regarded rather as agreat turning movement on the part of humanity towards the ideal. Theco-operative organizations now being formed in Ireland and over theworld will, I am certain, persist and outlast this generation and thenext, and will grow into vaster things than we dream of; but the reallyimportant change they will bring about in the minds of men will bepsychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of commonaction for the common good. To get so far in civil life is a greatstep. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interestsand competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vastturning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring themface round to the Delectable City. When this psychological change takesplace the democratic associations--which have grown up haphazard as theworkers found it easiest to create them--will be changed and remodeledby men who will have the mass of people behind them in their effortsto make a more majestic structure of society for the enlargement of thelives and spirits of men. 

XII. 

We have descended from the national soul to the material plane, and wemust still continue here for a time, because the doctrine that a sanemind can only manifest through a sane body is as true in referenceto the State as to the individual, and necessitates a study of socialfabrics. The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and thebody repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soulagain with its old desires. Our religious hatreds created sectarianorganizations, and these react again in the national soul, whichwould, I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itselfincarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and itsenergies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly. So adrunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature isconquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul inrebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body. The individualism inour economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents concertedaction for the general good. We have yet to create harmony of purposein our economic life, and to bring together interests long separated andunmindful of each other, and make them realize that their interests areidentical. It is one of the commonplaces of economics that urbanand rural interests are identical: but in truth the townsman and thecountryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed, and they know very little of each other. I never like to let thesecommonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give thecountersign to the challenge for truth. People declare in the same waythat the interests of labor and capital are identical, and implore themnot to fight with one another. But the truth of that statement seemsto me to depend largely on whether capital owns labor or labor ownscapital. As an abstract proposition it is one of the economic formulae Iwould leave instructions at my frontiers to have detained until furtherinquiry as to its antecedents. All these statements may be true, butto make them operative, to give them a dynamic rather than a staticcharacter, we must convince people they are true by close argument andstill more so by realistic illustration. 

To bring about a high nobility in the national soul we must make harmonyin its economic life, and the two main currents of economic energy--theagricultural and urban--must be made to flow so that their action willnot defeat each other. Let us take the farmer first. How ought he towish to see life in the towns develop? Should he wish for the triumph oflabor or capital: the success of the co-operative movement, the triumphof the multiple shop or the private trader, of guilds of workers orautocrats of industry? Economic desires generally depend on the natureof the industry men are engaged in. The jeweler would probably desirethe permanence of the social order which created most wealthy people whocould afford to buy his wares. The farmer's industry, if we consider itclosely, is the most democratic of any in its application to society. The produce of the farm, in its final distribution, is divided intoportions more or less equal and conditioned in quantity by the digestivepowers of an individual. The wealthiest millionaire cannot eat morebread, butter, meat, vegetables, or fruit than the manual laborer wouldeat if the latter could afford to get such things. In fact he wouldeat rather less, because the manual worker has a much better appetite, indeed requires more food. It appears to be the interest of the farmerto support any urban movement whose object it is to see that everyworker in the towns is remunerated so that he, his wife, and hischildren can procure as much food as they require. Any underpaid workerin the towns is a wrong to the farmer--a willing customer who yet cannotbuy. If there is, let us say, a sum of fifteen hundred pounds a week tobe paid away in a town, it is to the interest of farmers that that sumshould be paid to a thousand men at the rate of thirty shillings a weekrather than to fifty men at thirty pounds a week. In the case of theworkers a greater part of the money will be spent on food. But if fiftymen have thirty pounds a week each, it will be spent to satisfy theappetites of a much smaller number of people. A larger proportion willbe spent on furniture, pictures, motor-cars and what not. It may bespent so as to give some kind of employment, but it will not be adivision of the money so much to the interests of the farmer. Howeverwe analyze the problem it appears to be to the farmer's interests tosupport democratic movements in the cities, certainly up to the pointwhere every worker in the towns has a wage which enables himself and hisfamily to eat all they require for health. It is also to the interestsof farmers to support any system of distribution of goods whicheliminates the element of profit in the sale. After the farmer gets hisprice it is to his interests that food should be increased in cost aslittle as possible when the article is transferred to the consumer, because if farm produce has to bear too many profits it will beexpensive for the consumer, and there will be a lessened demand. Soassociations like the co-operative stores, which aim at the eliminationof the element of profit in distribution, should be approved of by thefarmers. 

Now we come to the townsman again. Is it his interest to support thefarmers in his own country or to regard the world as his farm? Theargument on the economic side is not so clear, but it is, I think, just as sound. If agriculture is neglected in any country the ruralpopulation pour into the towns. The country becomes a fountain ofblackleg labor. Rural labor has no traditions of trade unionism, andtakes any work at any price. There are fewer people engaged in producingfood, and its cost rises. Food must be imported from abroad; and thereis national insecurity, as in times of war their is always the danger ofthe trade routes overseas being blocked by an enemy, and this again hasto be provided against by heavy expenditure for militarist purposes. Thefarther away an army is from its base the more insecure is itsposition, and the same thing is true in the industrial life of nations. International trade there must always be. It is one of the means bywhich the larger solidarity of humanity is to be achieved; but that willnever come about until there is a nobler and more human life within thestates, and we must begin by perfecting national life before we considerempires and world federations. So in this essay only the national beingis considered. 

I desire to unite countryman and townsman in one movement, and to makethe co-operative principle the basis of a national civilization. Howare we to prevent them fighting the old battle between producer andconsumer? I think that this can best be brought about by co-operativefederations, which will act for both in manufacture, purchase, and sale, and with which both rural and urban associations will find it to theirinterest to be affiliated. Now the townsman cannot to any extent supplyfood for his stores by buying farms. To control agricultural productionin that way would necessitate a financial operation which theState would shrink from, and which it would be impossible for urbancooperators to finance. We had better make up our minds to let farmersbe syndicalists, controlling entirely the processes of agriculturalproduction themselves. They will do it better than the townsman could, more efficiently and more economically. They will never be able, withthe world in competition, to put up prices artificially. How can thetwo main divisions of national life be brought together in a nationalsolidarity? We can find an answer if we remember that farmers are notonly producers but consumers. They do not go about naked in the fields. They require clothes, furniture, tea, coffee, sugar, oil, soap, candles, pots and pans--in fact the farmer's wife needs nearly all the things thetownsman's wife needs, except that she purchases a little less food. Buteven here modern conditions are driving the farmer to buy food in theshops rather than to produce it for himself on the farm. Country breadis made in the bakery more and more. Butter, cheese, and bacon are madein factories, and the farmer's tendency is to buy what bread, bacon, and butter he requires, selling the milk to be made into butter to acreamery, the grain to make the bread to a miller, and the pigs toa factory. Co-operative distribution would be as advantageous to thecountry as in the town. Already in Ireland a considerable number offarmers' societies are enlarging their objects, and are turning whatoriginally were purely agricultural associations into generalpurposes societies, where the farmer's wife can purchase herdomestic requirements as well as her man his machinery, fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, and seeds. It would be to the interest of ruralsocieties to deal with co-operative wholesales just as much as it is inthe interest of urban stores to do so. It would be to their interest totake shares in these wholesales and productive federations, and see thatthey cater for the farmer's interests as much as for the townsman's. 

The urban co-operators, on their side, will see the opportunities forproductive co-operation the union of rural and urban movements wouldcreate. They naturally will desire to employ as many people as possiblein co-operative production. Farmers are surrounded by rings of allkinds: machinery manufacturers who will not sell to their societies, manure manufacturers' alliances who keep up prices. It is a greatindustry, this of supplying the farmer with his fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, cake, machinery. These rural co-operative societiesare increasing in number year by year. Farmers want clothes, hats, andboots: and the necessary machinery for their industry is almost entirelyof urban manufacture--ploughs, binders, separators, harrows, and manyother implements of tillage. It is an immense industry and yet to beco-operatively exploited. In the towns some progress has been made indistribution. But a nation depends upon its wealth producers and notupon its consumers. Co-operators might double, treble, or quadruple thedistributive trade, and still occupy only a very secondary position innational life unless they enter more largely upon production. We willnever make the co-operative idea the fundamental one in the civilizationof Ireland until we employ a very large part of the population inproduction. Now we have at present, thanks to the energy of the pioneersof agricultural co-operation, a new market opening in the countryfor things which the townsman can produce. Does not this suggestnew productive urban enterprises? Does it not favor an evolution ofmanufacturing industry, so that democratic control may finally replacethe autocratic control of the capitalist? The trades unions cannotdo this alone by following up any of their traditional policies. Theycannot go into trade on their own account with any guarantee of successunless they are associated with agencies of distribution. But ifco-operators--urban and rural--through their federations invade more andmore the field of production they will draw to themselves the hearts andhopes of the workers and idealists in the nation. People are really moreconcerned about the making of an income than about the spending of it. It is a necessity of our policy if it is to bring about the co-operativecommonwealth, that co-operators must adventure much more largely intoproduction than they have hitherto done. 

Now let us see what we have come to. There is a country movement whichis not merely one for agricultural production. It is rapidly takingup the distribution of goods. There is an urban movement not merelyconcerned with distribution but entering upon production. They can bebrought into harmony if the same federations act for both branches ofthe movement. The meeting-place of the two armies should be there. If this policy is adopted there will gradually grow-up that unity ofpurpose between country and urban workers which is the psychologicalbasis and necessary precedent for national action for the common good. The policy of identity of interest must be real, and it can only bereal when the identity of interest is obvious, and it can only be madeobvious when the symbols of that unity and identity are visible day byday in buildings and manufactures, things which are handled and seen, and in transactions which daily bring that unity to mind. The oldpoetic ideal of a United Ireland was and could only be a geographicalexpression, and not a human reality, so long as men were individualistin economics and were competing and struggling with each other formastery. 

By the co-operative commonwealth more is meant than a series oforganizations for economic purposes. We hope to create finally, by theclose texture of our organizations, that vivid sense of the identity ofinterest of the people in this island which is the basis of citizenship, and without which there can be no noble national life. Our greatnation-states have grown so large, so myriad are their populations, socomplicated are their interests, that most people in them really feel nosense of brotherhood with each other. We have yet to create inside ourgreat nation-states social and economic organizations, which willmake this identity of interest real and evident, and not seem merelya metaphor, as it does to most people today. The more the co-operativemovement does this for its members, the more points of contact they findin it, the more will we tend to make out of it and its branches realsocial organisms, which will become as closely knit psychically asphysically the cells in a human body are knit together. Our Irishdiversities of interest have made us world-famous; but such industrialand agricultural organizations would swallow up these antagonisms, asthe serpents created by the black art of the Egyptian magicians wereswallowed up by the rod Aaron cast on the floor, and which was madeanimate by the white magic of the Lord. 

XIII. 

