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+Project Gutenberg's National Being, by (A.E.)George William Russell
+#2 in our series by (A.E.)George William Russell
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+Title: National Being
+       Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity
+
+Author: (A.E.)George William Russell
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8104]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 15, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NATIONAL BEING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jake Jaqua
+
+
+
+
+THE NATIONAL BEING Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity--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 economic
+tree.  I do not know if you expected a hybrid.  This essay may not be
+economics in your sense of the word.  It certainly is not poetry in my
+sense.  The Marriage of Heaven and Earth was foretold by the ancient
+prophets.  I have seen no signs of that union taking place, but I have
+been led to speculate how they might be brought within hailing distance
+of each other.  In my philosophy of life, we are all responsible for the
+results of our actions and their effects on others.  This book is a
+consequence of your grafting operation, and so I dedicate it to you.--
+A.E.
+
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+
+In the year nineteen hundred and fourteen Anno Domini, amid a world
+conflict, the birth of the infant State of Ireland was announced. Almost
+unnoticed this birth, which in other times had been cried over the earth
+with rejoicings or anger.  Mars, the red planet of war, was in the
+ascendant when it was born.  Like other births famous in history, the
+child had to be hidden away for a time, and could not with pride be
+shown to the people as royal children were wont to be shown.  Its
+enemies were unforgiving, and its friends were distracted with mighty
+happenings in the world.  Hardly did they know whether it would not be
+deformed if it survived:  whether this was the Promised, or another
+child yet to be conceived in the womb of the Mother of Parliaments.
+Battles were threatened between two hosts, secular champions of two
+spiritual traditions, to decide its fate.  That such a conflict
+threatened showed indeed that there was something of iron fibre in the
+infant, without which in their make-up individuals or nations do nothing
+worthy of remembrance. Hercules wrestled with twin serpents in his
+cradle, and there were twin serpents of sectarianism ready to strangle
+this infant State of ours if its guardians were not watchful, or if the
+infant was not itself strong enough to destroy them.
+
+It is about the State of Ireland, its character and future, I have here
+written some kind of imaginative meditation.  The State is a physical
+body prepared for the incarnation of the soul of a race. The body of the
+national 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, even as
+through heredity the inherited tendencies and passions of the flesh
+affect the indwelling spirit.  Our brooding over the infant State must
+be dual, concerned not only with the body but the soul.  When we essay
+self-government in Ireland our first ideas will, in all probability, be
+borrowed from the Mother of Parliaments, just as children before they
+grow to have a character of their own repeat the sentiments of their
+parents.  After a time, if there is anything in the theory of Irish
+nationality, we will apply original principles as they are from time to
+time discovered to be fundamental in Irish character. A child in the
+same way makes discoveries about itself.  The mood evoked by picture or
+poem reveals a love of beauty;  the harsh treatment of an animal
+provokes an outburst of pity;  some curiosity of nature draws forth the
+spirit of scientific inquiry, and so, as the incidents of life reveal
+the innate affinities of a child to itself, do the adventures of a
+nation gradually reveal to it its own character and the will which is in
+it.
+
+For all our passionate discussions over self-government we have had
+little speculation over our own character or the nature of the
+civilization we wished to create for ourselves.  Nations rarely, if
+ever, start with a complete ideal.  Certainly we have no national
+ideals, no principles of progress peculiar to ourselves in Ireland,
+which are a common possession of our people.  National ideals are the
+possession of a few people only.  Yet we must spread them in wide
+commonalty over Ireland if we are to create a civilization worthy of our
+hopes and our ages of struggle and sacrifice to attain the power to
+build.  We must spread them in wide commonalty because it is certain
+that democracy will prevail in Ireland.  The aristocratic classes with
+traditions of government, the manufacturing classes with economic
+experience, will alike be secondary in Ireland to the small farmers and
+the wage-earners in the towns.  We must rely on the ideas common among
+our people, and on their power to discern among their countrymen the
+aristocracy of character and intellect.
+
+Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of races.
+They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty,
+imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people.  That
+great mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded by
+enemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant in
+Europe simply by militarism.  That military power depended on and was
+fed by a vigorous intellectual life, and the most generally diffused
+education and science existing perhaps in the world.  The national being
+had been enriched by a long succession of mighty thinkers.  A great
+subjective life and centuries of dream preceded a great objective
+manifestation of power and wealth.  The stir in the German Empire which
+has agitated Europe was, at its root, the necessity laid on a powerful
+soul to surround itself with equal external circumstance.  That
+necessity is laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their
+external life correspond in some measure to their internal dream.  A
+lover of beauty will never contentedly live in a house where all things
+are devoid of taste.  An intellectual man will loathe a disordered
+society.
+
+We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people are
+a measure of their inner life.  Our mean and disordered little country
+towns in Ireland, with their drink-shops, their disregard of cleanliness
+or 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 by
+village, the character of a civilization changes as the character of the
+individuals change.  When we begin to build up a lofty world within the
+national soul, soon the country becomes beautiful and worthy of respect
+in its externals.  That building up of the inner world we have
+neglected.  Our excited political controversies, our playing at
+militarism, have tended to bring men's thoughts from central depths to
+surfaces.  Life is drawn to its frontiers away from its spiritual base,
+and behind the surfaces we have little to fall back on.  Few of our
+notorieties could be trusted to think out any economic or social problem
+thoroughly and efficiently.  They have been engaged in passionate
+attempts at the readjustment of the superficies of things.  What we
+require more than men of action at present are scholars, economists,
+scientists, thinkers, educationalists, and litterateurs, who will
+populate the desert depths of national consciousness with real thought
+and turn the void into a fullness.  We have few reserves of intellectual
+life to draw upon when we come to the mighty labor of nation-building.
+It will be indignantly denied, but I think it is true to say that the
+vast majority of people in Ireland do not know the difference between
+good and bad thinking, between the essential depths and the shallows in
+humanity.  How could people, who never read anything but the newspapers,
+have any genuine knowledge of any subject on earth or much imagination
+of anything beautiful in the heavens?
+
+What too many people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feelings. It is
+enough to them to vent like or dislike, inherited prejudices or
+passions, and they think when they have expressed feeling they have
+given utterance to thought.  The nature of our political controversies
+provoked passion, and passion has become dominant in our politics.
+Passion truly is a power in humanity, but it should never enter into
+national policy.  It is a dangerous element in human life, though it is
+an essential part of our strangely compounded nature.  But in national
+life it is the most dangerous of all guides.  There are springs of power
+in ourselves which in passion we draw on and are amazed at their depth
+and 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 creatures
+rise in the scale of being the dominant factor in life changes.  In
+vegetation it may be appetite;  instinct in bird and beast for man a
+life at once passionate and intellectual;  but the greater beings, the
+stars and planets, must wheel in the heavens under the guidance of
+inexorable and inflexible law.  Now the State is higher in the scale of
+being than the individual, and it should be dominated solely by moral
+and intellectual principles.  These are not the outcome of passion or
+prejudice, but of arduous thought.  National ideals must be built up
+with the same conscious deliberation of purpose as the architect of the
+Parthenon conceived its lofty harmony of shining marble lines, or as the
+architect of Rheims Cathedral designed its intricate magnificence and
+mystery.  Nations which form their ideals and marry them in the hurry of
+passion are likely to repent without leisure, and they will not be able
+to divorce those ideals without prolonged domestic squabbles and public
+cleansing of dirty linen.  If we are to build a body for the soul of
+Ireland it ought not to be a matter of reckless estimates or jerry-
+building.  We have been told, during my lifetime at least, not to
+criticize leaders, to trust leaders, and so intellectual discussion
+ceased and the high principles on which national action should be based
+became less and less understood, less and less common possessions.  The
+nation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its laws
+but as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark and
+issuing 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, to
+gratify ignoble desires.  The highest love conspires with the
+imaginative reason to bring about every beautiful circumstance around
+the beloved which will permit of the highest development of its life.
+There is no real love apart from this intellectual brooding.  Men who
+love Ireland ignobly brawl about her in their cups, quarrel about her
+with their neighbor, allow no freedom of thought of her or service of
+her other than their own, take to the cudgel and the rifle, and join
+sectarian orders or lodges to ensure that Ireland will be made in their
+own ignoble image.  Those who love Ireland nobly desire for her the
+highest of human destinies.  They would ransack the ages and accumulate
+wisdom to make 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, by the exercise of the imaginative reason have revealed to
+their countrymen ideals which they recognized were implicit in national
+character.  It is such discoveries we have yet to make about ourselves
+to unite us to fulfill our destiny.  We have to discover what is
+fundamental in Irish character, the affections, leanings, tendencies
+towards one or more of the eternal principles which have governed and
+inspired all great human effort, all great civilizations from the dawn
+of history.  A nation is but a host of men united by some God-begotten
+mood, some hope of liberty or dream of power or beauty or justice or
+brotherhood, and until that master idea is manifested to us there is no
+shining star to guide the ship of our destinies.
+
+Our civilization must depend on the quality of thought engendered in the
+national being.  We have to do for Ireland--though we hope with less
+arrogance--what the long and illustrious line of German thinkers,
+scientists, poets, philosophers, and historians did for Germany, or what
+the poets and artists of Greece did for the Athenians:  and that is, to
+create national ideals, which will dominate the policy of statesmen, the
+actions of citizens, the universities, the social organizations, the
+administration of State departments, and unite in one spirit urban and
+rural life.   Unless this is done Ireland will be like Portugal, or any
+of the corrupt little penny-dreadful nationalities which so continually
+disturb the peace of the world with internal revolutions and external
+brawlings, 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 an
+Irish polity, are not to be taken as an attempt to deal with more than a
+few essentials.  I offer it to my countrymen, to start thought and
+discussion upon the principles which should prevail in an Irish
+civilization.  If to readers in other countries the thought appears
+primitive or elementary, I would like them to remember that we are at
+the beginning of our activity as a nation, and we have yet to settle
+fundamentals.  Races hoary with political wisdom may look with disdain
+on the attempts at political thinking by a new self-governing
+nationality, or the theories of civilization discussed about the cradle
+of an infant State.  To childhood may be forgiven the elemental
+character of its thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not
+persist in developed manhood;  but if youth has never drawn heaven and
+earth together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be
+undistinguished.  This book only begins a meditation in which, I hope,
+nobler imaginations and finer intellects than mine will join hereafter,
+and help to raise the soul 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 most
+practical of all enterprises, in which human faculties are exalted to
+their highest, and beauties and majesties are manifested in multitude as
+they are never by solitary man or by disunited peoples. In the highest
+civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made
+part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being.  He enters
+into it, and it becomes in oversoul to him, and gives to all his works a
+character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his fellow-
+citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labors of others for
+unity and magnificence of effect.  So ancient Egypt, with its temples,
+sphinxes, pyramids, and symbolic decorations, seems to us as if it had
+been created by one grandiose imagination;  for even the lesser
+craftsmen, working on the mummy case for the tomb, had much of the
+mystery and solemnity in their work which is manifest in temple and
+pyramid.  So the city States in ancient Greece in their day were united
+by ideals to a harmony of art and architecture and literature.  Among
+the Athenians at their highest the ideal of the State so wrought upon
+the individual that its service became the overmastering passion of
+life, and in that great oration of Pericles, where he told how the
+Athenian ideal inspired the citizens so that they gave their bodies for
+the commonwealth, it seems to have been conceived of as a kind of
+oversoul, a being made up of immortal deeds and heroic spirits,
+influencing the living, a life within their life, molding their spirits
+to its likeness.  It appears almost as if in some of these ancient
+famous communities the national ideal became a kind of tribal deity,
+that began first with some great hero who died and was immortalized by
+the poets, and whose character, continually glorified by them, grew at
+last so great in song that he could not be regarded as less than a demi-
+god.  We can see in ancient Ireland that Cuchulain, the dark sad man of
+the earlier tales, was rapidly becoming a divinity, a being who summed
+up in himself all that the bards thought noblest in the spirit of their
+race;  and if Ireland had a happier history no doubt one generation of
+bardic chroniclers after another would have molded that half-mythical
+figure into the Irish ideal of all that was chivalrous, tender, heroic,
+and magnanimous, and it would have been a star to youth, and the thought
+of it a staff to the very noblest.  Even as Cuchulain alone at the ford
+held it against a host, so the ideal would have upheld the national soul
+in its darkest hours, and stood in many a lonely place in the heart.