It will appear to the idealist who has contemplated the heavens moreclosely than the earth that the policy I advocate is one which onlytardily could be put into operation, and would be paltry and inadequateas a basis for society. The idealist with the Golden Age already in hisheart believes he has only to erect the Golden Banner and display it formultitudes to array themselves beneath its folds; therefore he advocatesnot, as I do, a way to the life, but the life itself. I am sympatheticwith idealists in a hurry, but I do not think the world can be changedsuddenly by some heavenly alchemy, as St. Paul was smitten by a lightfrom the overworld. Such light from heaven is vouchsafed to individuals, but never to nations, who progress by an orderly evolution in society. Though the heart in us cries out continually, "Oh, hurry, hurry to theGolden Age, " though we think of revolutions, we know that the patientmarshalling of human forces is wisdom. We have to devise ways and meansand light every step clearly before the nation will leave its footingin some safe if unattractive locality to plant itself elsewhere. Theindividual may be reckless. The race never can be so, for it carries toogreat a burden and too high destinies, and it is only when the godswish to destroy or chastise a race that they first make it mad. Not byrevolutions can humanity be perfected. I might quote from an old oracle, "The gods are never so turned away from man as when he ascends to themby disorderly methods. " Our spirits may live in the Golden Age, but ourbodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path andthe staff struck carefully into the darkness before us to see that thepath beyond is not a morass, and the light not a will o' the wisp. 

Other critics may say I would destroy the variety of civilization by theinflexible application of a single idea. Well, I realize that the netwhich is spread for Leviathan will not capture all the creatures of thedeep; and the complexity of human nature is such that it is impossibleto imagine a policy, however fitting in certain spheres of humanactivity, which could be applied to the whole of life. What I think weshould aim at is making the co-operative idea fundamental in Irish life. But to say fundamental is not to say absolute. Always there will beenter rising persons--men of creative minds--who will break away fromthe mass and who will insist, perhaps rightly, on an autocratic controlof the enterprises they found, which were made possible alone bytheir genius, and which would not succeed unless every worker in theenterprise was malleable by their will. It is unlikely that State actionwill cease, or that any Government we may have will not respond to theappeal of the people to do this, that, or the other for them which theyare too indolent to do for themselves, or which by the nature of thingsonly governments can undertake. For a principle to be fundamental ina country does not mean that it must be absolute. I hope society inIreland will be organized that the idea of democratic control of itseconomic life will so pervade Irish thought that it will be in the bodypolitic what the spinal column is to the body--the pillar on which itrests, the strongest single factor in the body. Another illustrationmay make still clearer my meaning. In a red sunsetting the glow is sopowerful that green hills, white houses, and blue waters, touched byits light, assume a ruddy color, partly a local color, and partly areflected light from the sun. Now in the same way, what is most powerfulin society multiplies images and shadows of itself, and producesharmonies with itself which are yet not identities. It is by apredominating idea that nations achieve the practical unity of theircitizens, and national progress becomes possible. In the futurestructure of society I have no doubt there will be elements to which thesocialist, the syndicalist, the capitalist, and the individualist willhave contributed. By degrees it will be discovered what enterprisesare best directed by the State, by municipalities, by groups, or byindividuals. But if the idea of democratic control is predominant, thoseenterprises which are otherwise directed will yet meet the prevalentmood by adopting the ideas of the treatment of the workers enforced indemocratically controlled enterprises, and will in every respect, exceptcontrol, make their standards equal. All the needles of being point tothe centres where power is most manifested. The effects of the Frenchrevolution--a democratic upheaval--invaded men's minds everywhere. Eventhe autocratically ruled States, hitherto careless about the people intheir underworlds, had to make advances to democracy, and give it somemeasure of the justice democracy threatened to deal to itself. Withoutdemanding absolutism I do desire a predominant democratic character inour national enterprises, rather than a confused muddle or struggle ofinterests where nothing really emerges except the egoism of those whostruggle. 

It will be noticed that in all that has preceded I have referred littleto action by government, though it is on governments that democraciesover the world are now fixing all their hopes. They believe the Stateis the right agency to bring about reforms and changes in society. AndI must here explain why I do not share their hopes. My distrust of theState in economic reform is based on the belief that governments ingreat nation-states, even representative governments, are not malleableby the general will. They are too easily dominated by the holders ofeconomic power, are, in fact, always dominated by aristocracies withland or by the aristocracies of wealth. It is the hand at the helmguides the ship. The larger the State is the more easily do the holdersof economic power gain political power. The theory of representativegovernment held good in practice, I think, so long as parliaments wereengaged in formulating general rights, the right, for example, of theindividual to think or profess any religion he pleased; his right notto be deprived of liberty or life without open trial by hisfellow-citizens. So long as legislatures were affirming or maintainingthese rights, which rich and poor equally desired, they were justified. But when legislatures began to intervene in economic matters, in thestruggles between rich and poor, between capital and labor, it becameat once apparent the holders of economic power had also political power;and that the institution which operated fairly where universal rightswere considered did not operate fairly when there was a conflict betweenparticular interests. 

The jury of the nation was found to be packed. At least nine-tenths ofthe population in Great Britain, for example, belong to the wage-earningclass. At least nine-tenths of the members of legislatures belong tothe classes possessing land or capital. Now, why any member of thewage-earning class should look with hope to such assemblies I cannotunderstand. Their ideal is, or should be, economic freedom, togetherwith democratic control of industries, an ideal in every way opposedto the ideal of the majority of the members of the legislatures. Thefiction that representative assemblies will work for the general good isproclaimed with enthusiasm; but the moment we examine their actionswe see it is not so, and we discover the cause. Where the nation iscapitalist and capitalism is the dominant economic factor, legislaturesinvariably act to uphold it, and legislation tends to fix the systemmore securely. We see in Great Britain that wage-earners are now openlyregarded by the legislatures as a class who must not be allowed the samefreedom in life as the wealthy. They must be registered, inspected, and controlled in a way which the wealthy would bitterly resent if thelegislation referred to themselves. After economic inferiority has beenenforced on them by capital, the stigma of human inferiority is attachedto the wage-earners by the legislature. But I must not be led away frommy theme by the bitter reflections which arise in one who lives in theIron Age and knows it is Iron, who feels at times like the lost wandereron trackless fields of ice, which never melt and will not until earthturns from its axis. 

I wish to see society organized so that it shall be malleable to thegeneral will. But political and economic progress are obstructed becauseexisting political and economic organizations are almost entirelyunmalleable by the general will. Public opinion does not control thepress. The press, capitalistically controlled, creates public opinion. Our legislators have grown so secure that they confess openly they havepassed measures which they knew would be hateful to the majority ofcitizens, and which, if they had been voted on, would never have beenpassed. The theory of representative government has broken down. To tellthe truth, the life of the nation is so complicated that it is difficultfor the private citizen to have any intelligent opinion about nationalpolicies, and we can hardly blame the politician for despising thejudgment of the private citizen. Government departments are still lessmalleable by public opinion than the legislature. For an individual toattack the policy of a Government department is almost as hopeless aproceeding as if a laborer were to take pickaxe and shovel anddetermine to level a mountain which obstructed his view. Yet Governmentdepartments are supposed to be under popular control. The Castle inIreland, theoretically, was under popular control, but it was adamantinein policy. If the cant about popular control of legislation andGovernment departments is obviously untrue, how much more is itin regard to public services like railways, gas works, mines, thedistribution of goods, manufacture, purchase and sale, which are almostentirely under private control and where public interference is bitterlyresented and effectively opposed. What chance has the individual who isaggrieved against the great carrying companies? To come lower down, let us take the farmer in the fairs. What way has he of influencing thejobbers and dealers to act honestly by him--they who have formed ringsto keep down the prices of cattle? Are they malleable to public opinion?The farmers who have waited all day through a fair know they are not. 

When we consider the agencies through which people buy we find the samething. The increase of multiple shops, combines, and rings makes the useof the limited power a man had to affect a dealer by transferring hiscustom to another merchant to dwindle yearly. Everywhere we turn wefind this adamantine front presented by the legislature, the Statedepartments, by the agencies of production, distribution, or credit, andit is the undemocratic organization of society which is responsible fornine-tenths of our social troubles. All the vested interests backed upby economic and political power conflict with the public welfare, andthe general will, which intends the good of all, can act no more thana paralyzed cripple can walk. We would all choose the physique of theathlete, with his swift, unfettered, easy movements, rather than thebody of the cripple if we could, and we have this choice before us inIreland. 

If we concentrate our efforts mainly on voluntary action, strivingto make the co-operative spirit predominant, the general will wouldmanifest itself through organizations malleable to that will, flexibleand readily adjusting themselves to the desires of the community. To effect reforms we have not first to labor at the gigantic task ofaffecting national opinion and securing the majorities necessary fornational action. In any district a hundred or two hundred men can atany time form co-operative societies for production, purchase, sale, orcredit, and can link themselves by federation with other organizationslike their own to secure greater strength and economic efficiency. Byfollowing this policy steadily we simplify our economic system, andreduce to fewer factors the forces in conflict in society. We beget thepredominance of one principle, and enable that general will for good, which Rousseau theorized about, to find agencies through which it canmanifest freely, so changing society from the static condition begotby conflict and obstruction to a dynamic condition where energies anddesires manifest freely. 

The general will, as Rousseau demonstrated, always intends the good, andif permitted to act would act in a large and noble way. The change fromstatic to dynamic, from fixed forms to fluid forms, has been comingswiftly over the world owing to the liberation of thought, and this inspite of the obstruction of a society organized, I might almost say, with egomania as the predominant psychological factor. The ancientconception of Nature as a manifestation of spirit is incarnating anewin the minds of modern thinkers, and Nature is not conceived of asmaterial, but as force and continual motion; and they are trying toidentify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces ofNature have freer play in humanity. We begin to catch glimpses ofcivilizations as far exceeding ours as ours surpasses society in theStone Age. In all our democratic movements, in these efforts towardsthe harmonious fusion of human forces, humanity is obscurely intenton mightier collective exploits than anything conceived of before. Thenature of these energies manifesting in humanity I shall try to indicatelater on. But to let the general will have free play ought to be theaim of those who wish to build up national organizations for whateverpurpose; and to let the general will have free play we require somethingbetter than the English invention of representative government, which, as it exists at present, is simply a device to enable all kinds ofcompromises to be made on matters where there should be no compromise, as if right and wrong could come to an agreement honestly to let thingsbe partly right and partly wrong. We are importing into Ireland somepolitical machinery of this antiquated pattern. I have written theforegoing because I dread Irish people becoming slaves of this machine. I fear the importers of this machinery will desire to make it do thingsit can only do badly, and will set it to work with the ferocity of thenew broom and will make it an obstruction, so that the real genius ofthe Irish people will be unable freely to manifest itself. The less werely on this machinery at present, and the more we desire a machinery ofprogress, at once flexible and efficient, the better will it be for uslater on. What must be embodied in State action is the national willand the national soul, and until that giant being is manifested it isdangerous to let the pygmies set powers in motion which may enchain usfor centuries to come. 

XIV. 

It may seem I have spoken lightly of that infant whose birth I referredto with more solemnity in the opening pages of this book, and indeed Iam a little dubious about that infant. The signature of the Irish mindis nowhere present in it, and I look upon it with something of thehesitating loyalty the inhabitant of a new Balkan State night feel forhis imported prince, doubtful whether that sovereign will reflectthe will of his new subjects or whether his policy will not constrainnational character into an alien mould. The signature of the Irish mindis not apparent anywhere in this new machinery for self-government. Ourpoliticians seem to have been unaware that they had any wisdom to learnfrom the more obvious failures of representative government as they knewit. So far, as I have knowledge, no Irishman during the past centuryof effort for political freedom took the trouble to think out a formof government befitting Irish circumstance and character. We left itabsolutely to those whom we declared incapable of understanding usor governing us to devise for us a system by which we might governourselves. I do not criticize those who devised the new machinery ofself-government, but those who did not devise it, and who discouragedthe exercise of political imagination in Ireland. It is said of anartist that it was his fantasy first to paint his ideal of womanlybeauty, and, when this was done, to approximate it touch by touch tothe sitter, and when the sitter cried, "Ah, now it is growing like!" theartist ceased, combining the maximum of ideal beauty possible with theminimum of likeness. Now if we had thought out the ideal structure ofIrish government we might have offered it for criticism by those inwhose power it was to accept or reject, and have gradually approximatedit until a point was reached where the compromise left at leastsomething of our making and imagination in it. There is nothing of usin the Act which is in abeyance as I write. I am less concerned withit than with the creation of a social order, for the social order ina country is the strong and fast fortress where national characteris created and preserved. A legislature may theoretically allowself-government, but by its constitution may operate against nationalcharacter and its expression in a civilization. We have accepted theprinciple of representative government, and that, I readily concede, isthe ideal principle, but the method by which a representative characteris to be given to State institutions we have not thought out at all. Wehave committed the error our neighbors have committed of assuming thatthe representative assembly which can legislate for general interestscan deal equally with particular interests; that the body of men whowill act unitedly so as to secure the liberty of person or liberty ofthought, which all desire for themselves, will also act wisely whereclass problems and the development of particular industries areconcerned. The whole history of representative assemblies shows thatthe machinery adequate for the furtherance and protection of generalinterests operates unjustly or stupidly in practice against particularinterests. The long neglect of agriculture and the actual condition ofthe sweated are instances. I agree that representative government isthe ideal, but how is it to operate in the legislature and still morein administration? Are government departments to be controlled byParliament or by the representatives of the particular class to promotewhose interests special departments were created. I hold that thecontinuous efficiency of State departments can only be maintained whenthey are controlled in respect of policy, not by the casual politicianwhom the fluctuations of popular emotion places at their head, but bythe class or industry the State institution was created to serve. Adepartment of State can conceivably be preserved from stagnation bya minister of strong will, who has a more profound knowledge ofthe problems connected with his department than even his permanentofficials. He might vitalize them from above. But does the party systemyield us such Ministers? In practice is not high position the reward ofservice to party? Is special knowledge demanded of the controller of aBoard of Trade or a Board of Agriculture? Do we not all know that thevast majority of Ministers are controlled by the permanent officialsof their department. Failing great Ministers, the operations of adepartment may be vitalized by control over its policy exercised, notby a general assembly like Parliament, but by a board elected from theclass or industry the department ostensibly was created to serve. Anagricultural department controlled by a council or board composed solelyof those making their livelihood out of agriculture and elected solelyby their own class, would, we may be certain, be practical in itsmethods. It would receive perpetual stimulus from those engaged inmaking their living by the industry. Parliaments or senates shouldconfine themselves to matters of general interest, leaving particular orspecial interests to those who understand them, to the specialists, andonly intervene when national interests are involved by a clashing ofparticular interests. Our State institutions will never fulfill theirfunctions efficiently until they are subject in respect of policy notto general control, but the control of the class they were created toserve. 

That ideal can only be realized fully when all industries are organized. But we should work towards it. Parliament may act as a kind of guardianof the unorganized, but, once an industry is organized, once it hascome of age, it must resent domination by bodies without the specialknowledge of which it has the monopoly within itself. It should nottolerate domination by the unexpert outsider, whatever may be his reputein other spheres. It is only when industries are organized thatthe democratic system of election can justify itself by resultsin administration. When a county, let us say, chooses a member ofParliament to represent every interest, only too often it chooses aman who can represent few interests except his own. The greatest commondenominator of the constituents is as a rule some fluent utterer ofplatitudes. But if the farmers in a county, or the manufacturers ina county, or the workers in a county, had each to choose a man torepresent them, we may be certain the farmers would choose one whom theyregarded as competent to interpret their needs, the manufacturers a manof real ability, and labor would select its best intelligence. Personsengaged in special work rarely fall to recognize the best men in theirown industry. Then they judge somewhat as experts, whereas they areby no means experts when they are asked to select a representativeto represent everybody in every industry. To secure good government Iconceive we must have two kinds of representative assemblies runningconcurrently with their spheres of influence well defined. One, thesupreme body, should be elected by counties or cities to deal withgeneral interests, taxation, justice, education, the duties and rightsof individual citizens as citizens. The other bodies should be electedby the people engaged in particular occupations to control the policyof the State institutions created to foster particular interests. Theaverage man will elect people to his mind whose deliberations will be ina sphere where the ideas of the average man ought to be heard and mustbe respected. The specialists in their department of industry will electexperts to work in a sphere where their knowledge will be invaluable, and where, if it is not present, there will be muddle. 

The machinery of government ought never to be complicated, and oughtto be easily understood by the citizens. In Ireland, where we haveat present no thought of foreign policy, no question of army ornavy, departments of State should fall naturally into a few divisionsconcerned with agriculture, education, local government, justice, police, and taxation. The administration of some of these are mattersof national concern, and they should and must be under parliamentarycontrol, and that control should be jealously protected. Others aresectional, and these should be controlled in respect of policy bypersons representative of these sections, and elected solely by them. Ithink there should also be a department of Labor. I am not sure that themain work of the Minister in charge ought not to be the organization oflabor in its proper unions or guilds. It is a work as important to theState as the organization of agriculture, and indeed from a humanitarianpoint of view more urgent. Nothing is more lamentable, nothing fillsthe heart more with despair, than the multitude of isolated workers, sweated, unable to fix a price for their work, ignorant of its trueeconomic value; connected with no union, unable to find any body to fallback on for help or advice in trouble, neglected altogether by society, which yet has to pay a heavy price in disease, charity, poor rates, and in social disorder for its neglect. Was not the last Irish risinglargely composed of those who were economically neglected and oppressed?Society bears a heavier burden for its indifference than it would bearif it accepted responsibility for the organization of labor in its owndefense. The State in these islands recommends farmers to organize forthe protection of their interests and assists in the organization, andleaves the organized farmers free to use their organizations asthey will. As good a case could be made for the State aiding in theorganization of labor for the protection of its own interests. Aministry of labor should seek out all wage-earners; where there is notrade union one should be organized, and, where one exists, all workersshould be pressed to join it. Such a ministry ought to be the city ofrefuge for the proletarian, and the Minister be the Father of Labor, fighting its battles for an entry into humanity and its rightful placein civilization. 

If we consider the problem of representation, it should not beimpossible to devise a system of which the foundation might be theCounty Councils, where there would be as sub-divisions, committees forlocal government, agriculture, and technical instruction or trade todeal with local administration in these matters. These committeesshould send representatives to general councils of local government, agriculture, and trade. The election should not be by the County Councilas a body, but by the committees, so that traders would have no voicein choosing a representative for farmers, nor farmers interfere inthe choice of manufacturers or traders selecting a representative on ageneral Council of Trade, and it should be regarded as ridiculous anysuch intervention as for a War Office to claim it should have a voicealong with the Admiralty in the selection of captains and commanders ofvessels of war. At these general councils, which might meet twice a yearfor whatever number of days may be expedient, general policies would bedecided and boards elected to ensure the carrying out by the officialsof the policies decided upon. By this process of selection men who hadto control Boards of Agriculture, Trade, or Local Government would bethree times elected, each time by a gradually decreasing electorate, with a gradually increasing special knowledge of the matters to bedealt with. A really useless person may contrive to be chosen asrepresentative by a thousand electors. It requires an able manto convince a committee of ten persons, themselves more or lessspecialists, that his is the best brain among them. Where nationaleducation, a thorny subject in Ireland, is concerned, I think theeducationalists in provinces might be asked to elect representativesfrom their own profession on a Council of Education to act as anadvisory body to the Minister of Education. County Council elections arenot exactly means by which miracles of culture are discovered. A man whocame to be member of a board of control would at least have provedhis ability to others engaged on work like his own who have specialknowledge of it and of his capacity to deal with it. If this systemwas accepted, we would not have traders on our Council of Agricultureprotesting against the farmers organizing their industry, because nonebut persons concerned with agriculture would be a owed to be membersof agricultural committees, and this would, of course, involve theconcentration of merchants and manufacturers upon the work of a Board ofTrade and the control of a policy of technical instruction suitable forindustrial workers, where agricultural advisers in their turn would beout of place. Control so exercised over the policy of State institutionswould vitalize them, and tend to make them enter more intimately intothe department of national effort they were created to foster. Thestagnation which falls on most Government departments is due to this, that the responsible heads rarely have a knowledge great enough toenable them to inaugurate new methods, that parliamentary control isnever adequate, is rarely exercised with knowledge, and there is alwaysa party in power to defend the policy of their Minister, for if oneMinister is successfully attacked a whole party goes out of power. We, in Ireland, should desire above all things efficiency in our publicservants. They will stagnate in their offices unless they arecontinually stimulated by intimate connection with the class they workfor and who have a power of control. This system would also, I believe, lead to less jobbery. Men in an assembly, where theoretically everyclass and interest are represented, often conspire to make badappointments, because only a minority have knowledge of whatqualifications the official ought to have, and they are outvoted byrepresentatives who do their friends such good turns often in sheerignorance that they are betraying their constituents. Where specialistshave power, and where the well-being of their own industry is concerned, they never willingly appoint the inefficient. Such an organizationof our County Council system would operate also to break up sectariancliques. The feeling of organized classes, farmers, or industrialists, concerned about their own well-being, would oppose itself to sectariansentiment where its application was unfitting. 

In the system of representative government I have outlined, we wouldhave one supreme or national assembly concerned with general interests, justice, taxation, education, the apportioning of revenue to itsvarious uses, reserving to itself direct control over the policy ofthe departments of treasury, police, judiciary, all that affects thecitizens equally; and, beneath it, other councils, representative ofclasses and special interests, controlling the policy and administrationof the State departments concerned with their work. Where everybodywas concerned everybody would have that measure of control which a voteconfers; where particular interests were concerned these interests wouldnot be hampered in their development by the intervention of busybodiesfrom outside. Of course on matters where particular interests clashedwith general interests, or were unable to adjust themselves to otherinterests, the supreme Assembly would have to decide. The more sectionalinterests are removed from discussion in the National Assembly, andthe more it confines itself to general interests the more will itapproximate to the ideal sense, be less the haunt of greed, and more thevehicle of the national will and the national being. 