+The national soul in a theocratic State is a god;  in an aristocratic
+age it assumes the character of a hero;  and in a democracy it becomes a
+multitudinous being, definite in character if the democracy is a real
+social organism. But where the democracy is only loosely held together
+by the social order, the national being is vague in character, is a mood
+too feeble to inspire large masses of men to high policies in times of
+peace, and in times of war it communicates frenzy, panic, and delirium.
+
+None of our modern States create in us such an impression of being
+spiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient
+world.  The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that many
+leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them
+as divine incarnations.  It is difficult to know to what to attribute
+this degeneration.  Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame.
+In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great
+kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry
+and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great
+man was like;  and men were influenced by the ideal created, and strove
+to win the praise of the bards and to be recrowned by them a second time
+in great poetry. So we had Cuchulain and Oscar in Ireland;  Hector of
+Troy, Theseus in Greece;  Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all
+bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image.  It is the
+great 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 an
+epic.  It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of a
+genuine lyric.  Whitman, himself the most democratic poet of the modern
+world, felt this deficiency in the literature of the later democracies,
+and lamented the absence of great heroic figures. The poets have dropped
+out of the divine procession, and sing a solitary song.  They inspire
+nobody to be great, and failing any finger-post in literature pointing
+to true greatness our democracies too often take the huckster from his
+stall, the drunkard from his pot, the lawyer from his court, and the
+company promoter from the director's chair, and elect them as
+representative men.  We certainly do this in Ireland.  It is--how many
+hundred years since greatness guided us?  In Ireland our history begins
+with the most ancient of any in a mythical era when earth mingled with
+heaven.  The gods departed, the half-gods also, hero and saint after
+that, and we have dwindled down to a petty peasant nationality, rural
+and urban life alike mean in their externals.  Yet the cavalcade, for
+all its tattered habiliments, has not lost spiritual dignity.  There is
+still some incorruptible spiritual atom in our people.  We are still in
+some relation to the divine order;  and while that uncorrupted spiritual
+atom still remains all things are possible if by some inspiration there
+could be revealed to us a way back or forward to greatness, an Irish
+polity in accord with national character.
+
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+
+In formulating an Irish polity we have to take into account the change
+in world conditions.  A theocratic State we shall have no more.  Every
+nation, and our own along with them, is now made up of varied sects, and
+the practical dominance of one religious idea would let loose
+illimitable passions, the most intense the human spirit can feel.  The
+way out of the theocratic State was by the drawn sword and was lit by
+the martyr's fires.  The way back is unthinkable for all Protestant
+fears or Catholic aspirations. Aristocracies, too, become impossible as
+rulers.  The aristocracy of character and intellect we may hope shall
+finally lead us, but no aristocracy so by birth will renew its authority
+over us.  The character of great historic personages is gradually
+reflected in the mass.  The divine right of kings is followed by the
+idea of the divine right of the people, and democracies finally become
+ungovernable save by themselves.  They have seen and heard too much of
+pride and greatness not to have become, in some measure, proud and
+defiant of all authority except their own.  It may be said the history
+of democracies is not one to fill us with confidence, but the truth is
+the world has yet to see the democratic State, and of the yet untried we
+may think with hope.  Beneath the Athenian and other ancient democratic
+States lay a substratum of humanity in slavery, and the culture, beauty,
+and bravery of these extraordinary peoples were made possible by the
+workers in an underworld who had no part in the bright civic life.
+
+We have no more a real democracy in the world today.  Democracy in
+politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We
+still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as
+theocratic king ruling in the name of a god, or aristocracy ruling by
+military power;  and the forces represented by these twain, superseded
+by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power which
+took their place of pride.  Religion and rank, whether content or not
+with the subsidiary place they now occupy, are most often courtiers of
+Mammon and support him on his throne.  For all the talk about democracy
+our social order is truly little more democratic than Rome was under the
+Caesars, and our new rulers have not, with all their wealth, created a
+beauty which we could imagine after-generations brooding over with
+uplifted heart.
+
+The people in theocratic States like Egypt or Chaldea, ruled in the name
+of gods, saw rising out of the plains in which they lived an
+architecture so mysterious and awe-inspiring that they might well
+believe the master-minds who designed the temples were inspired from the
+Oversoul.  The aristocratic States reflected the love of beauty which is
+associated with aristocracies.  The oligarchies of wealth in our time,
+who have no divine sanction to give dignity to their rule nor traditions
+of lordly life like the aristocracies, have not in our day created
+beauty in the world.  But whatever of worth the ancient systems produced
+was not good enough to make permanent their social order.  Their
+civilizations, like ours, were built on the unstable basis of a vast
+working-class with no real share in the wealth and grandeur it helped to
+create.  The character of his kingdom was revealed in dream to
+Nebuchadnezzar by an image with a golden head and feet of clay, and that
+image might stand as symbol of the empires the world has known.  There
+is in all a vast population living in an underworld of labor whose
+freedom to vote confers on them no real power, and who are most often
+scorned and neglected by those who profit by their labors. Indifference
+turns to fear and hatred if labor organizes and gathers power, or makes
+one motion of its myriad hands towards the sceptre held by the autocrats
+of industry.  When this class is maddened and revolts, civilization
+shakes and totters like cities when the earthquake stirs beneath their
+foundations.  Can we master these arcane human forces?  Can we, by any
+device, draw this submerged humanity into the light and make them real
+partners in the social order, not partners merely in the political life
+of the nation, but, what is of more importance, in its economic life?
+If we build our civilization without integrating labor into its economic
+structure, it will wreck that civilization, and it will do that more
+swiftly today than two thousand years ago, because there is no longer
+the disparity of culture between high and low which existed in past
+centuries.  The son of the artisan, if he cares to read, may become
+almost as fully master of the wisdom of Plato or Aristotle as if he had
+been at a university.  Emerson will speak to him of his divinity;
+Whitman, drunken with the sun, will chant to him of his inheritance of
+the 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 social order, and failing even to serve in the social heaven
+these men will spread revolt and reign in the social hell.  They are
+becoming too many for higher places to be found for them in the national
+economy.  They are increasing to a multitude which must be considered,
+and the framers of a national polity must devise a life for them where
+their new-found dignity of spirit will not be abased.  Men no more will
+be content under rulers of industry they do not elect themselves than
+they were under political rulers claiming their obedience in the name of
+God.  They will not for long labor in industries where they have no
+power to fix the conditions of their employment, as they were not
+content with a political system which allowed them no power to control
+legislation.  Ireland must begin its imaginative reconstruction of a
+civilization by first considering that type which, in the earlier
+civilizations of the world, has been slave, serf, or servile, working
+either on land or at industry, and must construct with reference to it.
+These workers must be the central figures, and how their material,
+intellectual, and spiritual needs 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 the
+folk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal--the linking
+up of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since the
+destruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factor
+in rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other and
+from the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action;  and that
+was so until the movement for the organization of agriculture was
+initiated by Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in that patriotic
+association, the Irish Agricultural Organization Society.  Though its
+actual achievement is great;  though it may be said to be the pivot
+round which Ireland has begun to swing back to its traditional and
+natural communism in work, we still have over the larger part of Ireland
+conditions prevailing which tend to isolate the individual from the
+community.
+
+When we examine rural Ireland, outside this new movement, we find
+everywhere isolated and individualistic agricultural production, served
+with regard to purchase and sale by private traders and dealers, who are
+independent of economic control from the consumers or producers, or the
+State.  The tendency in the modern world to conduct industry in the
+grand manner is not observable here.  The first thing which strikes one
+who travels through rural Ireland is the immense number of little shops.
+They are scattered along the highways and at the crossroads;  and where
+there are a few families together in what is called a village, the
+number of little shops crowded round these consumers is almost
+incredible.  What are all these little shops doing?  They are supplying
+the farmers with domestic requirements:  with tea, sugar, flour, oil,
+implements, vessels, clothing, and generally with drink.  Every one of
+them almost is a little universal provider.  Every one of them has its
+own business organization, its relations with wholesale houses in the
+greater towns.  All of them procure separately from others their bags of
+flour, their barrels of porter, their stocks of tea, sugar, raisins,
+pots, pans, nails, twine, fertilizers, and what not, and all these
+things 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 the
+necessaries of life are brought together.  In the world-wide
+amalgamation of shoe-makers into boot factories, and smithies into
+ironworks, which is going on in Europe and America, these little shops
+have been overlooked.  Nobody has tried to amalgamate them, or to
+economize human effort or cheapen the distribution of the necessaries of
+life.  This work of distribution is carried on by all kinds of little
+traders competing with each other, pulling the devil by the tail;  doing
+the work economically, so far as they themselves are concerned, because
+they must, but doing it expensively for the district because they cannot
+help it. They do not serve Ireland well.  The genius of amalgamation and
+organization cannot afford to pass by these shops, which spring up in
+haphazard fashion, not because the country needs them, but because
+farmers or traders have children to be provided for.  To the ignorant
+this is the easiest form of trade, and so many are started in life in
+one of these little shops after an apprenticeship in another like it.
+These numerous competitors of each other do not keep down prices.  They
+increase them rather by the unavoidable multiplication of expenses;  and
+many of them, taking advantage of the countryman's irregularity of
+income and his need for credit, allow credit to a point where the small
+farmer becomes a tied customer, who cannot pay all he owes, and who
+therefore dares not deal elsewhere.  These agencies for distribution do
+not by their nature enlarge the farmer's economic knowledge.  His vision
+beyond them to their sources of supply is blocked, and in this respect
+he is debarred from any unity with national producers other than his own
+class.
+
+Let us now for a little consider the small farmer around whom have
+gathered these multitudinous little agencies of distribution.  What kind
+of a being is he?  We must deal with averages, and the small farmer is
+the typical Irish countryman.  The average area of an Irish farm is
+twenty-five acres or thereabouts.  There are hundreds of thousands who
+have more or less.  But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer with
+twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a drift
+of sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal:  call him Patrick
+Maloney and accept him as symbol of his class.  We will view him outside
+the operation of the new co-operative policy, trying to obey the command
+to be fruitful and replenish the earth.  He is fruitful enough.  There
+is no race suicide in Ireland.  His agriculture is largely traditional.
+It varied little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and the
+beginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite of a
+huge department of agriculture.  His butter, his eggs, his cattle,
+horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers.  He rarely knows
+where his produce goes to--whether it is devoured in the next county or
+is sent across the Channel.  It might be pitched into the void for all
+he knows about its destiny.  He might be described almost as the
+primitive economic cave-man, the darkness of his cave unillumined by any
+ray of general principles.  As he is obstructed by the traders in a
+general vision of production other than his own, so he is obstructed by
+these dealers in a general vision of the final markets for his produce.
+His reading is limited to the local papers, and these, following the
+example of the modern press, carefully eliminate serious thought as
+likely to deprive them of readers.  But Patrick, for all his economic
+backwardness, has a soul.  The culture of the Gaelic poets and story-
+tellers, while not often actually remembered, still lingers like a
+fragrance about his mind.  He lives and moves and has his being in the
+loveliest nature, the skies over him ever cloudy like an opal;  and the
+mountains flow across his horizon in wave on wave of amethyst and pearl.
+He has the unconscious depth of character of all who live and labor much
+in the open air, in constant fellowship with the great companions--with
+the earth and the sky and the fire in the sky.  We ponder over Patrick,
+his race and his country, brooding whether there is the seed of a
+Pericles in Patrick's loins.  Could we carve an Attica out of Ireland?
+
+Before Patrick can become the father of a Pericles, before Ireland can
+become an Attica, Patrick must be led out of his economic cave: his low
+cunning in barter must be expanded into a knowledge of economic law--his
+fanatical concentration on his family--begotten by the isolation and
+individualism of his life--be sublimed into national affections;  his
+unconscious depths be sounded, his feeling for beauty be awakened by
+contact with some of the great literature of the world.  His mind is
+virgin soil, and we may hope that, like all virgin soil, it will be
+immensely fruitful when it is cultivated. How does the policy of
+co-working make Patrick pass away from his old self?  We can imagine him
+as a member of a committee getting hints of a strange doctrine called
+science from his creamery manager. He hears about bacteria, and these
+dark invisibles replace, as the cause of bad butter-making, the wicked
+fairies of his childhood. Watching this manager of his society he learns
+a new respect for the man of special or expert knowledge.  Discussing
+the business of his association with other members he becomes something
+of a practical economist.  He knows now where his produce goes.  He
+learns that he has to compete with Americans, Europeans, and Colonials--
+indeed with the farmers of the world, hitherto concealed from his view
+by a mountainous mass of middle-men.  He begins to be interested in
+these countries and reads about them.  He becomes a citizen of the
+world.  His horizon is no longer bounded by the wave of blue hills
+beyond his village.  The roar of the planet begins to sound in his ears.
+What is more important is that he is becoming a better citizen of his
+own country.  He meets on his committee his religious and political
+opponents, not now discussing differences out identities of interest.
+He also meets the delegates from other societies in district conferences
+or general congresses, and those who meet thus find their interests are
+common, and a new friendliness springs up between North and South, and
+local co-operation leads on to national co-operation.  The best
+intellects, the best business men in the societies, meet in the big
+centres as directors of federations and wholesales, and they get an all-
+Ireland view of their industry.  They see the parish from the point of
+view of the nation, and this vision does not desert them when they go
+back to the parish.  They realize that their interests are bound up with
+national interests, and they discuss legislation and administration with
+practical knowledge.  Eyes getting keener every year, minds getting more
+instructed, begin to concentrate on Irish public men.  Presently Patrick
+will begin to seek for men of special knowledge and administrative
+ability to manage Irish affairs.  Ireland has hitherto been to Patrick a
+legend, a being mentioned in romantic poetry, a little dark Rose, a
+mystic maiden, a vague but very simple creature of tears and aspirations
+and revolts. He now knows what a multitudinous being a nation is, and in
+contact 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 them
+our typical Irish farmer gets drawn out of his agricultural sleep of the
+ages, developing rapidly as mummy-wheat brought out of the tomb and
+exposed to the eternal forces which stimulate and bring to life.  I have
+taken an individual as a type, and described the original circumstance
+and illustrated the playing of the new forces on his mind.  It is the
+only way we can create a social order which will fit our character as
+the glove fits the hand. Reasoning solely from abstract principles about
+justice, democracy, the rights of man and the like, often leads us into
+futilities, if not into dangerous political experiments.  We have to see
+our typical citizen in clear light, realize his deficiencies, ignorance,
+and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we can
+wisely enlarge his boundaries.  The centre of the citizen is the home.
+His circumference ought to be the nation.  The vast majority of Irish
+citizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital
+relations with their circumference which alone entitle them to the
+privileges of citizenship, and enable them to act with political wisdom.
+An emotional relationship is not enough.  Our poets sang of a united
+Ireland, but the unity they sang of was only a metaphor.  It mainly
+meant separation from another country. In that imaginary unity men were
+really separate from each other. Individualism, fanatically centering
+itself on its family and family interests, interfered on public boards
+to do jobs in the interests of its kith and kin.  The co-operative
+movement connects with living links the home, the centre of Patrick's
+being, to the nation, the circumference of his being.  It connects him
+with the nation through membership of a national movement, not for the
+political purposes which call on him for a vote once every few years,
+but for economic purposes which affect him in the course of his daily
+occupations.  This organization of the most numerous section of the
+Irish democracy into co-operative associations, as it develops and
+embraces the majority, will tend to make the nation one and indivisible
+and conscious of its unity.  The individual, however meagre his natural
+endowment of altruism, will be led to think of his community as himself;
+because his income, his social pleasures even, depend on the success of
+the local and national organizations with which he is connected.  The
+small farmers of former times pursued a petty business of barter and
+haggle, 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 be
+communal and national enterprises.  How much that will mean in a change
+of national character we can hardly realize, we who were born in an
+Ireland where petty individualism was rampant, and where every child had
+it 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 the
+personality.
+
+We may hope and believe that this transformation of the social order
+will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation,
+identifying national with personal interests.  For those who believe
+there is a divine seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they may
+hope will promote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in the
+past, in favorable airs, has made beauty or grandeur or spirituality the
+characteristics of ancient civilizations in Greece, in Egypt, and in
+India.  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 of
+his race also.  We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting
+the rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the
+lofty edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious.
+And in Ireland, for all its melancholy history, we may, knowing that we
+are human, 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 the
+countryman, because our main industry is agriculture.  We have few big
+cities.  Our great cities are almost all outside our own borders.  They
+are across the Atlantic.  The surplus population of the countryside do
+not go to our own towns but emigrate.  The exodus does not enrich
+Limerick or Galway, but New York.  The absorption of life in great
+cities is really the danger which most threatens the modern State with a
+decadence of its humanity.  In the United States, even in Canada, hardly
+has the pioneer made a home in the wilderness when his sons and his
+daughters are allured by the distant gleam of cities beyond the plains.
+In England the countryside has almost ceased to be the mother of men--at
+least a fruitful mother.  We are face to face in Ireland with this
+problem, with no crowded and towering cities to disguise the emptiness
+of the fields.  It is not a problem which lends itself to legislative
+solution.  Whether there be fair rents or no rents at all, the child of
+the peasant, yearning for a fuller life, goes where life is at its
+fullest.  We all desire life, and that we might have it more
+abundantly,--the peasant as much as the mystic thirsting for infinite
+being,--and in rural Ireland the needs of life have been neglected.
+
+The chief problem of Ireland--the problem which every nation in greater
+or 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 the
+land from landlord to cultivator, has advanced us part of the way, but
+the Land Acts offered no complete solution.  We were assured by hot
+enthusiasts of the magic of proprietorship, but Ireland has not tilled a
+single acre more since the Land Acts were passed.  Our rural exodus
+continued without any Moses to lead us to Jerusalems of our own.  At
+every station boys and girls bade farewell to their friends;  and hardly
+had the train steamed out when the natural exultation of adventure made
+the faces of the emigrants glow because the world lay before them, and
+human appetites the country could not satisfy were to be appeased at the
+end of the journey.
+
+How can we make the countryside in Ireland a place which nobody would
+willingly emigrate from?  When we begin to discuss this problem we soon
+make the discovery that neither in the new world nor the old has there
+been much first-class thinking on the life of the countryman.  This will
+be apparent if we compare the quality of thought which has been devoted
+to the problems of the city State, or the constitution of widespread
+dominions, from the days of Solon and Aristotle down to the time of
+Alexander Hamilton, and compare it with the quality of thought which has
+been 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 the
+countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. It
+seems to be so in Canada and the States even, countries which we in
+Europe for long regarded as mainly agricultural.  It seems only
+yesterday to the imagination that they were colonized, and yet we find
+the Minister of Agriculture in Canada announcing a decline in the rural
+population in Eastern Canada.  As children sprung from the loins of
+diseased parents manifest at an early age the same defects in their
+constitution, so Canada and the States, though in their national
+childhood, seem already threatened by the same disease from which
+classic Italy perished, and whose ravages today make Great Britain seem
+to the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit--ruddy
+without, but eaten away within and rotten at the core.  One expects
+disease in old age, but not in youth.  We expect young countries to sow
+their wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle down to
+national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles--the
+result of excessive energy--as we are by symptoms of premature decay.
+No nation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry,
+contented with rural employments, however discontented with other
+things, exists on its soil.  The disease which has attacked our great
+populations here and in America is a discontent with rural life.
+Nothing which has been done hitherto seems able to promote content.  It
+is true, indeed, that science has gone out into the fields, but the
+labors of the chemist, the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer
+are not enough to ensure health.  What is required is the art of the
+political thinker, the imagination which creates a social order and
+adjusts it to human needs.  The physician who understands the general
+laws of human health is of more importance to us here than the
+specialist.  The genius of rural life has not yet appeared. We have no
+fundamental philosophy concerning it, but we have treasures of political
+wisdom dealing with humanity as a social organism in the city States or
+as great nationalities.  It might be worth while inquiring to what
+extent the wisdom of a Solon, an Aristotle, a Rousseau, or an Alexander
+Hamilton might be applied to the problem of the rural community.  After
+all, men are not so completely changed in character by their rural
+environment that their social needs do not, to a large extent, coincide
+with the needs of the townsman.  They cannot be considered as creatures
+of a different species.  Yet statesmen who have devoted so much thought
+to the constitution of empires and the organization of great cities, who
+have studied their psychology, have almost 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 fashion
+out of city States and scattered tribal communities.  The fusion of
+these into larger entities, which could act jointly for offence or
+defense, so much occupied the thoughts of their rulers that everything
+else was subordinated to it.  As a result, the details of our modern
+civilizations are all wrong.  There is an intensive life at a few great
+political or industrial centres, and wide areas where there is
+stagnation and decay.  Stagnation is most obvious in rural districts.
+It is so general that it has been often assumed that there was something
+inherent in rural life which made the countryman slow in mind as his own
+cattle.  But this is not so, as I think can be shown.  There is no
+reason why as intense, intellectual, and progressive a life should not
+be possible in the country as in the towns.  The real reason for the
+stagnation is that the country population is not organized.  We often
+hear the expression, "the rural community," but where do we find rural
+communities?  There are rural populations, but that is altogether a
+different thing. The word "community" implies an association of people
+having common interests and common possessions, bound together by laws
+and regulations which express these common interests and ideals, and
+define the relation of the individual to the community.  Our rural
+populations are no more closely connected, for the most part, than the
+shifting sands on the seashore.  Their life is almost entirely
+individualistic.  There are personal friendships, of course, but few
+economic or social partnerships.  Everybody pursues his own occupation
+without regard to the occupation of his neighbors.  If a man emigrates
+it does not affect the occupation of those who farm the land all about
+him.  They go on ploughing and digging, buying and selling, just as
+before.  They suffer no perceptible economic loss by the departure of
+half-a-dozen men from the district. A true community would, of course,
+be affected by the loss of its members.  A co-operative society, if it
+loses a dozen members, the milk of their cows, their orders for
+fertilizers, seeds, and feeding-stuffs, receives serious injury to its
+prosperity.  There is a minimum of trade below which its business cannot
+fall without bringing about a complete stoppage of its work and an
+inability to pay its employees.  That is the difference between a
+community and an unorganized population.  In the first the interests of
+the community make a conscious and direct appeal to the individual, and
+the community, in its turn, rapidly develops an interest in the welfare
+of the member.  In the second, the interest of the individual in the
+community is only sentimental, and as there is no organization the
+community lets its units slip away or disappear without comment or
+action.  We had true rural communities in ancient Ireland, though the
+organization was rather military than economic. But the members 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 interest to have
+a numerous membership of the clan, because it made it less liable to
+attack.  Men were drawn by the social order out of merely personal
+interests into a larger life. In their organizations they were
+unconsciously groping, as all human organizations are, towards the final
+solidarity of humanity--the federation of the world.
+
+Well, these old rural communities disappeared.  The greater
+organizations of nation or empire regarded the smaller communities
+jealously in the past, and broke them up and gathered all the strings of
+power into capital cities.  The result was a growth of the State, with a
+local decay of civic, patriotic, or public feeling, ending in
+bureaucracies and State departments, where paid officials, devoid of
+intimacy with local needs, replaced the services naturally and
+voluntarily rendered in an earlier period.  The rural population, no
+longer existing as a rural community, sank into stagnation. There was no
+longer a common interest, a social order turning their minds to larger
+than individual ends.  Where feudalism was preserved, the feudal chief,
+if the feeling of noblesse oblige was strong, might act as a centre of
+progress, but where this was lacking social decay set in.  The
+difficulty of moving the countryman, which has become traditional, is
+not due to the fact that he lives in the 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 recreation grounds, there is a machinery
+which can be set in motion;  there are corporations and urban councils
+which can be approached.  If public opinion is evident--and it is easy
+to organize public opinion in a town--the city representatives will
+consider the scheme, and if they approve and it is within their power as
+a council, they are able to levy rates to finance the art gallery,
+recreation grounds, public gardens, or whatever else.  Now let us go to
+a country district where there is no organization.  It may be obvious to
+one or two people that the place is perishing and the intelligence of
+its humanity is decaying, lacking some centre 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 these people to talk to their friends,
+and the ripples go out weakening and widening for months, perhaps for
+years.  I know of districts where this has happened.  There are hundreds
+of parishes in Ireland where one or two men want co-operative societies
+or village halls or rural libraries.  They discuss the matter with their
+neighbors, but find a complete ignorance on the subject, and consequent
+lethargy. There is no social organism with a central life to stir.