By the application of the principle of representative government now inforce, one is reminded of nothing so much as the palette of an artistwho had squeezed out the primary colors and mixed them into a greasydrab tint, where the purity of every color was lost, or the mostpowerful pigment was in dull domination. If the modification of therepresentative principle I have outlined was in operation, with eachinterest or industry organized, and freed from alien interference, theeffect might be likened to a disc with the seven primary colors rayingfrom a centre, and made to whirl where the motion produced rather theeffect of pure light. We must not mix the colors of national lifeuntil conflicting interests muddle themselves into a gray drab of humanfutility, but strive, so far as possible, to keep them pure and unmixed, each retaining its own peculiar lustre, so that in their conjunctionwith others they will harmonize, as do the pure primary colors, andin their motion make a light of true intelligence to prevail in thenational being. 

XV. 

No policy can succeed if it be not in accord with national character. If I have misjudged that, what is written here is vain. It may be asked, can any one abstract from the chaos which is Irish history a prevailingmood or tendency recurring again and again, and assert these arefundamental? It is difficult to define national character, even inlong-established States whose history lies open to the world; but it ismost difficult in Ireland, which for centuries has not acted by its ownwill from its own centre, where national activity was mainly by wayof protest against external domination, or a readjustment of itself toexternal power. We can no more deduce the political character of theIrish from the history of the past seven hundred years than we canestimate the quality of genius in an artist whom we have only seen whengrappling with a burglar. The political character of a people emergesonly when they are shaping in freedom their own civilization. To get aclue in Ireland we must slip by those seven centuries of struggle andstudy national origins, as the lexicographer, to get the exact meaningof a word, traces it to its derivation. The greatest value our earlyhistory and literature has for us is the value of a clue to character, to be returned to again and again in the maze of our infinitely morecomplicated life and era. 

In every nation which has been allowed free development, while it hasthe qualities common to all humanity, it will be found that some oneidea was predominant, and in its predominance regrouped about itselfother ideas. With our neighbors I believe the idea of personal libertyhas been the inspiring motive of all that is best in its politicaldevelopment, whatever the reactions and oppressions may have been. Inancient Attica the idea of beauty, proportion, or harmony in life sopervaded the minds of the citizens that the surplus revenues of theState were devoted to the beautifying of the city. We find that love forbeauty in its art, its literature, its architecture; and to Plato, thehighest mind in the Athenian State, Deity itself appeared as Beauty inits very essence. That mighty mid-European State, whose ambitions haveupset the world, seems to conceive of the State as power. Other raceshave had a passion for justice, and have left codes of law which haveprofoundly affected the life of nations which grew up long after theywere dead. The cry of ancient Israel for righteousness rings out aboveall other passions, and its laws are essentially the laws of a peoplewho desired that morality should prevail. We have to discover forourselves the ideas which lie at the root of national character, and soinculcate these principles that they will pervade the nation and make ita spiritual solidarity, and unite the best minds in their service, andso control those passionate and turbulent elements which are the causeof the downfall and wreckage of nations by internal dissensions. Idesire as much as any one to preserve our national identity, and to makeit worthy of preservation, and this can only be done by the dominationof some inspiring ideal which will draw all hearts to it; which may atfirst have that element of strangeness in it which Ben Jonson said wasin all excellent beauty, and which will later become--as all high thingswe love do finally become--familiar to us, and nearer and closer to usthan the beatings of our own hearts. 

When ideals which really lie at the root of our being are firstproclaimed, all that is external in life protests. So were many greatreformers martyred, but they left their ideals behind them in theair, and men breathed them and they became part of their very being. Nationality is a state of consciousness, a mood of definite character inour intellectual being, and it is not perceived first except in profoundmeditation; it does not become apparent from superficial activities anymore than we could, by looking at the world and the tragic historyof mankind, discover that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Thatknowledge comes to those who go within themselves, and not to those whoseek without for the way, the truth, and the life. But, once proclaimed, the incorruptible spiritual element in man intuitively recognizes itas truth, and it has a profound effect on human action. There is, Ibelieve, a powerful Irish character which has begun to reassert itselfin modern times, and this character is in essentials what it was twothousand years ago. We discover its first manifestation in the ancientclans. The clan was at once aristocratic and democratic. It wasaristocratic in leadership and democratic in its economic basis. Themost powerful character was elected as chief, while the land was theproperty of the clan. That social order indicates the true politicalcharacter of the Irish. Races which last for thousands of years do notchange in essentials. They change in circumstance. They may grow betteror worse, but throughout their history the same fundamentals appear andreassert themselves. We can see later in Irish literature or politics, as powerful personalities emerged and expressed themselves, how theancient character persisted. Swift, Goldsmith, Berkeley, O'Grady, Shaw, Wilde, Parnell, Davitt, Plunkett, and many others, however they differedfrom each other, in so far as they betrayed a political character, wereintensely democratic in economic theory, adding that to an aristocraticfreedom of thought. That peculiar character, I believe, still persistsamong our people in the mass, and it is by adopting a policy whichwill enable it to manifest once more that we will create an Irishcivilization, which will fit our character as the glove fits the hand. During the last quarter of a century of comparatively peaceful life theco-operative principle has once more laid hold on the imagination of theIrish townsman and the Irish countryman. The communal character is stillpreserved. It still wills to express itself in its external aspects ina communal civilization, in an economic brotherhood. That movement aloneprovides in Ireland for the aristocratic and democratic elements inIrish character. It brings into prominence the aristocracy of characterand intelligence which it is really the Irish nature to love, and itseconomic basis is democratic. A large part of our failure to achieveanything memorable in Ireland is due to the fact that, influenced by theexample of our great neighbors, we reversed the natural position of thearistocratic and democratic elements in the national being. Instead ofbeing democratic in our economic life, with the aristocracy of characterand intelligence to lead us, we became meanly individualistic in oureconomics and meanly democratic in leadership. That is, we allowedindividualism--the devilish doctrine of every man for himself--to be thekeynote of our economic life; where, above all things, the general goodand not the enrichment of the individual should be considered. For ourleaders we chose energetic, common-place types, and made them representus in the legislature; though it is in leadership above all that weneed, not the aristocracy of birth, but the aristocracy of character, intellect, and will. We had not that aristocracy to lead us. We choseinstead persons whose ideas were in no respect nobler than theaverage to be our guides, or rather to be guided by us. Yet when thearistocratic character appeared, however imperfect, how it was adored!Ireland gave to Parnell--an aristocratic character--the love whichsprings from the deeps of its being, a love which it gave to none otherin our time. 

With our great neighbors what are our national characteristics werereversed. They are an individualistic race. This individualism hasexpressed itself in history and society in a thousand ways. Beingindividualistic in economics, they were naturally democratic inpolitics. They have a genius for choosing forcible average men asleaders. They mistrust genius in high places, Intensely individualisticthemselves, they feared the aristocratic character in politics. Theydesired rather that general principles should be asserted to encircleand keep safe their own national eccentricity. They have graduallyinfected us with something of their ways, and as they were not truly ourways we never made a success of them. It is best for us to fall back onwhat is natural with us, what is innate in character, what was visibleamong us in the earliest times, and what, I still believe, persistsamong us--a respect for the aristocratic intellect, for freedom ofthought, ideals, poetry, and imagination, as the qualities to be lookedfor in leaders, and a bias for democracy in our economic life. We weremore Irish truly in the heroic ages. We would not then have taken, as wedo today, the huckster or the publican and make them our representativemen, and allow them to corrupt the national soul. Did not the wholevulgar mob of our politicians lately unite to declare to the worldthat Irish nationality was impossible except it was floated on a sea ofliquor? The image of Kathleen ni Houlihan anciently was beauty in thehearts of poets and dreamers. We often thought her unwise, but never didwe find her ignoble; never was she without a flame of idealism in hereyes, until this ignoble crew declared alcohol to be the only possiblebasis of Irish nationality. 

In the remote past we find the national instincts of our people fullymanifested. We find in this early literature a love for the truth-tellerand for the hero. Indeed they did not choose as chieftains of theirclans men whom the bards could not sing. They reverenced wisdom, whetherin king, bard, or ollav, and at the same time there was a communal basisfor economic life. This heroic literature is, as our Standish O'Gradydeclared, rather prophecy than history. It reveals what the highestspirits deemed the highest, and what was said lay so close to theheart of the race that it is still remembered and read. That literaturediscloses the character of the national being, still to be manifested ina civilization, and it must flame out before the tale which began amongthe gods is closed. Whatever brings this communal character into oursocial order, and at the same time desires the independent aristocraticintellect, is in accord with the national tradition. The co-operativemovement is the modern expression of that mood. It is already making aconquest of the Irish mind, and in its application to life predisposingour people to respect for the man of special attainments, independentcharacter, and intellect. A social order which has made its economicsdemocratic in character needs such men above all things. It needsaristocratic thinkers to save the social order from stagnation, thedisease which eats into all harmonious life. We shall succeed or fail inIreland as we succeed or fail to make democracy prevail in oureconomic life, and aristocratic ideals to prevail in our political andintellectual life. 

In all things it is best for a people to obey the law of their ownbeing. The lion can never become the ox, and "one law for the lion andthe ox is oppression. "

Now that the hammer of Thor is wrecking our civilizations, is destroyingthe body of European nationalities, the spirit is freer to reshape theworld nearer to the heart's desire. Necessity will drive us along withthe rest to recast our social order and to fix our ideals. Necessity andour own hearts should lead us to a brotherhood in industry. It shouldbe horrible to us the thought of the greedy profiteer, the pursuit ofwealth for oneself rather than the union of forces for the good of alland the creation of a brotherly society. The efforts of individuals toamass for themselves great personal wealth should be regarded as ignobleby society, and as contrary to the national spirit, as it is indeedcontrary to all divine teaching. Our ideal should be economic harmonyand intellectual diversity. We should regard as alien to the nationalspirit all who would make us think in flocks, and discipline us to anunintellectual commonalty of belief. The life of the soul is a personaladventure, a quest for the way and the truth and the life. It may be weshall find the ancient ways to be the true ways, but if we are led tothe truth blindfolded and without personal effort, we are like thosewhom the Scripture condemns for entering into Paradise, not by thestraight gate, but over the wall, like thieves and robbers. If we seekit for ourselves and come to it, we shall be true initiates and mastersin the guild. 

No people seem to have greater natural intelligence than the Irish. Nopeople have been so unfortunately cursed with organizations which ledthem to abnegate personal thought, and Ireland is an intellectualdesert where people read nothing and think nothing; where not fifty in ahundred thousand could discern the quality of thought in the Politicsof Aristotle or the Republic of Plato as being in any way deeper thana leading article in one of their daily papers. And we, whose externallife is so mean, whose ignorance of literature is so great, are yetflattered by the suggestion that we have treasures of spiritual andintellectual life which should not be debased by external influences, and so it comes about that good literature is a thing unpurchasableexcept in some half-dozen of the larger towns. Any system which wouldsuppress the aristocratic, fearless, independent intellect should beregarded as contrary to the Irish genius and inimical to the nationalbeing. 

XVI. 

Among the many ways men have sought to create a national consciousness, a fountain of pride to the individual citizen, is to build a strong bodyfor the great soul, and it would be an error to overlook--among othermodern uprisings of ancient Irish character--the revival of the militaryspirit and its possible development in relation to the national being. National solidarity may be brought about by pressure from without, or bythe fusion of the diverse elements in a nation by a heat engenderedfrom within. But to Create national solidarity by war is to attain buta temporary and unreal unity, a gain like theirs who climb into theKingdom not by the straight gate, but over the wall like a robber. Whenone nation is threatened by another, great national sacrifices will bemade, and the latent solidarity of its humanity be kindled. But when thewar is over, when the circumstances uniting the people for a time arepast, that spirit rapidly dies, and people begin their old antagonismsbecause the social order, in its normal working, does not constantlypromote a consciousness of identity of interest. 

Almost all the great European states have fortified their nationalbeing by militarism. Everything almost in their development has beensubordinated to the necessities of national defense, and hence it isonly in times of war there is any real manifestation of national spirit. It is only then that the citizens of the Iron Age feel a transitorybrotherhood. It is a paradoxical phenomenon, possible only in the IronAge, that the highest instances of national sacrifice are evoked bywarfare--the most barbarous of human enterprises. To make normal thatspirit of unity which is now only manifested in abnormal moments inhistory should be our aim; and as it is the Iron Age, and materialforces are more powerful than spiritual, we must consider how thesefierce energies can be put in relation with the national being withleast debasement of that being. If the body of the national soul is toomartial in character, it will by reflex action communicate its characterto the spirit, and make it harsh and domineering, and unite against itin hatred all other nations. We have seen that in Europe but yesterday. The predominance in the body of militarist practice will finally driveout from the soul those unfathomable spiritual elements which are thebody's last source power in conflict, and it will in the end defeat itsown object, which is power. When nations at war call up their reservesof humanity to the last man capable of bearing arms, their leaders beginalso to summon up those bodiless moods and national sentiments whichare the souls of races, and their last and most profound sources ofinspiration and deathless courage. The war then becomes a conflict ofcivilizations and of spiritual ideals, the aspirations and memorieswhich constitute the fundamental basis of those civilizations. Withoutthe inspiration of great memories or of great hopes, men are incapableof great sacrifices. They are rationalists, and the preservation of thelife they know grows to be a desire greater than the immortality of thespiritual life of their race. A famous Japanese general once said it wasthe power to hold out for the last desperate quarter of an hour whichwon victories, and it is there spiritual stamina reinforces physicalpower. It is a mood akin to the ecstasy of the martyr through hisburning. Though in these mad moments neither spiritual nor material isconsciously differentiated, the spiritual is there in a fiery fusionwith all other forces. If it is absent, the body unsupported may taketo its heels or will yield. It has played its only card, and has noteternity to fling upon the table in a last gamble for victory. 

A military organization may strengthen the national being, but if itdominates it, it will impoverish its life. How little Sparta has givento the world compared with Attica. Yet when national ideals have beencreated they assume an immeasurably greater dignity when the citizensorganize themselves for the defense of their ideals, and are prepared toyield up life itself as a sacrifice if by this the national being maybe preserved. A creed always gains respect through its martyrs. We maygrant all this, yet be doubtful whether a militarist organization shouldbe the main support of the national being in Ireland. The character ofthe ideal should, I believe, be otherwise created, and I am notcertain that it could not be as well preserved and defended by acivil organization, such as I have indicated, as by armed power. Ourgeographical position and the slender population of our country alsomake it evident that the utmost force Ireland could organize would makebut a feeble barrier against assault by any of the greater States. Wehave seen how Belgium, a country with a population larger than that ofIreland, was thrust aside, crushed and bleeding, by one stroke from thepaw of its mighty neighbor. * The military and political institutions ofa small country are comparatively easy to displace, but it would bea task infinitely more difficult to destroy ideals or to extinguish anational being based on a social order, democratic and co-operative incharacter, the soul of the country being continually fed by institutionswhich, by their very nature, would be almost impossible to alter unlessdestruction of the whole humanity of the country was aimed at. Nationalideals, based on a co-operative social order, would have the samepower of resistance almost as a religion, which is, of all things, mostunconquerable by physical force, and, when it is itself militant, themost powerful ally of military power. The aim of all nations is topreserve their immortality. I do not oppose the creation of a nationalarmy for this purpose. There are occasions when the manhood of a nationmust be prepared to yield life rather than submit to oppression, whenit must perish in self-contempt or resist by force what wrong would beimposed by force. But I would like to point out that for a country inthe position of Ireland the surest means of preserving the nationalbeing by the sacrifice and devotion of the people are economic andspiritual. 

 * Since this book was written Ireland has had a tragic illustration of the truth of what is urged in these pages. 

Our political life in the past has been sordid and unstable because wewere uncultured as a nation. National ideals have been the possession ofthe few in Ireland, and have not been diffused. That is the cause of ourcomparative failure as a nation. If we would create an Irish culture, and spread it widely among our people, we would have the sameunfathomable sources of inspiration and sacrifice to draw upon in ouracts as a nation as the individual has who believes he is immortal, andthat his life here is but a temporary foray into time out of eternity. 

Yet we have much to learn from the study of military organization. Thegreat problem of all civilizations is the creation of citizens: thatis, of people who are dominated by the ideal of the general welfare, who will sink private desire and work harmoniously with theirfellow-citizens for the highest good of their race. While we may allagree that war brings about an eruption of the arcane and elementalforces which lie normally in the pit of human life, as the forces whichcause earthquakes lie normally asleep in the womb of the world, none theless we must admit that military genius has discovered and appliedwith mastery a law of life which is of the highest importance tocivilization--far more important to civil even than to militarydevelopment--and that is the means by which the individual will forgethis personal danger and sacrifice life itself for the general welfare. In no other organization will men in great masses so entirely forgetthemselves as men will in battle under military discipline. What is thecause of this? Can we discover how it is done and apply the law to civillife?

The military discipline works miracles. The problem before the captainsof armies is to take the body of man, the most naturally egoistic ofall things, which hates pain and which will normally take to its legs indanger and try to save itself, and to dominate it so that the body andthe soul inhabiting it will stand still and face all it loathes. And theproblem is solved in the vast majority of cases. After military trainingthe civilians who formerly would fly before a few policemen willmanfully and heroically stand, not the blows of a baton, but a wholehail of bullets, a cannonade lasting through a day; nay, they will forweeks and months, day by day, risk and lose life for a cause, for anidea, at a word of command. They may not have half as good a cause tolose life for as they had as a mob of angry civilians, but they willface death now, and the chances of mutilation and agony worsethan death. Can we inspire civilians with the same passionateself-forgetfulness in the pursuit of the higher ideals of peace? Men ina regiment have to a large extent the personal interests abolished. Theorganization they now belong to supports them and becomes their life. Bytheir union with it a new being is created. Exercise, drill, maneuver, accentuate that unity, and esprit de corps arises, so that they feeltheir highest life is the corporate one; and that feeling is fosteredcontinually, until at last all the units, by some law of the soul, areas it were in spite of themselves, in spite of the legs which want torun, in spite of the body which trembles with fear, constrained tomove in obedience to the purpose of the whole organism expressed by itscontrolling will; and so we get these devoted masses of men who advanceagain and again under a hail more terrible than Dante imagined fallingin his vision of the fiery world. 

There is nothing like it in civilian life, but yet the aim of the higherminds in all civilizations is to create a similar devotion to civicideals, so that men will not only, as Pericles said, "give their bodiesfor the commonwealth, " but will devote mind, will, and imagination withequal assiduity and self-surrender to the creation of a civilizationwhich will be the inheritance of all and a cause of pride to every one, and which will bring to the individual a greater beauty and richness oflife than he could finally reach by the utmost private efforts of whichhe was capable. 

I believe that an organization of society, such as I have indicated, would evolve gradually a similar passion for the general zeal, having, without the stern restraint militarism imposes on its units, a likepower of turning the thoughts to the general good. 

I may say also that to create a militarist organization, before thenatural principles to be safe-guarded are well understood and a commonpossession of all the people in the country, would be a danger akin tothe peril of allowing children to play with firearms. We may find it abad business to create natural ideals as they are required, just as itis a perilous business to try to create an army when a country is in astate of war. If we do not rapidly create a national culture embodyingthe fundamental ideas we wish to see prevailing in society our volunteerarmies will be subject to influences from the baser sort of politicianswho would force party aims on the country. We shall have a wretchedfuture unless the soul of the country can dominate the physical forcesin it, unless ideals of national conduct, liberty of speech and thought, of justice and brotherhood, exist to inspire and guide it, and arerecognized by all and appealed to by all parties equally. 

We are standing on the threshold of nationhood, and it is problems likethese we should be setting ourselves to solve, unless we are to be anunimportant province of the world, a mere administrative area inhabitedby a quite undistinguished people. 

XVII. 

But there are other methods of devotion to the national being possibleto us through collective action, and I was moved to imagine one, havingonce received a letter from a bloodthirsty correspondent--one of thatrather numerous class whose minds are always loaded with ball cartridge, whose fingers are always on the trigger, and who are always callingon the authorities not to hesitate to shoot. He wrote to me during arailway strike, advocating military conscription in order thatrailway men who went out on strike could be called up by the militaryauthorities, as the French railway strikers were, and who were subjectto martial law if they disobeyed. I do not think with those who believethe venerable remedy of blood-letting is the best cure for socialmaladies; and I would have thought no more about that sterndisciplinarian, but my mind went playing about the idea of conscription, and there came to me some thoughts which I wish to put on record in thehope that our people in some future, when the social order will createpublic spirit and the passion for the State more plentifully than itdoes today, may recur to the idea and apply it. Nearly every State inthe world demands from youth a couple of years' service in the army. There they are trained to defend their country--even, if necessary, to slay their own countrymen. There is much that is abhorrent to theimagination in the idea of war, and I am altogether with that noblebody of men who are trying, by means of arbitration treaties, tosolve national differences by reason rather than by force. But weall recognize something noble in the spirit of the nation where thecommunity agrees that every man shall give up some years of his life tothe State for the preservation of the State, and may be called upon tosurrender life absolutely in that service. While the manhood of a racedoes this on the whole with cheerfulness, there must be something ofhigh character in the manhood of that nation. A certain gravity attachesto national decisions which are made, as it were, upon the slopes ofdeath, because none are exempt from service, and there is no deliriousmob ready to yell for a war in which it does not run the risk of havingits own dirty skin perforated by bullets. In Ireland we have never hadmilitary conscription, for reasons which are well known to all, andupon which I need not enter. I am well satisfied it should be so, forit leaves open to us the possibility of a much nobler service, one whichhas never yet been attempted by any modern nation, and that is civilconscription. 