+Before enthusiasm can be kindled there must be some knowledge.  The
+countryman reads little, and it is a long and tedious business before
+enough people are excited to bring them to the point of appealing to
+some expert to come in and advise.
+
+More changes often take place within a dozen years after a co-operative
+society is first started than have taken place for a century previous.
+I am familiar with a district--in the northwest of Ireland.  It was a
+most wretchedly poor district.  The farmers were at the mercy of the
+gombeen traders and the agricultural middlemen.  Then a dozen years ago
+a co-operative society was formed. I am sure that the oldest inhabitant
+would agree with me that more changes for the better for farmers have
+taken place since the co-operative society was started than he could
+remember in all his previous life.  The reign of the gombeen man is
+over.  The farmers control their own buying and selling.  Their
+organization markets for them the eggs and poultry.  It procures seeds,
+fertilizers, and domestic requirements.  It turns the members' pigs into
+bacon. They have a village hall and a woman's organization.  They sell
+the products of the women's industry.  They have a co-operative band,
+social gatherings, and concerts.  They have spread out into half-a-dozen
+parishes, going southward and westward with their propaganda, and in
+half-a-dozen years, in all that district, previously without
+organization, there will be well-organized farmers' guilds,
+concentrating in themselves the trade of their district, having meeting-
+places where the opinion of the members can be taken, having a
+machinery, committees, and executive officers to carry out whatever may
+be decided on:  and having funds, or profits, the joint property of the
+community, which can be drawn upon to finance their undertakings.  It
+ought to be evident what a tremendous advantage it is to farmers in a
+district to have such organizations, what a lever they can pull and
+control.  I have tried to indicate the difference between a rural
+population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together
+by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who are
+closely knit together in an association and who form a true social
+organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find
+expression and society is malleable to the general will.  I assert that
+there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real
+prosperity without such farmers' organizations or guilds.  Wherever
+rural prosperity is reported of any country inquire into it, and it will
+be found that it depends on rural organization.  Wherever there is rural
+decay, if it is inquired into, it will be found that there was a rural
+population but no rural community, no organization, no guild to promote
+common 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
+to organize the community so that it can act as one body.  It is not
+enough to organize farmers in a district for one purpose only--in a
+credit society, a dairy society, a fruit society, a bacon factory, or in
+a co-operative store.  All these may be and must be beginnings; but if
+they do not develop and absorb all rural business into  their
+organization they will have little effect on character.  No true social
+organism will have been created.  If people unite as consumers to buy
+together they only come into contact on this one point; there is no
+general identity of interest.  If co-operative societies are specialized
+for this purpose or that--as in Great Britain or on the Continent--to a
+large extent the limitation of objects prevents a true social organism
+from being formed.  The latter has a tremendous effect on human
+character.  The specialized society only develops economic efficiency.
+The evolution of humanity beyond its present level depends absolutely on
+its power to unite and create true social organisms.  Life in its higher
+forms is only possible because 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 compared with the life in more complex organisms, like
+the ant or bee. Man is the most highly developed living organism on the
+globe;  yet his body is built up of innumerable cells, each of which
+might be described as a tiny life in itself.  But they are built up in
+man into such a close association that what affects one part of the body
+affects all.  The pain which the whole being feels if a part is wounded,
+if one cell in the human body is hurt, should prove that to the least
+intelligent.  The nervous system binds all the tiny cells together, and
+they form in this totality a being infinitely higher, more powerful,
+than the cells which compose it. They are able to act together and
+achieve things impossible to the separated cells.  Now humanity today
+is, to some extent, like the individual cells.  It is trying to unite
+together to form a real organism, which will manifest higher qualities
+of life than the individual can manifest.  But very few of the organisms
+created by society enable the individual to do this.  The joint-stock
+companies or capitalist concerns which bring men together at this work
+or that do not yet make them feel their unity.  Existence under a common
+government effects this still less.  Our modern states have not yet
+succeeded in building up that true national life where all feel the
+identity of interest;  where the true civic or social feeling is
+engendered and the individual bends all his efforts to the success of
+the community on which his own depends;  where, in fact, the ancient
+Greek conception of citizenship is realized, and individuals are created
+who are ever conscious of the identity of interest between themselves
+and their race.  In the old Greek civilizations this was possible
+because their States were small, indeed their ideal State contained no
+more citizens than could 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 we could not, within our widespread nationalities,
+create communities by economic means, where something of the same sense
+of solidarity of interest might be engendered and the same quality of
+life maintained.  I am greatly ambitious for the rural community.  But
+it is no use having mean ambitions.  Unless people believe the result of
+their labors will result in their equaling or surpassing the best that
+has been done elsewhere, they will never get very far.  We in Ireland
+are in quest of a civilization. It is a great adventure, the building up
+of a civilization--the noblest which could be undertaken by any persons.
+It is at once the noblest and the most practical of all enterprises, and
+I can conceive of no greater exaltation for the spirit of man than the
+feeling that his race is acting nobly;  and that all together are
+performing a service, not only to each other, but to humanity and those
+who come after them, and that their deeds will be remembered. It may
+seem a grotesque juxtaposition of things essentially different in
+character, to talk of national idealism and then of farming, but it is
+not so.  They are inseparable.  The national idealism which will not go
+out into the fields and deal with the fortunes of the working farmers is
+false dealism.  Our conception of a civilization must include, nay, must
+begin with the life of the humblest, the life of the average man or
+manual worker, for if we neglect them we will build in sand.  The
+neglected classes will wreck our civilization.  The pioneers of a new
+social 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 be
+possible through their companionship.  If you will not offer people the
+noblest and best they will go in search of it.  Unless the countryside
+can offer to young men and women some satisfactory food for soul as well
+as body, it will fail to attract or hold its population, and they will
+go to the already overcrowded towns;  and the lessening of rural
+production will affect production in the cities and factories, and the
+problem of the unemployed will get still keener.  The problem is not
+only an economic problem.  It is a human one.  Man does not live by cash
+alone, but by every gift of fellowship and brotherly feeling society
+offers him.  The final urgings of men and women are towards humanity.
+Their desires 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 it is only a village.  It is one of the illusions of modern
+materialistic thought to suppose that as high a quality of life is not
+possible in a village as in a great city, and it ought to be one of the
+aims of rural reformers to dissipate this fallacy, and to show that it
+is possible--not indeed to concentrate wealth in country communities as
+in the cities--but that it is possible to bring comfort enough to
+satisfy any reasonable person, and to create a society where there will
+be intellectual life and human interests.  We will hear little then of
+the rural exodus.  The country will retain and increase its population
+and productiveness. Like attracts like.  Life draws life to itself.
+Intellect awakens intellect, and the country will hold its own tug for
+tug with the towns.
+
+Now it may be said I have talked a long while round and round the rural
+community, but I have not suggested how it is to be created. I am coming
+to that.  It really cannot be created.  It is a natural growth when the
+right seed is planted.  Co-operation is the seed. Let us consider
+Ireland.  Twenty-five years ago there was not a single co-operative
+society in the country.  Individualism was the mode of life.  Every
+farmer manufactured and sold as seemed best in his eyes.  It was
+generally the worst possible way he could have chosen.  Then came Sir
+Horace Plunkett and his colleagues, preaching co-operation.  A creamery
+was established here, an agricultural society there, and having planted
+the ideas it was some time before the economic expert could decide
+whether they were planted in fertile soil.  But that question was
+decided many years ago.  The co-operative society, started for whatever
+purpose originally, is an omnivorous feeder, and it exercises a magnetic
+influence on all agricultural 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 their members, and even cater for every requirement of the farmer's
+household.  This magnetic power of attracting and absorbing to
+themselves the various rural activities which the properly constituted
+co-operative societies have, makes them develop rapidly, until in the
+course of a decade or a generation there is created a real social
+organism, where the members buy together, manufacture together, market
+together, where finally their entire interests are bound up with the
+interests of the community.  I believe in half a century the whole
+business of rural Ireland will be done co-operatively.  This is not a
+wild surmise, for we see exactly the same process going on in Denmark,
+Germany, Italy, and every country where the co-operative seed was
+planted.  Let us suppose that in a generation all the rural industries
+are organized on co-operative lines, what kind of a community should we
+expect to find as the result?  How would its members live?  What would
+be their relations to one another and their community?  The agricultural
+scientist is making great discoveries.  The mechanical engineer goes
+from one triumph to another.  The chemist already could work wonders in
+our fields if there was a machinery for him to work through.  We cannot
+foretell the developments in each branch, but we can see clearly that
+the organized community can lay hold of discoveries and inventions which
+the individual farmer cannot.  It is little for the co-operative society
+to buy 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
+could raise several hundred pounds. The society is a better buyer than
+the individual.  It can buy things the individual cannot buy.  It is a
+better producer also. The plant for a creamery is beyond the individual
+farmer;  but our organized farmers in Ireland, small though they are,
+find it no trouble to erect and equip a creamery with plant costing two
+thousand pounds.  The organized rural community of the future will
+generate its own electricity at its central buildings, and run not only
+its factories and other enterprises by this power, but will supply light
+to the houses of its members and also mechanical power to run machinery
+on the farm.  One of our Irish societies already supplies electric light
+for the town it 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 be delivered to the co-operative business centre of the
+district, where the manager of the dairy will turn the milk into butter
+or cheese, and the skim milk will be returned to feed the community's
+pigs.  The poultry and egg department will pack and dispatch the fowl
+and eggs to market. The mill will grind the corn and return it ground to
+the member, or there may be a co-operative bakery to which some of it
+may go.  The pigs will be dealt with in the abattoir, sent as fresh pork
+to the market or be turned into bacon to feed the members.  We may be
+certain that any intelligent rural community will try to feed itself
+first, and will only sell the surplus.  It will realize that it will be
+unable to buy any food half as good as the food it produces. The
+community will hold in common all the best machinery too expensive for
+the members to buy individually.  The agricultural laborers will
+gradually become skilled mechanics, able to direct threshers, binders,
+diggers, cultivators, and new implements we have no conception of now.
+They will be members of the society, sharing in its profits in
+proportion to their wages, even as the farmer will in proportion to his
+trade.  The co-operative community will have its own carpenters, smiths,
+mechanics, employed in its workshop at repairs or in making those things
+which can profitably be made locally.  There may be a laundry where the
+washing--a heavy burden for the women--will be done:  for we may be sure
+that every scrap of power generated will be utilized.  One happy
+invention after another will come to lighten the labor of life.  There
+will be, of course, a village hall with a library and gymnasium, where
+the boys and girls will be made straight, athletic, and graceful. In the
+evenings, when the work of the day is done, if we went into the village
+hall we would find a dance going on or perhaps a concert. There might be
+a village choir or band.  There would be a committee-room where the
+council of the community would meet once a week; for their enterprises
+would have grown, and the business of such a parish community might
+easily be over one hundred thousand pounds, and would require constant
+thought.  There would be no slackness on the part of the council in
+attending, because their fortunes would depend on their communal
+enterprises, and they would have to consider reports from the managers
+and officials of the various departments.  The co-operative community
+would be a busy place. In years when the society was exceptionally
+prosperous, and earned larger profits than usual on its trade, we should
+expect to find discussions in which all 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 should be devoted to some public
+purpose. We may be certain that there would be animated discussions,
+because a real solidarity of feeling would have arisen and a pride in
+the work of the community engendered, and they would like to be able to
+outdo the good work done by the neighboring communities.