I throw out this suggestion, which may hold the imagination of those whohave noble conceptions of what national life should be and what a nationshould work for, in the hope that some time it may fructify. There is aprohibition laid on the people in this island against conscriptionfor military purposes. Is there any reason why we should not haveconscription for civil purposes? Why should not every young man inIreland give up two years of his life in a comradeship of labor withother young men, and be employed under skilled direction in great worksof public utility, in the erection of public buildings, the beautifyingof our cities, reclamation of waste lands, afforestation, and otherdesirable objects? The principle of service for the State formilitary purposes is admitted in every country, even at last by theEnglish-speaking peoples. It is easy to be seen how this principle ofconscription could be applied to infinitely nobler ends--to the buildingup of a beautiful civilization--and might make the country adopting itin less than half a century as beautiful as ancient Attica or majesticas ancient Egypt. While other nations take part of the life of young menfor instruction in war, why should not the State in Ireland, more noblyinspired, ask of its young men that they should give equally of theirlives to the State, not for the destruction of life, but for theconservation of life? This service might be asked from all--high andlow, well and humbly born--except from those who can plead the reasonswhich exempt people abroad from military service. As things stand today, if the State undertakes any public work, it does it more expensively byfar than it would be if undertaken by private enterprise. Every personputs up prices for the State or for municipalities. Labor, land, andmaterials are all charged at the highest possible rates, whereas ifthere was any really high conception of citizenship and of the functionsof the State, the citizens would agree so that works of public utility, or those which conspired to add to national dignity, should be done atleast cost to the community. Where there is no national sacrifice thereis no national pride. Because there is no national pride our moderncivilizations show meanly compared with the titanic architecture of thecities and majestic civilizations of the past. We know from the ruins ofthese proud cities that he who walked into ancient Rome, Athens, Thebes, Memphis and Babylon, walked amid grandeurs which must have exalted thespirit. To walk into Manchester, Sheffield, or Liverpool is to feel aweight upon the soul. There is no national feeling for beauty in ourindustrial civilizations. 

Let us suppose Ireland had through industrial conscription about fiftythousand young men every year at its disposal under a national worksdepartment. What could be done? First of all it would mean that everyyoung man in the country would have received an industrial training ofsome kind. The work of technical instruction could be largely carried onin connection with this industrial army. People talk of the benefit ofdiscipline and obedience secured by military service. This and much morecould be secured by a labor conscription. Every man in the island wouldhave got into the habit of work at a period of life when it is mostnecessary, and when too many young men have no serious occupation. Parents should welcome the training and discipline for their children, and certificates of character and intelligence given by the departmentof national works should open up prospects of rapid employment inthe ordinary industrial life of the country when the period of publicservice was closed. For those engaged there would be a true comradeshipin labor, and the phrase, "the dignity of labor, " about which so muchcant has been written, would have a real significance where young menwere working together for the public benefit with the knowledge that anycompleted work would add to the health, beauty, dignity, and prosperityof the State. In return for this labor the State should feed and clotheits industrial army, educate them, and familiarize them with some branchof employment, and make them more competent after this period of servicewas over to engage in private enterprise. Two years of such trainingwould dissipate all the slackness, lack of precision, and lazinesswhich are so often apparent in young men who have never had any strictdiscipline in their homes, and whom parental weakness has rendered unfitfor the hard business of life. 

The benefit to those undergoing such a training would of itself justifycivil conscription; but when we come to think of the nation--what mightnot be done by a State with a national labor army under its control?Public works might be undertaken at a cost greatly below that whichwould otherwise be incurred, and the estimates which now paralyze theState, when it considers this really needed service or that, wouldassume a different appearance, as it would be embracing in oneenterprise technical education and the accomplishment of beneficialworks. With such an army under skilled control the big cities couldhave playgrounds for the children of the cities; public gardens, baths, gymnasiums, recreation rooms, hospitals, and sanatoriums might be built;waste land reclaimed and afforested, and the roadsides might be plantedwith fruit trees. National schools, picture-galleries, public halls, libraries, and a thousand enterprises which now hang fire because atpresent labor for public service is the most expensive labor, all couldbe undertaken. If the State becomes very poor, as indeed it is certainto be, it may be forced into some such method of fulfilling itsfunctions. Are we, with enormous burdens of debt, to hang up everyuseful public work because of the expense, and spend our lives in payingState debts while the body for whom we work is unable, on account of theexpense, to do anything for us in return? If the State is to continueits functions we shall have to commandeer people for its service intimes of peace as is done in times of war. There is hardly an argumentwhich could be used to defend military conscription which could not beequaled with as powerful an argument for civil conscription. I am notat all sure that if the State in Ireland decided to utilize two years ofevery young man's life for State purposes that we could not disbandmost of our expensive constabulary and make certain squads of our civilrecruits responsible for the keeping of public law and order, leavingonly the officers as permanent professionals, for of course there mustbe expert control of the conscripts. The postal service might also becarried on largely by conscripted civilians. 

This may appear a fantastic programme, but I would like to see itargued out. It would create a real brotherhood in work, just as the armycreates in its own way a brotherhood between men in the same regiments. The nation adopting civil conscription could clean itself up in acouple of generations, so that in respect of public services it would beincomparable. The alternative to this is to starve all public services, to make the State simply the tax-collector, to pay the interest on ahuge debt, and so get it hated because it can do nothing except collectmoney to pay the interest on a colossal national debt. Obviously theState as an agency to bring about civilization cannot perform bothservices--pay interest on huge public loans, and continue an expensiveservice. It must find out some way in which public services can becontinued, and if possible improved, and the open way to that is civilconscription and the assertion of a claim to two or three years of thework of every citizen for civil purposes, just as it now asserts a claimon the services of citizens for the defense of the State. As nationaldebts are more and more piled up, it has seemed to many that here mustbe an end to what was called social reform, that we were entering on ablack era, and no dawn would show over Europe for another century. Thereis always a way out of troubles if people are imaginative enough andbrotherly enough to conceive of it and bold enough to take action whenthey have found the way. The real danger for society is that it maybecome spiritless and hidebound and tamed, and have none of those highqualities necessary in face of peril, and the more people get accustomedto thinking of bold schemes the better. They will get over the firstshock, and may be ready when the time comes to put them into action. When a country is poor like Ireland and yet is ambitious of greatness;when the aspect of its civilization is mean and when it yet aspires tobeauty; when its people are living under unsanitary conditions and yetthe longing is there to give health to all; when Ireland is like this, its public men and its citizens might do much worse than brood over thepossibilities of industrial conscription, and of revising the characterof the purposes for which nations have hitherto claimed service fromtheir young citizens on behalf of the State. Debarred by a fate notaltogether unkind from training every citizen in the arts of war Irelandmight--if the love of country and the desire for service are really sostrong as we are told--suddenly become eminent among the nations of theworld by adopting a policy which in half a century would make our meancities and our backward countryside the most beautiful in the modernworld. 

XVIII. 

I have not in all this written anything about the relations of Irelandwith other countries, or even with our neighbors, in whose politicalhousehold we have lived for so many centuries in intimate hostility. I have considered this indeed, but did not wish, nor do I now wish, in anything I may write, to say one word which would add to that oldhostility. Race hatred is the cheapest and basest of all nationalpassions, and it is the nature of hatred, as it is the nature of love, to change us into the likeness of that which we contemplate. We grownobly like what we adore, and ignobly like what we hate; and no peoplein Ireland became so anglicized in intellect and temperament, and evenin the manner of expression, as those who hated our neighbors most. Allhatreds long persisted in bring us to every baseness for which we hatedothers. The only laws which we cannot break with impunity are divinelaws, and no law is more eternally sure in its workings than that whichcondemns us to be even as that we condemned. Hate is the high commanderof so many armies that an inquiry into the origin of this passion isat least as needful as histories of other contemporary notorieties. Notemperors or parliaments alone raise armies, but this passion also. Itwill sustain nations in defeat. When everything seems lost this wildcaptain will appear and the scattered forces are reunited. They will beas oblivious of danger as if they were divinely inspired, but if theywin their battle it is to become like the conquered foe. All greatwars in history, all conquests, all national antagonisms, result in anexchange of characteristics. It is because I wish Ireland to be itself, to act from its own will and its own centre, that I deprecate hatred asa force in national life. It is always possible to win a cause withoutthe aid of this base helper, who betrays us ever in the hour of victory. 

When a man finds the feeling of hate for another rising vehemently inhimself, he should take it as a warning that conscience is battlingin his own being with that very thing he loathes. Nations hate othernations for the evil which is in themselves; but they are as littlegiven to self-analysis as individuals, and while they are right toovercome evil, they should first try to understand the genesis of thepassion in their own nature. If we understand this, many of the ironiesof history will be intelligible. We will understand why it was that ourcountrymen in Ulster and our countrymen in the rest of Ireland, whohave denounced each other so vehemently, should at last appear tohave exchanged characteristics: why in the North, having passionatelyprotested against physical force movements, no-rent manifestos, andcontempt for Imperial Parliament, they should have come themselves atlast to organize a physical force movement, should threaten to pay notaxes, and should refuse obedience to an Act of Parliament. We willunderstand also why it was their opponents came themselves to address toUlster all the arguments and denunciations Ulster had addressed to them. I do not point this out with intent to annoy, but to illustrate by latehistory a law in national as well as human psychology. If this unpopularpsychology I have explained was adopted everywhere as true, we wouldnever hear expressions of hate. People would realize they were firstrevealing and then stabbing their own characters before the world. 

Nations act towards other nations as their own citizens act towards eachother. When slavery existed in a State, if that nation attackedanother it was with intent to enslave. Where there is a fierce economiccompetition between citizen and citizen then in war with another nation, the object of the war is to destroy the trade of the enemy. If thecitizens in any country could develop harmonious life among themselvesthey would manifest the friendliest feelings towards the people of othercountries. We find that it is just among groups of people who aimat harmonious life, co-operators and socialists, that the strongestnational impulses to international brotherhood arise; and wars ofdomination are brought about by the will of those who within a State aredominant over the fortunes of the rest. Ireland, a small country, can only maintain its national identity by moral and economic forces. Physically it must be overmastered by most other European nations. Moralforces are really more powerful than physical forces. One Christ changedthe spiritual life of Europe; one Buddha affected more myriads in Asia. 