+
+One might like to endow the village school with a chemical laboratory,
+another might want to decorate the village hall with reproductions of
+famous pictures, another might suggest removing all the hedges and
+planting the roadsides and lanes with gooseberry bushes, currant bushes,
+and fruit trees, as they do in some German communes today. There would
+be eloquent pleadings for this or that, for an intellectual heat would
+be engendered in this human hive, and there would be no more illiterates
+or ignoramuses.  The teaching in the village school would be altered to
+suit the new social order, and the children of the community would, we
+may be certain, be instructed in everything necessary for the
+intelligent conduct of the communal business.  The spirit of rivalry
+between one community and another, which exists today between
+neighboring creameries, would excite the imagination of the members, and
+the organized community would be as swift to act as the unorganized
+community is slow to act.  Intelligence would be organized as well as
+business. The women would have their own associations, to promote
+domestic economy, care of the sick and the children.  The girls would
+have their own industries of embroidery, crochet, lace, dress-making,
+weaving, spinning, or whatever new industries the awakened intelligence
+of women may devise and lay hold of as the peculiar labor of their sex.
+The business of distribution of the produce and industries of the
+community would be carried on by great federations, which would attend
+to export and sale of the products of thousands of societies.  Such
+communities would be real social organisms.  The individual would be
+free to do as he willed, but he would find that communal activity would
+be infinitely more profitable than individual activity.  We would then
+have a real democracy carrying on its own business, and bringing about
+reforms without pleading to, or begging of, the State, or intriguing
+with or imploring the aid of political middlemen to get this, that, or
+the other done for them.  They would be self-respecting, because they
+would be self-helping above all things.  The national councils and
+meetings of national federations would finally become the real
+Parliament of the nation;  for wherever all the economic power is
+centered, there also is centered all the political power.  And no
+politician would dare to interfere with the organized industry of a
+nation.
+
+There is nothing to prevent such communities being formed.  They would
+be a natural growth once the seed was planted.  We see such communities
+naturally growing up in Ireland, with perhaps a little stimulus from
+outside from rural reformers and social enthusiasts. If this ideal of
+the organized rural community is accepted there will be difficulties, of
+course, and enemies to be encountered. The agricultural middleman is a
+powerful person.  He will rage furiously.  He will organize all his
+forces to keep the farmers in subjection, and to retain his peculiar
+functions of fleecing the farmer as producer and the general public as
+consumer.  But unless we are determined to eliminate the middleman in
+agriculture we will fall to effect anything worth while attempting.  I
+would lay down certain fundamental propositions which, I think, should
+be accepted without reserve as a basis of reform.  First, that the
+farmers must be organized to have complete control over all the business
+connected with their industry.  Dual control is intolerable. Agriculture
+will never be in a satisfactory condition if the farmer is relegated to
+the position of a manual worker on his land;  if he is denied the right
+of a manufacturer to buy the raw materials of his industry on trade
+terms;  if other people are to deal with his raw materials, his milk,
+cream, fruit, vegetables, live stock, grain, and other produce;  and if
+these capitalist middle agencies are to manufacture the farmers' raw
+material into butter, bacon, or whatever else are to do all the
+marketing and export, paying farmers what they please on the one hand,
+and charging the public as much as they can on the other hand.  The
+existence of these middle agencies is responsible for a large proportion
+of the increased cost of living, which is the most acute domestic
+problem of modern industrial communities.  They have too much power over
+the farmer, and are too expensive a luxury for the consumer.  It would
+be very unbusinesslike for any country to contemplate the permanence in
+national life of a class whose personal interests are always leading
+them to fleece both producer and consumer alike. So the first
+fundamental idea for reformers to get into their minds is that farmers,
+through their own co-operative organizations, must control the entire
+business connected with agriculture.  There will not be so much
+objection to co-operative sale as to co-operative purchase by the
+farmers.  But one is as necessary as the other.  We must bear in mind,
+what is too often forgotten, that farmers are manufacturers, and as such
+are entitled to buy the raw materials for their industry at wholesale
+prices.  Every other kind of manufacturer in the world gets trade terms
+when he buys.  Those who buy--not to consume, but to manufacture and
+sell again--get their requirements at wholesale terms in every country
+in the world. If a publisher of books is approached by a bookseller he
+gives that bookseller trade terms, because he buys to sell again.  If I,
+as a private individual, want one of those books I must pay the full
+retail price.  Even the cobbler, the carpenter, the solitary artist, get
+trade terms.  The farmer, who is as much a manufacturer as the
+shipbuilder, or the factory proprietor, is as much entitled to trade
+terms when he buys the 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 the farmer when he buys and any other kind of
+manufacturer.  Is it any wonder that agriculture decays in countries
+where the farmers are expected to buy at retail prices and sell at
+wholesale prices?  We must not, to save any friction, sell the rights of
+farmers.  The second proposition I lay down is that this necessary
+organization work among the farmers must be carried on by an organizing
+body which is entirely controlled by those interested in agriculture--
+farmers and their friends. To ask the State or a State Department to
+undertake this work is to ask a body influenced and often controlled by
+powerful capitalists, and middle agencies which it should be the aim of
+the organization to eliminate.  The State can, without obstruction from
+any quarter, give farmers a technical education in the science of
+farming;  but let it once interfere with business, and a horde of angry
+interests set to work to hamper and limit by every possible means and
+compromises on matters of principle, where no compromise ought to be
+permitted, are almost inevitable.
+
+A voluntary organizing body like the Irish Agricultural Organization
+Society, which was the first to attempt the co-operative organization of
+farmers in these islands, is the only kind of body which can pursue its
+work fearlessly, unhampered by alien interests.  The moment such a body
+declares its aims, its declaration automatically separates the sheep
+from the goats, and its enemies are outside and not inside.  The
+organizing body should be the heart and centre of the farmers' movement,
+and if the heart has its allegiance divided, its work will be poor and
+ineffectual, and very soon the farmers will fall away from it to follow
+more single-hearted leaders.  No trades union would admit
+representatives of capitalist employers on its committee, and no
+organization of farmers should allow alien or opposing interest on their
+councils to clog the machine or betray the cause.  This is the best
+advice I can give reformers.  It is the result of many years' experience
+in this work.  An industry must have the same freedom of movement as an
+individual in possession of all his powers.  An industry divided against
+itself can no more prosper than a household divided against itself.  By
+the means I have indicated the farmers can become the masters of their
+own destinies, just as the urban workers can, I think, by steadfastly
+applying the same principles, emancipate themselves.  It is a battle in
+which, as in all other battles, numbers and moral superiority united are
+irresistible;  and in the Irish struggle to create a true democracy
+numbers and the power of moral ideas are with the insurgents.
+
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+
+It would be a bitter reproach on the household of our nation if there
+were any unconsidered, who were left in poverty and without hope and
+outside our brotherhood.  We have not yet considered the agricultural
+laborer--the proletarian of the countryside.  His is, in a sense, the
+most difficult problem of any.  The basis of economic independence in
+his industry is the possession of land, and that is not readily to be
+obtained in Ireland.  The earth does not upheave itself from beneath the
+sea and add new land to that already above water in response to our need
+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 it is
+a country of small holdings, where the farmer and his family are
+themselves laborers. Labor is badly paid, and, owing to the lack of
+continuous cropping of the land, it is often left without employment at
+seasons when employment is most needed.  No class which is taken up
+today and dropped tomorrow will in modern times remain long in a
+country. Employers often act as if they thought labor could be taken up
+and laid down again like a pipe and tobacco.  None have contributed so
+to thicken the horde of Irish exiles as the rural laborers.  Three
+hundred thousand of them in less than my lifetime have left the fields
+of Ireland for the factories of the new world.  Yet I can only rejoice
+if Irishmen, who are badly dealt with in their motherland, find an
+ampler life and a more prosperous career in another land. A wage of ten
+or eleven shillings a week will bind none but the unaspiring lout to his
+country.  But I would like to make Ireland a land which, because of the
+human kindness in it, few would willingly leave.  The agricultural
+proletarian, like all other labor, should be organized in a national
+union.  That is bound to come.  But the agricultural laborer should, I
+think, no more than labor in the cities, make the raising of wages his
+main or only object.  He should rather strive to make himself
+economically independent;  or, in the alternative, seek for status by
+integration into the co-operative communities of farmers by becoming a
+member, and by pressing for permanent employment by the community rather
+than casual employment by the individual.  Agricultural labor
+undoubtedly will have to struggle for better remuneration.  Yet it has
+to be remembered that agriculture is a protean industry.  It is not like
+mining, where the colliery produces coal and nothing but coal, and where
+the miners have a practical monopoly of supply.  If miners are
+dissatisfied with wages and are well organized they can enforce their
+terms, and the colliery owners may almost be indifferent, because they
+can charge the increased cost of working to the public. But agriculture,
+as I said, is protean and changes its forms perpetually.  If tillage
+does not pay this year, next year the farmer may have his land in grass.
+He reverts to the cheapest methods of farming when prices are low, or
+labor asks a wage which the farmer believes it would be unprofitable to
+pay.  In this way pressure on the farmer for extra wages might result in
+two men being employed to herd cows where a dozen men were previously
+employed at tillage.  The farmer cannot easily--as the mine-owner--
+unload his burden on the general public by the increase of prices. There
+are many difficulties, which seem almost insoluble, if we propose to
+ourselves to integrate the rural laborer into the general economic life
+of the country by making him a partner in the industry he works on.  But
+what I hope for most is first that the natural evolution of the rural
+community, and the concentration of individual manufacture, purchase and
+sale, into communal enterprises, will lead to a very large co-operative
+ownership of expensive machinery, which will necessitate the communal
+employment of labor.  If this takes place, as I hope it will, the rural
+laborer, instead of being a manual worker using primitive implements,
+will have the status of a skilled mechanic employed permanently by a
+cooperative community. He should be a member of the society which employs
+him, and in the division of profits receive in proportion to his wage,
+as the farmers in proportion to their trade.
+
+A second policy open to agricultural labor when it becomes organized is
+the policy of collective farming.  This I believe will and ought to
+receive attention in the future.  Co-operative societies of agricultural
+laborers in Italy, Roumania, and elsewhere have rented land from
+landowners.  They then reallotted the land among themselves for
+individual cultivation, or else worked it as a true co-operative
+enterprise with labor, purchase and sale all communal enterprises, with
+considerable benefit to the members.  We can well understand a landowner
+not liking to divide his land into small holdings, with all the
+attendant troubles which in Ireland beset a landlord with small farmers
+on his estate.  But I think landowners in Ireland could be found who
+would rent land to a co-operative society of skilled laborers who
+approached the owner with a well-thought-out scheme.  The success of one
+colony would lead to others being started, as happened in Italy.
+
+This solution of the problem of agricultural labor will be forced on us
+for many reasons.  The economic effects of the great European War, the
+burden of debt piled on the participating nations, will make Ministers
+shun schemes of reform involving a large use of national credit, or
+which would increase the sum of national obligations.  Land purchase on
+the old term I believe cannot be continued.  Yet we will demand the
+intensive cultivation of the national estate, and increased production
+of wealth, especially of food-stuffs.  The large area of agricultural
+land laid down for pasture is not so productive as tilled land, does not
+sustain so large a population, and there will be more reasons in the
+future than in the past for changing the character of farming in these
+areas.  The policy of collective farming offers a solution, and whatever
+Government is in power should facilitate the settlement of men in
+cooperative colonies and provide expert instructors as managers for the
+first year or two if necessary.  Such a policy would not be so expensive
+as land purchase, and with fair rent fixed, hundreds of thousands of
+people could be planted comfortably on the land in Ireland and produce
+more wealth from it than could ever be produced from grazing lands, and
+agricultural workers and the sons of farmers who now emigrate could
+become economically independent.
+
+I hope, also, that farmers, becoming more brotherly as their own
+enterprises flourish, will welcome laborers into their co-operative
+stores, credit banks, poultry and bee-keeping societies, and allow them
+the benefits of cheap purchase, cheap credit, and of efficient marketing
+of whatever the laborer may produce on his allotment.  The growth of
+national conscience and the spirit of human brotherhood, and a feeling
+of shame that any should be poor and neglected in the national
+household, will be needed to bring the rural laborer into the circle of
+national life, and make him a willing worker in the general scheme.  If
+farmers will not, on their part, advance towards their laborers and
+bring them into the co-operative community, then labor will be organized
+outside their community and will be hostile, and will be always brooding
+and scheming to strike a blow when the farmer can least bear it,--when
+the ground must be tilled or the harvest gathered.  And this, if peace
+cannot be made, will result in a still greater decline of tillage and
+the continued flight of the rural laborers, and the increase of the area
+in grass, and the impoverishing of human life and national well-being.