The co-operative ideal of brotherhood in industry has helped to makestronger the ideal of the brotherhood of humanity, and no body of men inany of the countries in the great War of our time regarded it with moregenuine sorrow than those who were already beginning to promote schemesfor international co-operation. It must be mainly in movements inspiredwith the ideal of the brotherhood of man, that the spirit will begenerated which, in the future, shall make the idea of war so detestablethat statesmen will find it is impossible to think of that solutionof their disputes as they would think now of resorting to privateassassination of political opponents. The great tragedy of Europe wasbrought about, not by the German Emperor, nor by Sir Edward Grey, nor bythe Czar, nor by any of the other chiefs ostensibly controlling foreignpolicy, but by the nations themselves. These men may have been agents, but their action would have been impossible if they did not realize thatthere was a vast body of national feeling behind them not opposed towar. Their citizens were in conflict with each other already, generatingthe moods which lead on to war. Emperors, foreign secretaries, ambassadors, cabinet ministers are not really powerful to move nationsagainst their will. On the whole, they act with the will of the nations, which they understand. Let any one ruler try, for example, to change byedict the religion of his subjects, and a week would see him bereft ofplace and power. They could not do this, because the will of the nationwould be against it. They resort to war and prepare for it because thewill of the nation is with them, and this throws us back on the privatecitizens, who finally are individually and collectively responsible forthe actions of the State. In the everlasting battle between good andevil, private soldiers are called upon to fight as well as the captains, and it is only through the intensive cultivation by individuals andraces of the higher moral and intellectual qualities, until in intensitythey outweigh the mood and passion of the rest, that war will finallybecome obsolete as the court of appeal. When there is a panic of firein a crowded building men are suddenly tested as to character. Some willbecome frenzied madmen, fighting and trampling their way out. Otherswill act nobly, forgetting themselves. They have no time to think. Whatthey are in their total make up as human beings, overbalanced either forgood or evil, appears in an instant. Even so, some time in the heroicfuture, some nation in a crisis will be weighed and will act noblyrather than passionately, and will be prepared to risk nationalextinction rather than continue existence at the price of killingmyriads of other human beings, and it will oppose moral and spiritualforces to material forces, and it will overcome the world by makinggentleness its might, as all great spiritual teachers have done. Itcomes to this, we cannot overcome hatred by hatred or war by war, butby the opposites of these. Evil is not overcome by evil but by good; andany race like the Irish, eager for national life, ought to learn thistruth--that humanity will act towards their race as their race actstowards humanity. The noble and the base alike beget their kin. Empires, ere they disappear, see their own mirrored majesty arise in thelooking-glass of time. Opposed to the pride and pomp of Egypt were thepride and pomp of Chaldaea. Echoing the beauty of the Greek city statewere many lovely cities made in their image. Carthage evoked Rome. TheBritish Empire, by the natural balance and opposition of things, calledinto being another empire with a civilization of coal and steel, andwith ambitions for colonies and for naval power, and with that imageof itself it must wrestle for empire. The great armadas that throng theseas, the armed millions upon the earth betray the fear in the minds ofraces, nay, the inner spiritual certitude the soul has, that pride andlust of power must yet be humbled by their kind. They must at last meettheir equals face to face, called to them as steel to magnet by someinner affinity. This is a law of life both for individuals and races, and, when this is realized, we know nothing will put an end to raceconflicts except the equally determined and heroic development of thespiritual, moral, and intellectual forces which disdain to use the forceand fury of material powers. 

We may be assured that the divine law is not mocked, and it cannot bedeceived. As men sow so do they reap. The anger we create will rend us;the love we give will return to us. Biologically, everything breeds trueto its type: moods and thoughts just as much as birds and beasts andfishes. When I hear people raging against England or Germany or Russia Iknow that rage will beget rage, and go on begetting it, and so the wholedevilish generation of passions will be continued. There are no nationsto whom the entire and loyal allegiance of man's spirit could be given. It can only go out to the ideal empires and nationalities in the wombof time, for whose coming we pray. Those countries of the future we mustcarve out of the humanity of today, and we can begin building them upwithin our present empires and nationalities just as we are buildingup the co-operative movement in a social order antagonistic to it. The people who are trying to create these new ideals in the world areoutposts, sentinels, and frontiersmen thrown out before the armies ofthe intellectual and spiritual races yet to come into being. We can allenlist in these armies and be comrades to the pioneers. I hope manywill enlist in Ireland. I would cry to our idealists to come out of thispresent-day Irish Babylon, so filled with sectarian, political, and racehatreds, and to work for the future. I believe profoundly, with the mostextreme of Nationalists, in the future of Ireland, and in the visionof light seen by Bridget which she saw and confessed between hopes andtears to Patrick, and that this is the Isle of Destiny and the destinywill be glorious and not ignoble, and when our hour is come we will havesomething to give to the world, and we will be proud to give rather thanto grasp. Throughout their history Irishmen have always wrought betterfor others than for themselves, and when they unite in Ireland towork for each other, they will direct into the right channel all thatnational capacity for devotion to causes for which they are famed. Weought not only to desire to be at peace with each other, but withthe whole world, and this can only be brought about by the individualcitizen at all times protesting against sectarian and national passions, and taking no part in them, coming out of such angry parties altogether, as the people of the Lord were called by the divine voice to come out ofBabylon. It may seem a long way to set things right, but it is the swiftway and the royal road, and there is no other; and nobody, no prophetcrying before his time, will be listened to until the people are readyfor him. The congregation must gather before the preacher can deliverwhat is in him to say. The economic brotherhood which I have put forwardas an Irish ideal would, in its realization, make us at peace withourselves, and if we are at peace with ourselves we will be at peacewith our neighbors and all other nations, and will wish them thegoodwill we have among ourselves, and will receive from them the samegoodwill. I do not believe in legal and formal solutions of nationalantagonisms. While we generate animosities among ourselves we willalways display them to other nations, and I prefer to search out how itis national hatreds are begotten, and to show how that cancer can be cutout of the body politic. 

XIX. 

It seems inevitable that the domination of the individual by theState must become ever greater. It is in the evolutionary process. Theamalgamation of individuals into nationalities and empires is as muchin the cosmic plan as the development of highly organized beings outof unicellular organisms. I believe this process will continue untilhumanity itself is so psychically knit together that, as a being, itwill manifest some form of cosmic consciousness in which the individualwill share. Our spiritual intuitions and the great religions of theworld alike indicate some such goal as that to which this turbulentcavalcade of humanity is wending. A knowledge of this must be in oursubconscious being, or we would find the sacrifices men make for theState otherwise inexplicable. The State, though now ostensibly secular, makes more imperious claims on man than the ancient gods did. It layshold of life. It asserts its right to take father, brother, and son, andto send them to meet death in its own defense. It denies them a choiceor judgment as to whether its action is right or wrong. Right or wrong, the individual must be prepared to give his body for the commonwealth, and when one gives the body unresistingly, one gives the soul also. The marvelous thing about the authority of the State is that it isrecognized by the vast majority of citizens. During eras of peace thecitizen may be always in conflict with the policy of the State. He maycall it a tyranny, but yet when it is in peril he will die to preservefor it an immortal life. The hold the State establishes over the spiritof man is the more wonderful when we look rearward on history, and seewith what labor and sacrifice the State was established. But we seealso how readily, once the union has been brought about, men will dieto preserve it, even although it is a tyranny, a bad State. For whatdo they die unless the spirit in man has some inner certitude that thedivine event to which humanity tends is a unity of its multitudinouslife, and that a State--even a bad State--must be preserved by itscitizens, because it is at least an attempt at organic unity? It is asimulacrum of the ideal; it contains the germ or possibility of that towhich the spirit of man is traveling. It disciplines the individual inservice to that greater being in which it will find its fulfillment, anda bad State is better than no State at all. To be without a State is toprowl backwards from the divinity before us to the beast behind us. 

The power the State exerts is a spiritual power, acting on or throughthe will of man. The volunteer armies do not really march to die withmore readiness than the conscript armies. The sacrifice is not readilyexplicable by material causes. There is no material reason why theproletarian--who has no property to defend, who is more or less sureas a skilled craftsman of employment under any ruler--should concernhimself whether his ruler be King, Kaiser, or President. But not one ina hundred proletarians really thinks like that. It is not the hopeof personal profit works upon men to risk life. Let some exploiter ofindustry desire to employ a thousand men at dangerous work, with therisks of death or disablement equal to those of war; let it be knownthat one in six will be killed and another be disabled, and what sumwill purchase the service of workers? They will risk life for the State, though given a bare subsistence or a pay which they would describe asinhuman if offered by one of the autocrats of industry. Men working forthe State will make the most extraordinary sacrifices; but they standstubbornly and sullenly as disturbers and blockers of all industry whichis run for private profit. Is it not clear of the two policies for theState to adopt, to promote personal interests among its citizens or tounite men for the general good, that the first path is full of danger tothe State, while through the other men will march cheerfully, though itbe to death, in defense of the State. Something, a real life above theindividual, acts through the national being, and would almost suggestto us that Heaven cannot fully manifest its will to humanity through theindividual, but must utter itself through multitudes. There must be anorchestration of humanity ere it can echo divine melodies. In real truthwe are all seeking in the majesties we create for union with a greaterMajesty. 

I wrote in an earlier page that the ancient conception of Nature asa manifestation of spirit was incarnating anew in the minds of modernthinkers; that Nature was no longer conceived of as material or staticin condition, but as force and continual motion; that they were tryingto identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces ofNature manifest with more power in society. The real nature of theseenergies manifesting in humanity I do not know, but they have beenhinted at in the Scriptures, the oracles of the Oversoul, which speak ofthe whole creation laboring upwards and the entry of humanity into theDivine Mind, and of the re-introcession of That Itself with all Itsmyriad unity into Deity, so that God might be all in all. I believeprofoundly that men do not hold the ideas of liberty or solidarity, which have moved them so powerfully, merely as phantasies which arepleasant to the soul or make ease for the body; but because, whetherthey struggle passionately for liberty or to achieve a solidarity, inworking for these two ideals, which seem in conflict, they are divinelysupported, in unison with the divine nature, and energies as real asthose the scientist studies--as electricity, as magnetism, heat orlight--do descend into the soul and reinforce it with elemental energy. We are here for the purposes of soul, and there can be no purpose inindividualizing the soul if essential freedom is denied to it and thereis only a destiny. Wherever essential freedom, the right of the spiritto choose its own heroes and its own ideals, is denied, nations risein rebellion. But the spirit in man is wrought in a likeness to Deity, which is that harmony and unity of Being which upholds the universe;and by the very nature of the spirit, while it asserts its freedom, its impulses lead it to a harmony with all life, to a solidarity orbrotherhood with it. 

All these ideals of freedom, of brotherhood, of power, of justice, ofbeauty, which have been at one time or another the fundamental idea incivilizations, are heaven-born, and descended from the divine world, incarnating first in the highest minds in each race, perceived by themand transmitted to their fellow-citizens; and it is the emergence ormanifestation of one or other of these ideals in a group which is thebeginning of a nation; and the more strongly the ideal is held the morepowerful becomes the national being, because the synchronous vibrationof many minds in harmony brings about almost unconsciously a psychicunity, a coalescing of the subconscious being of many. It is that innerunity which constitutes the national being. 

The idea of the national being emerged at no recognizable point inour history in Ireland. It is older than any name we know. It is notearth-born, but the synthesis of many heroic and beautiful moments, andthese, it must be remembered, are divine in their origin. Every heroicdeed is an act of the spirit, and every perception of beauty is visionwith the divine eye, and not with the mortal sense. The spirit wassubtly intermingled with the shining of old romance, and it is no merephantasy which shows Ireland at its dawn in a misty light thronged withdivine figures, and beneath and nearer to us demi-gods and heroesfading into recognizable men. The bards took cognizance only of themost notable personalities who preceded them, and of these only the actswhich had a symbolic or spiritual significance; and these grew thricerefined as generations of poets in enraptured musings along by themountains or in the woods brooded upon their heritage of story, until, as it passed from age to age, the accumulated beauty grew greater thanthe beauty of the hour. The dream began to enter into the children ofour race, and turn their thoughts from earth to that world in which ithad its inception. 

It was a common belief among the ancient peoples that each had anational genius or deity who presided over them, in whose all-embracingmind they were contained, and who was the shepherd of their destinies. We can conceive of the national spirit in Ireland as first manifestingitself through individual heroes or kings, and as the history of famouswarriors laid hold of the people, extending its influence until itcreated therein the germs of a kindred nature. 

An aristocracy of lordly and chivalrous heroes is bound in time tocreate a great democracy by the reflection of their character in themass, and the idea of the divine right of kings is succeeded by the ideaof the divine right of the people. If this sequence cannot be tracedin any one respect with historical regularity, it is because of thecomplexity of national life, its varied needs, the vicissitudes ofhistory, and its infinite changes of sentiment. But the threads are alltaken up in the end; and ideals which were forgotten and absent from thevoices of men will be found, when recurred to, to have grown to a rarerand more spiritual beauty in their quiet abode in the heart. The seedswhich were sown at the beginning of a race bear their flowers and fruitstowards its close, and already antique names begin to stir us again withtheir power, and the antique ideals to reincarnate in us and renew theirdominion over us. 

They may not be recognized at first as a re-emergence of ancient moods. The democratic economics of the ancient clans have vanished almost outof memory, but the mood in which they were established reappears inthose who would create a communal or co-operative life in the nationinto which those ancient clans long since have melted. The instinct inthe clans to waive aside the weak and to seek for an aristocratic andpowerful character in their leaders reappears in the rising generation, who turn from the utterer of platitudes to men of real intellect andstrong will. The object of democratic organization is to bring out thearistocratic character in leadership, the vivid original personalitieswho act and think from their own will and their own centres, who bringdown fire from the heaven of their spirits and quicken and vivify themass, and make democracies also to be great and fearless and free. Anation is dead where men acknowledge only conventions. We must find outtruth for ourselves, becoming first initiates and finally masters in theguild of life. The intellect of Ireland is in chains where it ought tobe free, and we have individualism in our economics which ought tobe co-ordinated and sternly disciplined out of the iniquity of freeprofiteering. To quicken the intellect and imagination of Ireland, to co-ordinate our economic life for the general good, should be theobjects of national policy, and will subserve the evolutionary purpose. The free imagination and the aspiring mind alone climb into the higherspheres and deflect for us the ethereal currents. It is the multitudeof aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them ofservice to other nations, and it is by the character of the socialorder and the quality of brotherhood in it our civilization will endure. Without love we are nothing. 

XX. 

I beseech audience from the churches for these thoughts on our Irishpolity, and would recall to them their early history, how when thefiery spirit of their Lord first manifested on earth, life, near to It, reflected It as in a glowing glass, and impulses of true living arose. Material possessions were held in common. There was no fierce talk ofThine and Mine. His ancient law counseled poverty to the spirit, lestthe gates of Paradise should grow narrow before it like the eye of aneedle. I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is dueto the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life. What profoundspiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men tobattle with each other for the means of existence? I know well that nopolitical mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only, will ofthemselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and bringit under the dominion of the spirit. For that, a far higher quality ofthought and action than is here indicated is necessary. The economistcan provide the daily bread, but that bread of the coming day whichChrist wished his followers to aspire to must come otherwise. Thatshould be the labor of the poets, artists, musicians, and of the heroicand aristocratic characters who provide by their life an image towhich life can be modeled. Therefore I beseech audience not only of thechurches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for theiraid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the idealswhich can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create forus images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, andto prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being. I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must belaid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sanga solitary song; to the writers who had turned from contemplatingthe great to the portrayal of the little in human nature. I know howdifficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to askartists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create. Butwe can ask all men--artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists--to becitizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception ofthe State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of theState will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective beingwhich must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as atyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majesticalthe spirit of man if we imagine rightly. All greatness is broughtabout by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literaturecertainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majestyonly arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mightyconductor; and as a people we shall never manifest the highest qualitiesin literature or life until we are under the dominion of one, at least, of the great fundamental ideas which have been the inspiration of races. Our feebleness arises from our economic individualism. We continuallyneutralize each other's efforts. Yet there is no less power in humanitytoday than there ever was. We see now clearly what untamed elementalfires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world. There was afeeling in society that, just as the earth itself had settled down tobe a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient ferocities ofearthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and rended seafrom sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies we surmisedin the cave-dweller or the hunters of mastodon, mammoth, and cave-tiger. But it was all a dream--a dream, we suspect, about the earth as wellas about humanity. While we indulged in these pleasing speculations onsociety, the scientists of our generation were placing beyond questionor argument the doctrine of the indestructibility of energy and matterand we may be sure that while there is immortal life there must beimmortal energies as its companions through time, and they will never beless powerful than they are today or were in the morning of the world. There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten brotherhood ofelemental powers; and, while we cannot hope that by the wastage of timethese powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an understanding ofthem we may get mastery over them. The wild elephant of the woods, witha greater strength than man's, has yet been trained to be his servant, and that arcane power we call electricity, which, if it shoots out ofits channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our servant. So we mayhope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity itself, which breakout in wars and Armageddons, will come under control. We should not hopethat man will ever be a less powerful being. To hope that would be towish for his degradation. We should wish him to become ever moreand more powerful by understanding himself, and by the unity ofthe spiritual faculties and the elemental energies in him into oneharmonious whole. At present he is feeble because he is, to use thescriptural illustration, a house divided against itself. 

Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflictwith each other. Get the two mightiest bulls in a herd, put themopposing each other in a narrow passage, and they, being of equalstrength, will reduce each other to feebleness. Neither will makeheadway. Let them unite together in their charge, and what will opposethem? Men at conflict in their own hearts, opposing each other in theworld, reduce themselves and each other to wretchedness. The race whichcould eliminate the factors which promote internal conflict in societyand could organize human energies in harmony, would be powerful beyondour wildest dreams. Every now and then in world-history we come acrossinstances of what organized humanity could accomplish. There arefragments of an architecture so majestic that they awe us as the highrocks of nature do, and they seem almost like portions of nature itself, and truly they are so, being portions of nature remade by man, who isalso a nature energy of divine origin. Europe by its conflicts todayis reducing itself to barbarism and powerlessness, and these conflictsarose out of the internal conflicts in society, for individuals andnations act outside themselves as they act inside themselves. Theproblem for Europe is to create a harmonious life, and it is the problemfor us in Ireland, and we will have to work this out for ourselves. Thecreation of a harmonious life among a people must come from within. Itcan never come by the imposition of an external law imposed by anotherpeople: Never did master and slave work in true unison, no matter howbenevolent the master or how yielding the slave, for there is in everyman, no matter what his condition, a spark of divine life, and itwill always be ready to stir him out of subjection, as the fires ofearthquake lie below the cultivated plain. Man is a creature who hasfree will, and it is by self-devised and self-checked efforts he willattain his full human stature. So the problem of creating an organiclife in Ireland, a harmony of our people, a union of their efforts forthe common good and for the manifestation of whatever beauty, majesty, and spirituality is in us, must be one we ourselves must solve forourselves. 

To be indifferent to the possibilities of human life, to ignore theproblem, is to turn our back on heaven, which fashioned the spirit ofman in its image. If the spirit of man has likeness to Deity, it meansthat if it manifests itself fully in the world, the world too becomesa shadowy likeness of the heavens, and our civilizations will make aharmony with the diviner spheres. We give still a service of lip beliefto the Scriptures, yet active faith we have not. But they are true, yesterday, today, and for ever; and we have still the root of the matterin us, for when any one utters out of profound conviction his faith, there are always multitudes ready to respond. What really prevents anorganic unity in Ireland is the economic individualism of our lives. Thescience of economics deals with the efforts of men to mine out of naturethe food, minerals, and materials necessary to preserve life. There isnothing more certain than that where men work alone or only with theaid of their families they are little higher than the animals. When theytend to unite civilization begins. Then arise the towers, the temples, the cities, the achievements of the architect and engineer. The earth istapped of its arcane energies, the very air yields to us its mysteriouspowers. We control the etheric waves and send the message of our deedsacross the ocean. Yet in the midst of these vast external manifestationsof power, multitudes of men and women live in squalor, isolated in theirlabors, living in the slums of cities; and this, if we examine it, comesabout because the organization of human energies into a harmonious unityis not complete. There is really no lack of food, clothing, buildingmaterial, land. Nature has provided bountifully for more myriads than weare likely to see peopling the earth. But people compete with each otherand undersell each other, and those who labor are mulcted of theirdue, and instead of turning to the earth--the inexhaustible mother--andworking unitedly for the common weal, they continue that fiercecompetition and stultify each other's efforts and reduce each other towretchedness. Humanity is a house divided against itself. Those who feelthis to be true must gather round any movement which gives a hope forthe future, which indicates a policy by which the organic unity ofsociety in Ireland might be attained, and our people work harmoniouslyto make beauty and health prevail in our civilization. What eachgives up to society in the making of a civilization he gets back athousandfold. Now, the co-operative movement alone of all movements inIreland has aspired to make an economic solidarity in Ireland. Whateverthe aims of other movements may be--and many of them have high idealsand are necessary for the spiritual and intellectual development of ourpeople--there is none of them which has for aim the unity of economiclife. They all leave untouched this problem--how are we to organizesociety so that people will not be in conflict with each other, will notnullify each other's efforts, but all will conspire together forunity, so that none shall be forgotten or oppressed or left out of ourbrotherhood? The policy I put forward is incomplete and imperfect, andit must necessarily be so, being mainly the work of one mind, and tocomplete it and perfect it there must be many minds and many workersfired by the ideal. But I have indicated in some completeness how therural population could be co-operatively organized, federated together, and how the urban population could be organized and brought into aharmony of economic purpose with the folk of the country. Within thelimits of object these suggestions amount to a policy for the nation. 

If the tragic condition of the world leaves us unstirred, if we drawno lessons from it, if there is no fiery stirring of will in Ireland tomake it a better place to live in, then indeed we may lose hope for ourcountry. Let us remember the most scornful condemnation in Scripture wasnot given to the evil but to the indifferent: "Because thou art neitherhot nor cold I will spew thee out of my mouth. " Let us not be theLaodiceans of Europe, listless and indifferent to human needs, swallowing our whisky and our porter, stupefying our souls, while ourpoor are sweated; letting the children of our cities die with morecarelessness about life than the people of any other European country, with sectarian organization's crawling in secrecy like poisonousserpents through the undergrowth of swamps and forests. The co-operativemovement is at least open and ideal in its aims and objects. It isnational and not sectional. It seeks the triumph of no section but theunity of our people, where unity alone is possible. Our intransigentsand extremists of all parties are not hurt or wounded by their adhesionto the co-operative ideal. We may make up our minds that the stubbornIrish temperament will never be overcome, but it may be won, and themovement which invites all parties and creeds into its ranks and givesthem the largest opportunities of working together and understandingeach other, gives also the largest hope of the gradual melting of oldbitterness into a common tolerance where what is best essentially wins;for all true triumphs are triumphs not of force, but the conquest by asuperior beauty of what is less beautiful. We should aim at a societywhere people will be at harmony in their economic life, will readilylisten to different opinions from their own, will not turn sour faceson those who do not think as they do, but will, by reason and sympathy, comprehend each other and come at last, through sympathy and affection, to a balancing of their diversities, as in that multitudinous diversity, which is the universe, powers and dominions and elements are balanced, and are guided harmoniously by the Shepherd of the Ages. 

THE END