+
+Some policy to bring contentment to small holders and rural workers must
+be formulated and acted upon.  Agriculture is of more importance to the
+nation than industry.  Our task is to truly democratize civilization and
+its agencies;  to spread in widest commonalty culture, comfort,
+intelligence, and happiness, and to give to the average man those things
+which in an earlier age were the privileges of a few.  The country is
+the fountain of the life and health of a race.  And this organization of
+the country people into co-operative communities will educate them and
+make them citizens in the true sense of the word, that is, people
+continually conscious of their identity of interest with those about
+them.
+
+It is by this conscious sense of solidarity of interest, which only the
+organized co-operative community can engender in modern times, that the
+higher achievements of humanity become possible. Religion has created
+this spirit at times--witness the majestic cathedrals the Middle Ages
+raised to manifest their faith.  Political organization engendered the
+passion of citizenship in the Greek States, and the Parthenon and a host
+of lordly buildings crowned the hills and uplifted and filled with pride
+the heart of the citizen.  Our big countries, our big empires, and
+republics, for all their military strength and science, and the wealth
+which science has made it possible for man to win, do not create
+citizenship because of the loose organization of society;  because
+individualism is rampant, and men, failing to understand the intricacies
+of the vast and complex life of their country, fall back on private life
+and private ambitions, and leave the honor of their country and the
+making of laws and the application of the national revenues to a class
+of professional politicians, in their turn in servitude to the interests
+which supply party funds, and so we find corruption in high places and
+cynicism in the people.  It is necessary for the creation of citizens,
+for the building up of a noble national life, that the social order
+should be so organized that this sense of interdependence will be
+constantly felt.  It is also necessary for the preservation of the
+physical health and beauty of our race that our people should live more
+in the country and less in the cities.  I believe it would be an
+excellent thing for humanity if its civilization could be based on rural
+industry mainly and not on urban industry.  More and more men and women
+in our modern civilization drift out of Nature, out of sweet air,
+health, strength, beauty, into the cities, where in the third generation
+there is a rickety population, mean in stature, vulgar or depraved in
+character, with the image of the devil in mind and matter more than the
+image of Deity.  Those who go like it at first;  but city life is like
+the roll spoken of by the prophet, which was sweet in the mouth but
+bitter in the belly. The first generation are intoxicated by the new
+life, but in the third generation the cord is cut which connected them
+with Nature, the Great Mother, and life shrivels up, sundered from the
+source of life.  Is there any prophet, any statesman, any leader, who
+will--as Moses once led the Israelites out of the Egyptian bondage--
+excite the human imagination and lead humanity back to Nature, to
+sunlight, starlight, earth-breath, sweet air, beauty, gaiety, and
+health?  Is it impossible now to move humanity by great ideas, as
+Mahomet fired his dark hosts to forgetfulness of life;  or as Peter the
+Hermit awakened Europe to a frenzy, so that it hurried its hot chivalry
+across a continent to the Holy Land?  Is not the earth mother of us all?
+Are not our spirits clothed round with the substance of earth?  Is it
+not from Nature 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.  Yet in the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on
+day by day.  The lover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any
+big city and may look into ten thousand faces and see none that is
+lovely.  Is not the return of man to a natural life on the earth a great
+enough idea to inspire humanity?  Is not the idea of a civilization amid
+the green trees and fields under the smokeless sky alluring?  Yes, but
+men say there is no intellectual life working on the land.  No
+intellectual life when man is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When
+the mysterious forces which bring to birth and life are yet
+undiscovered;  when the earth is teeming with 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 as provocative of thought as the
+things men learn at the schools?  Is not thought on these things more
+interesting than the sophistries of the newspapers?  It is only in
+Nature, and by thought on the problems of Nature, that our intellect
+grows to any real truth and draws near to the Mighty Mind which laid the
+foundations of the world.
+
+Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream.  They have no longer the
+grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh.  They grow meaner and meaner as they
+grow more urbanized.  What could be more depressing than the miles of
+poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities?  The
+memory lies on one "heavy as frost and deep almost as life."  It is
+terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements;  the
+depletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from the
+flaring drink-shops.  The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it while
+it moves amid such things.  And outside these places the clouds are
+flying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, the
+winds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leaf
+to leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk.  The
+creation 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 now
+is not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who are on
+the land contented, happy, and prosperous.  And we must begin by
+organizing them to defend what is left to them;  to take back, industry
+by industry, what was stolen from them.  We must organize the country
+people into communities, for without some kind of communal life men hold
+no more together than the drifting sands by the seashore.  There is a
+natural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves from
+the dawn of time.  It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees
+to build their hexagonal cells.  If we read the history of civilization
+we will find people in every land forming little clans co-operating
+together.  Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up;  the
+greed 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, with
+nature prompting him, to form little clans--or nations rather--with his
+fellows, and it is there life has been happiest.  We did this in ancient
+Ireland.  The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and the
+counties are survivals of these old co-operative colonies, where the men
+owned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed their
+own social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections.  It
+was so in every land under the sun.  It was so in ancient India and in
+ancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them,
+are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in
+nature--the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. And
+it is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that I
+have put together these thoughts on the rural community.
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+
+We may now consider the proletarian in our cities.  The worker in our
+modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The
+lordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the least
+the relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancient
+wisdom, as it is recounted to him on God's day, assures him of his
+immortality:  that the divine signature is over all his being, that in
+some way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in a
+likeness 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
+his coming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling
+within him of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self.
+So proud a tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after
+the day of God he finds that none will pay him reverence.  He, the
+destined comrade of Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children
+of the King in fetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his
+many mansions, where light and air, the great purifiers, are already
+dimmed and corrupted before they do him service.  He is insecure in the
+labor by which he lives.  He works today, and tomorrow he may be told
+there is no further need for him, and his fate and the fate of those
+dependent on him are not remembered by those who dismissed him.  If he
+dies, leaving wife or children, the social order makes but the most
+inhuman provision for them.  How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State
+for its poor the workhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn
+loving-kindness into official acts and make legal and formal what should
+be natural impulse and the overflow of the heart.  So great a disparity
+exists between spiritual theory and the realities of the social order
+that it might almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all
+on our civilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point
+where we could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery.  Here God possesses
+the world."
+
+The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, sees him
+laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, on
+strike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringing
+children into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliest
+years, a pauper when his days of strength are passed. He dies in
+charitable institutions.  Though his labors are necessary he is yet not
+integrated into the national economy.  He has no share of his own in the
+wealth of the nation.  He cannot claim work as a right from the holders
+of economic power, and this absolute dependence upon the autocrats of
+industry for a livelihood is the greatest evil of any, for it puts a
+spiritual curse on him and makes him in effect a slave.  Instinctively
+he adopts a servile attitude to those who can sentence him and his
+children to poverty and hunger without trial or judgment by his peers.
+A hasty word, and he may be told to draw his pay and begone.  The
+spiritual wrong done him by the social order is greater than the
+material ill, and that spiritual wrong is no less a wrong because
+generation after generation of workers have grown up and are habituated
+to it, and do not realize the oppression;  because in childhood
+circumstance and the black art of education alike conspire to make the
+worker humble in heart and to take the crown and sceptre from his
+spirit, and his elders are already tamed and obsequious.
+
+Yet the workers in the modern world have great qualities.  This class in
+great masses will continually make sacrifices for the sake of a
+principle.  They have lived so long in the depths:  many of them have
+reached the very end of all the pain which is the utmost life can bear
+and have in their character that fearlessness which comes from long
+endurance and familiarity with the worst hardships.  I am a literary
+man, a lover of ideas, and I have found few people in my life who would
+sacrifice anything for a social principle;  but I will never forget the
+exultation with which I realized in a great labor trouble, when the
+masters of industry issued a document asking men on peril of dismissal
+to swear never to join a trades union, that there were thousands of men
+in my own city who refused to obey, though they had no membership or
+connection with the objectionable association.  Nearly all the real
+manhood of Dublin I found was among the obscure myriads who are paid
+from twenty to thirty shillings a week.  The men who will sacrifice
+anything for brotherhood get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth.
+These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose their
+own heroes and their own ideals.  Most of them had no strike funds to
+fall back on.  They had wives and children depending on them.  Quietly
+and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yet
+nobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows.  Beneath their
+rags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit.
+It is in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the
+hope of Ireland lies.  The poor have always helped each other, and it is
+they who listen eagerly to the preachers of a social order based on
+brotherhood in industry.  It is these workers, always necessary but
+never yet integrated into the social order, who must be educated, who
+must be provided for, who must be accepted fully as comrade in any
+scheme of life to be devised and which would call itself Christian.
+That word, expressing the noblest and most spiritual conception of
+humanity, has been so degraded by misuse in the world that we could
+almost hate it with the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know
+that Hell can as disguise put on the outward garments of Heaven.  Yet
+what is eternally true remains pure and uncorrupted, and those who turn
+to it find it there--as all finally must turn to it to fulfill their
+destiny of inevitable beauty.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+
+Often with sadness I hear people speak of industrial development in
+Ireland, for I feel they contemplate no different system than that which
+fills workers with despair in countries where it is more successfully
+applied.  All these energetic people are conspiring to build factories
+and mills and to fill them with human labor, and they believe the more
+they do this the better it will be for Ireland. They talk of Ireland as
+if it was only admirable as a quantity rather than a quality.  They
+express delight at swelling statistics and increased trade, but where do
+we hear any reflection on the quality of life engendered by this
+industrial development?  Our civilization is to differ in no way from
+any other.  No new ideal of life is suggested to differentiate us.  We
+are to go on exploiting human labor.  Our working classes are to
+increase and multiply and earn profits for an employing class, as labor
+has one from time immemorial in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Rome, and in
+London today.  But a choice yet remains to us, because the character of
+our civilization is not yet fixed.  It is mainly germinal.  It fills the
+spirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path,
+without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and more
+beautiful life.  Every now and then, when the world was still vast and
+full of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor,
+and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities and
+over unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer and
+ampler than that they had known.  Is the old daring gone?  Are there not
+such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures--
+the building up of a civilization--so that the human might reflect the
+divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity.
+It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love;  and
+when it is free and acts by its own will it is most united with all
+other life.  Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motion about the
+heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as its adorers.
+But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has the dividing
+quality of the prism, which resolves pure light into distinct rays;  and
+so on earth we get the principle of freedom and the virtue of solidarity
+as separated ideals continually at warfare with each other, and the
+reconcilement on earth of these principles in man is the conquest of
+matter by the spirit.  This dramatic sundering on earth of virtues in
+unison in the heavens explains the struggle between Protestantism and
+Catholicism, between nationality and imperialism, between individualist
+and socialist, between dynamic and static in philosophy.  Indeed in the
+last analysis all human conflicts are the balancing on earth of the
+manifestation of divine principles which are one in the unmanifest
+spirit.
+
+The civilization we create, the social order we build up, must provide
+for essential freedom for the individual and for solidarity of the
+nation.  Now essential freedom is denied to men if they are in their
+condition servile.  Can we contemplate the permanent existence of a
+servile class in Ireland?  For, disguise it how we will, our present
+industrial system is practically a form of slavery for the workers,
+differing in externals only from the ages when the serf had a collar
+round his neck.  He has now freedom to change from master to master, and
+can even seek for a master in other countries;  but he must, in any
+case, accept the relation of servant to master.  The old slave could be
+whipped.  In the new order the wage slave can be starved, and the fact
+that many of the rulers of industry use their power benevolently does
+not make the existing relation between employer and employed right, or
+the social order one whose permanence can be justified.  Men will gladly
+labor if they feel that their labor conspires with that of all other
+workers for the general good;  but there is something loathsome to the
+spirit in the condition of the labor market, where labor is regarded as
+a commodity to be bought and sold like soap or candles.  For that truly
+describes how it is with labor in our industrial system:  we can buy
+labor, which means we can buy human life and thought, a portion of God's
+being, and make a profit out of it.  By so selling himself the worker is
+enslaved and limited in a thousand ways.  The power of dismissal of one
+person by another at whim acts against independence of character, or the
+free expression or opinion in thought, in politics, and in religion. The
+soul is stunted in its growth, and spiritual life made subordinate to
+material interests.  To deny essential freedom to the soul is the
+greatest of all crimes, and such denial has in all ages evoked the
+deepest anger among men.  When freedom has been threatened nations have
+risen up maddened and exultant, and the clang of martial arms has been
+heard 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 or
+hindrance by other men.
+
+We have many of the vices of a slave race, and we treat others as we
+have been treated.  Our national aspirations were overborne by material
+power, and we in turn use cudgel and curse on our countrymen when they
+differ from us in opinion and policy.  Men, when they cannot match their
+intellect against another's, suppress him and howl him down, putting
+faith in their own brainlessness. I would make the most passionate plea
+for freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel or
+know.  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
+will not argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are
+prowling back again on all fours in their minds to the brute.  It
+matters not in what holy name men war with violence on freedom of
+thought, whether in the name of God or nation they are enemies of both.
+We are only right in controversy when we overcome by a superior beauty
+or truth. The first fundamental idea inspiring an Irish polity should be
+this idea of freedom in all spheres of thought, and it is most
+necessary to fight for this because the devil and hell have organized
+their forces in this unfortunate land in sectarian and secret societies,
+of which it might be written they love darkness rather than light for
+the old God-given reasons.
+
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+
+Whenever in Ireland there has been a revolt of labor it too often finds
+arrayed against it the press, the law, and the police.  All the great
+powers are in entente.  The press, without inquiry, begins a detestable
+cant about labor agitators misleading ignorant men.  Every wild phrase
+uttered by an exasperated worker is quoted against the cause of labor,
+and its grievances are suppressed.  We are told nothing about how the
+worker lives:  what homes, what food, his wage will provide.  The
+journalist holds up a moral umbrella, protecting society from the fiery
+hail of conscience.  The baser sort of clergyman will take up the
+parable and begin advocating a servile peace, glibly misinterpreting the
+divine teaching 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
+peace which was Christ's gift to humanity was the peace of God which
+passes all understanding, and that it was a spiritual quietude, and that
+on earth--the underworld--the gospel in realization was to bring not
+peace but a sword.
+
+The law, assured of public opinion, then deals sternly with whatever
+unfortunate life is driven into its pens.  I am putting very mildly the
+devilish reality, for society is so constituted that the public, kept in
+ignorance of the real facts, believes that it is acting rightly, and so
+the devil has conscience on his side and that divine power is turned to
+infernal uses.  What can labor oppose to this federation of State and
+Church, of press and law, of capital and physical force to back capital,
+when it sets about its own liberation and to institute a new social
+order to replace autocracy in industry? Its allies are few.  A rare
+thinker, scientist, literary man, artist or clergyman, impelled by
+hatred of what is ugly in life, will speak on its behalf, and may render
+some aid and help to tear holes in that moral shield held up by the
+press, and may here and there give to that blinded public a vision of
+the Hosts of the Lord arrayed against it.  But the only real power the
+workers can truly rely on is their own.  Nothing but a spiritual
+revolution or an economic revolution will bring other classes into
+comradeship with them. The ideal labor should set before itself is not a
+transitory improvement in its wage, because a wage war never truly or
+permanently improves the position of labor.  This section or that may,
+relatively to its own past or the position of other workers, improve
+itself;  but capital is like a ship which, however the tide rises or
+falls, floats upon it, and is not sunken more deeply in the water at
+high tide than at low tide.  Whenever any burden is placed upon capital
+it immediately sets about unloading that burden on the public.  Wages
+might be doubled by Act of Parliament, and the net result would be to
+double prices, if not to increase them still more.  The more the
+autocrats of industry are federated the more easily can they unload on
+others any burden placed on them.
+
+The value of money is simply what it will purchase at any time.  If the
+rulers of industry can halve the purchasing power of money while
+doubling wages at the command of the State, logic leads us to assume
+that wages boards, arbitration boards and the like can only be
+transitory in their meliorating effect;  and to pursue the attack on the
+autocrats of industry by the road of wages alone is to attack them where
+they are impregnable, and where, seeming to give way, they are all the
+while really losing nothing, and are only fixing the wage system more
+permanently on those who attack them. There are fiery spirits among the
+proletarians who hope that militant labor will at last bring about the
+social revolution, taking the earthly paradise by violence.  They
+believe that if every worker dropped his tools and absolutely refused to
+work under the old system, it would be impossible to continue it.  That
+is true, but those who advocate this policy slur over many difficulties,
+and the relative power of endurance of both parties. They do not, I
+think, take into account the immense power in the hands of those who
+uphold the present system.  Those who might be expected to strike are
+not--at least in Ireland--a majority of the population.  They would have
+far fewer material resources to fall back on than those others whose
+interests would lead them to preserve the present social order.  It is
+clear, too, when we analyze the forces at the command of labor and
+capital, that the latter has attached to itself by the bonds of self-
+interest the scientific men--engineers, inventors, chemists,
+bacteriologists, designers, organizers, all the intellect of industry--
+without which, in alliance with itself, revolting labor would be unable
+to continue production as before.  Labor so revolting might indeed for a
+time bring the work of the nation to a standstill;  but unless it could
+by some means attract to itself men of the class described, it would not
+be able to take the helm of the ship of industry and guide it with
+knowledge as the holders of economic power have done in the past.  A
+policy of emancipation should provide labor with a means of attracting
+to itself that kind of knowledge which is gained in universities,
+laboratories, colleges of science, and, above all, in the actual
+guidance of great industrial enterprises. In any trial of endurance
+those who start with the greatest intellectual, moral, and material
+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 a
+knock-out blow to the present social order.  I believe in an orderly
+evolution of society, at least in Ireland, and doubt whether by
+revolution people can be raised to an intelligence, a humanity, or a
+nobility of nature greater than they formerly possessed.  Nobody can
+remain standing on tiptoe.  After a little time disorder subsides and
+some strong man leads the inevitable reaction.  In France people
+revolted against a decadent monarchy, and in a dozen years they had a
+new emperor.  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 of parliaments; and finally a second Charles, rather worse than
+the first, came to the throne.  The everlasting battle between light and
+darkness goes on stubbornly all the time, and the gain of the Hosts of
+Light is inch by inch.  Extraordinary efforts, impetuous charges, which
+seem to win for a moment, too often leave the attacking force tired and
+exhausted, and the forces of reaction set in and overwhelm them. I am
+the friend of revolt if people cannot stand the conditions they live
+under, and if they can see no other way.  It is better to be men than
+slaves.  The French Revolution was a tragic episode in history, but when
+people suffer intolerably and are insulted in their despair it is
+inevitable 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 and
+stone, or that there be no justice in destiny or time?
+
+There is danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much more
+advanced than the intellectual, and moral qualities which alone can
+secure the success of a revolt.  These intellectual and moral qualities
+--the skill to organize, the wisdom to control large undertakings, are
+not natural gifts but the results of experience. They are evolutionary
+products.  The emancipation of labor, I believe, will not be gained by
+revolution but by prolonged effort, continued month by month and year by
+year, in which first this thing is adventured, then that:  each
+enterprise brings its own gifts of wisdom and experience, and there is
+no reaction, because, instead of the violent use of certain powers, the
+whole being is braced:  experience, intellect, desire, all strong and
+working harmoniously, press forward and support each other, and no
+enterprise is undertaken where the intellect to carry it out is not
+present together with the desire.  It requires great intellectual and
+moral qualities to bring about a revolution.  A rage at present
+conditions is not enough.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+
+Our farmers are already free.  The problem with them is not now
+concerned with freedom, but how they may be brought into a solidarity
+with each other and the nation.  To make our proletarians free and
+masters of their own energies, in unison with each other and the
+national being, is the most pressing labor of the many before us.
+Unless there be economic freedom there can be no other freedom.  The
+right of no individual to subsistence should be at the good will of any
+other individual.  More than mere comfort depends on it.  There are
+eternal and august rights of the soul to be safeguarded, and the
+economic position of men should be protected by organization and
+democratic law.  I have already discussed some of the avenues through
+which workers in our time have looked with hope.  I have little belief
+that these roads lead anywhere but back to the old City of Slavery,
+however they may seem to curve away at the outset.  The strike, on
+whatever scale, is no way to freedom, though the strike--or the threat
+of it--may bring wages nearer to subsistence level.  The art of warfare
+is too much in the hands of specialists for trust to be placed in
+revolution. A machine-gun with a few experts behind it is worth a
+thousand revolutionary workers, however maddened they 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 is to appeal to
+bodies dominated by those interested in maintaining the present social
+order, although they may act so as to redress the worst evils created by
+it.  In Ireland, for this generation at least, it would be impossible to
+secure in a legislative assembly majorities representative of the class
+we wish to see emancipated. It may seem as if I had closed all the paths
+out of the social labyrinth;  but the way to emancipation has, I think,
+already been surveyed by pioneers.  A policy of social reconstruction is
+practical, and needs but steady persistence for its realization.  That
+policy--I refer to co-operative action--has been adopted in various
+forms by workers in many countries;  and what is needed here is to study
+and coordinate these applications of co-working, and to form a general
+staff of labor who will, on behalf of the workers, examine the weapons
+fashioned by their class elsewhere, and who will draw up a plan of
+campaign as the staff of an army do previous to military operations.  It
+will be found that economic action along co-operative lines has, in one
+country, barriers placed before its expansion which could be set aside
+by supplementing this action by methods 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 admirable
+books, but rather to indicate the order of advance, the methods of
+coordination of these, and their final absorption and transformation in
+the national being.  There is a great deal of ignorance about things
+essential to safe action.  When men are filled with enthusiasm they are
+apt to apply their new principles rashly in schemes which are bound to
+fall, just as over-confident soldiers will in battle sometimes rush a
+position prematurely which they cannot hold, because the general line of
+their army has not advanced sufficiently to support them.  Sacrifices
+are made with no permanent result, and the morale of the army is
+injured.
+
+In the rural districts the advance must, in the nature of things, be
+from production to consumption, and with urban workers inversely from a
+control over distribution to a mastery over production.  I have often
+wondered over the blindness of workers in towns in Ireland, who have
+made so little use in the economic struggle of the freedom they have to
+spend their wage where they choose.  They speak of this struggle as the
+class war;  but they carry on the conflict most energetically where it
+is most difficult for them to succeed, and hardly at all where it would
+be comparatively easy for them to weaken the resources of their
+antagonists.  In warfare much use is made of flanking movements, which
+aim 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 entrenched
+deeply with all the artillery of the State, the press, science, and
+wealth on their side.  What would we think of an army which, at the
+close of each week's fighting, voluntarily surrendered to the enemy the
+ground, guns, ammunition, and prisoners captured through the previous
+six days?  Yet this is what our workers do.  The power opposed to them
+is mainly economic, though there is an intellectual basis for it also.
+But the wages of the workers, little for the individual, yet a large
+part of the national income if taken for the mass, goes back to
+strengthen the system they protest against through purchases of domestic
+requirements.  The creation of co-operative stores ought to be the first
+constructive policy adopted by Irish labor.  It ought to be as much a
+matter of class honor with them to be members of stores as to be in the
+trade union of their craft.  The store may be regarded as the
+commissariat department of the army of labor.  Many a strike has failed
+of its object, and the workers have gone back defeated, because their
+neglect of the commissariat made them unable to hold out for that last
+week when both sides are desperate and at the end of their resources.
+But it is not mainly as an aid to the strike that I advocate
+democratizing the distributive trade, but because control over
+distribution gives a large measure of control over production.  The
+history of co-operative workshops indicates that these have rarely been
+successful unless worked in conjunction with distributive stores.  The
+retail trader is not sympathetic with co-operative production.  As the
+cat is akin to the tiger, so is the individual trader--no matter on how
+small a scale he operates--a kinsman of the great autocrats of industry,
+and he will sympathize with his economic kinsmen and will retail their
+goods in preference to those produced in co-operative workshops.
+
+The control of agencies of distribution by the workers at a certain
+stage in their development enables them to start productive enterprises
+with more safety and less expense in regard to advertisement than the
+capitalist can.  In fact the co-operative store, properly organized,
+creates a tied trade for the output of co-operative workshops.  It is a
+source of financial aid to these, and will invest funds in them and
+assist trades unions gradually to transform themselves into co-operative
+guilds of producers which should be their ultimate ideal.  As I shall
+show later on, the store will enable the urban worker to enter into
+intimate alliance with the rural producer.  Their interests are really
+identical.  In every town in Ireland efforts should be made to
+democratize the distributive agencies, and the workers will have many
+allies in this, driven by the increased cost of living to search out the
+most economical agencies of purchase.  If the proletarians are not in a
+majority in Ireland--a nation where the farmers are the most numerous
+single class--they certainly form the majority in the cities;  and the
+co-operative store, while admitting to membership all who will apply,
+ought to be and would be sympathetic with the efforts of labor to
+emancipate itself, and would be a powerful lever in its hands.  As the
+stores increase in number, an analysis of their trade will reveal year
+by year in what directions co-operative production of particular
+articles may safely be attempted.  More and more by this means the
+producing power and the capital at the disposal of the worker will be
+placed at the service of democracy.  The first steps are the most
+difficult. In due time the workers will have educated a number of their
+members, and will have attached to themselves men of proved capacity to
+be the leaders in fresh enterprises, manufactures of one kind or
+another, democratic banking institutions, all supporting each other and
+leaning on each other and playing into each other's hands.
+
+The extent to which this may be carried, and the opportunities for
+making Ireland a co-operative democracy, I shall presently explain.  I
+do not regard any of these forms of co-operative organization as ideal
+or permanent.  The co-operative movement must be regarded rather as a
+great turning movement on the part of humanity towards the ideal.  The
+co-operative organizations now being formed in Ireland and over the
+world will, I am certain, persist and outlast this generation and the
+next, and will grow into vaster things than we dream of;  but the really
+important change they will bring about in the minds of men will be
+psychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of common
+action for the common good.  To get so far in civil life is a great
+step.  Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests and
+competitions.  The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast
+turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them
+face round to the Delectable City.  When this psychological change takes
+place the democratic associations--which have grown up haphazard as the
+workers found it easiest to create them--will be changed and remodeled
+by men who will have the mass of people behind them in their efforts to
+make a more majestic structure of society for the enlargement of the
+lives and spirits of men.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+
+We have descended from the national soul to the material plane, and we
+must still continue here for a time, because the doctrine that a sane
+mind can only manifest through a sane body is as true in reference to
+the State as to the individual, and necessitates a study of social
+fabrics.  The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and the
+body repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soul again
+with its old desires.  Our religious hatreds created sectarian
+organizations, and these react again in the national soul, which would,
+I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itself
+incarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and its
+energies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly.  So a
+drunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature is
+conquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul in
+rebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body.  The individualism
+in our economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents
+concerted action for the general good.  We have yet to create harmony of
+purpose in our economic life, and to bring together interests long
+separated and unmindful of each other, and make them realize that their
+interests are identical.  It is one of the commonplaces of economics
+that urban and rural interests are identical:  but in truth the townsman
+and the countryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed,
+and they know very little of each other.  I never like to let these
+commonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give the
+countersign to the challenge for truth.  People declare in the same way
+that the interests of labor and capital are identical, and implore them
+not to fight with one another.  But the truth of that statement seems to
+me to depend largely on whether capital owns labor or labor owns
+capital.  As an abstract proposition it is one of the economic formulae
+I would leave instructions at my frontiers to have detained until
+further inquiry as to its antecedents.  All these statements may be
+true, but to make them operative, to give them a dynamic rather than a
+static character, we must convince people they are true by close
+argument and still more so by realistic illustration.
+
+To bring about a high nobility in the national soul we must make harmony
+in its economic life, and the two main currents of economic energy--the
+agricultural and urban--must be made to flow so that their action will
+not defeat each other.  Let us take the farmer first.  How ought he to
+wish to see life in the towns develop? Should he wish for the triumph of
+labor or capital:  the success of the co-operative movement, the triumph
+of the multiple shop or the private trader, of guilds of workers or
+autocrats of industry? Economic desires generally depend on the nature
+of the industry men are engaged in.  The jeweler would probably desire
+the permanence of the social order which created most wealthy people who
+could afford to buy his wares.  The farmer's industry, if we consider it
+closely, is the most democratic of any in its application to society.
+The produce of the farm, in its final distribution, is divided into
+portions more or less equal and conditioned in quantity by the digestive
+powers of an individual.  The wealthiest millionaire cannot eat more
+bread, butter, meat, vegetables, or fruit than the manual laborer would
+eat if the latter could afford to get such things.  In fact he would eat
+rather less, because the manual worker has a much better appetite,
+indeed requires more food.  It appears to be the interest of the farmer
+to support any urban movement whose object it is to see that every
+worker in the towns is remunerated so that he, his wife, and his
+children can procure as much food as they require.  Any underpaid worker
+in the towns is a wrong to the farmer--a willing customer who yet cannot
+buy.  If there is, let us say, a sum of fifteen hundred pounds a week to
+be paid away in a town, it is to the interest of farmers that that sum
+should be paid to a thousand men at the rate of thirty shillings a week
+rather than to fifty men at thirty pounds a week.  In the case of the
+workers a greater part of the money will be spent on food.  But if fifty
+men have thirty pounds a week each, it will be spent to satisfy the
+appetites of a much smaller number of people. A larger proportion will
+be spent on furniture, pictures, motor-cars and what not.  It may be
+spent so as to give some kind of employment, but it will not be a
+division of the money so much to the interests of the farmer.  However
+we analyze the problem it appears to be to the farmer's interests to
+support democratic movements in the cities, certainly up to the point
+where every worker in the towns has a wage which enables himself and his
+family to eat all they require for health.  It is also to the interests
+of farmers to support any system of distribution of goods which
+eliminates the element of profit in the sale.  After the farmer gets his
+price it is to his interests that food should be increased in cost as
+little as possible when the article is transferred to the consumer,
+because if farm produce has to bear too many profits it will be
+expensive for the consumer, and there will be a lessened demand. So
+associations like the co-operative stores, which aim at the elimination
+of the element of profit in distribution, should be approved of by the
+farmers.
+
+Now we come to the townsman again.  Is it his interest to support the
+farmers in his own country or to regard the world as his farm? The
+argument on the economic side is not so clear, but it is, I think, just
+as sound.  If agriculture is neglected in any country the rural
+population pour into the towns.  The country becomes a fountain of
+blackleg labor.  Rural labor has no traditions of trade unionism, and
+takes any work at any price.  There are fewer people engaged in
+producing food, and its cost rises.  Food must be imported from abroad;
+and there is national insecurity, as in times of war their is always the
+danger of the trade routes overseas being blocked by an enemy, and this
+again has to be provided against by heavy expenditure for militarist
+purposes.  The farther away an army is from its base the more insecure
+is its position, and the same thing is true in the industrial life of
+nations.  International trade there must always be.  It is one of the
+means by which the larger solidarity of humanity is to be achieved;  but
+that will never come about until there is a nobler and more human life
+within the states, and we must begin by perfecting national life before
+we consider empires and world federations.  So in this essay only the
+national being is considered.
+
+I desire to unite countryman and townsman in one movement, and to make
+the co-operative principle the basis of a national civilization. How are
+we to prevent them fighting the old battle between producer and
+consumer?  I think that this can best be brought about by co-operative
+federations, which will act for both in manufacture, purchase, and sale,
+and with which both rural and urban associations will find it to their
+interest to be affiliated.  Now the townsman cannot to any extent supply
+food for his stores by buying farms. To control agricultural production
+in that way would necessitate a financial operation which the State
+would shrink from, and which it would be impossible for urban
+cooperators to finance.  We had better make up our minds to let farmers
+be syndicalists, controlling entirely the processes of agricultural
+production themselves.  They will do it better than the townsman could,
+more efficiently and more economically.  They will never be able, with
+the world in competition, to put up prices artificially.  How can the
+two main divisions of national life be brought together in a national
+solidarity?  We can find an answer if we remember that farmers are not
+only 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 the
+townsman's wife needs, except that she purchases a little less food.
+But even here modern conditions are driving the farmer to buy food in
+the shops rather than to produce it for himself on the farm.  Country
+bread is made in the bakery more and more.  Butter, cheese, and bacon
+are made in 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 a creamery, the grain to make the bread to a miller, and the pigs to
+a factory. Co-operative distribution would be as advantageous to the
+country as in the town.  Already in Ireland a considerable number of
+farmers' societies are enlarging their objects, and are turning what
+originally were purely agricultural associations into general purposes
+societies, where the farmer's wife can purchase her d omestic
+requirements as well as her man his machinery, fertilizers, feeding-
+stuffs, and seeds.  It would be to the interest of rural societies to
+deal with co-operative wholesales just as much as it is in the interest
+of urban stores to do so.  It would be to their interest to take shares
+in these wholesales and productive federations, and see that they cater
+for the farmer's interests as much as for the townsman's.
+
+The urban co-operators, on their side, will see the opportunities for
+productive co-operation the union of rural and urban movements would
+create.  They naturally will desire to employ as many people as possible
+in co-operative production.  Farmers are surrounded by rings of all
+kinds:  machinery manufacturers who will not sell to their societies,
+manure manufacturers' alliances who keep up prices.  It is a great
+industry, this of supplying the farmer with his fertilizers, feeding-
+stuffs, cake, machinery.  These rural co-operative societies are
+increasing in number year by year. Farmers want clothes, hats, and
+boots:  and the necessary machinery for their industry is almost
+entirely of urban manufacture--ploughs, binders, separators, harrows,
+and many other implements of tillage. It is an immense industry and yet
+to be co-operatively exploited. In the towns some progress has been made
+in distribution.  But a nation depends upon its wealth producers and not
+upon its consumers. Co-operators might double, treble, or quadruple the
+distributive trade, and still occupy only a very secondary position in
+national life unless they enter more largely upon production.  We will
+never make the co-operative idea the fundamental one in the civilization
+of Ireland until we employ a very large part of the population in
+production.  Now we have at present, thanks to the energy of the
+pioneers of agricultural co-operation, a new market opening in the
+country for things which the townsman can produce.  Does not this
+suggest new productive urban enterprises?  Does it not favor an
+evolution of manufacturing industry, so that democratic control may
+finally replace the autocratic control of the capitalist?  The trades
+unions cannot do this alone by following up any of their traditional
+policies.  They cannot go into trade on their own account with any
+guarantee of success unless they are associated with agencies of
+distribution.  But if co-operators--urban and rural--through their
+federations invade more and more the field of production they will draw
+to themselves the hearts and hopes of the workers and idealists in the
+nation.  People are really more concerned 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-operative commonwealth, that co-operators must
+adventure much more largely into production than they have hitherto
+done.
+
+Now let us see what we have come to. There is a country movement which
+is not merely one for agricultural production.  It is rapidly taking up
+the distribution of goods.  There is an urban movement not merely
+concerned with distribution but entering upon production. They can be
+brought into harmony if the same federations act for both branches of
+the movement.  The meeting-place of the two armies should be there.  If
+this policy is adopted there will gradually grow-up that unity of
+purpose between country and urban workers which is the psychological
+basis and necessary precedent for national action for the common good.
+The policy of identity of interest must be real, and it can only be real
+when the identity of interest is obvious, and it can only be made
+obvious when the symbols of that unity and identity are visible day by
+day in buildings and manufactures, things which are handled and seen,
+and in transactions which daily bring that unity to mind.  The old
+poetic ideal of a United Ireland was and could only be a geographical
+expression, and not a human reality, so long as men were individualist
+in economics and were competing and struggling with each other for
+mastery.
+
+By the co-operative commonwealth more is meant than a series of
+organizations for economic purposes.  We hope to create finally, by the
+close texture of our organizations, that vivid sense of the identity of
+interest of the people in this island which is the basis of citizenship,
+and without which there can be no noble national life.  Our great
+nation-states have grown so large, so myriad are their populations, so
+complicated are their interests, that most people in them really feel no
+sense of brotherhood with each other.  We have yet to create inside our
+great nation-states social and economic organizations, which will make
+this identity of interest real and evident, and not seem merely a
+metaphor, as it does to most people today.  The more the co-operative
+movement does this for its members, the more points of contact they find
+in it, the more will we tend to make out of it and its branches real
+social organisms, which will become as closely knit psychically as
+physically the cells in a human body are knit together.  Our Irish
+diversities of interest have made us world-famous;  but such industrial
+and agricultural organizations would swallow up these antagonisms, as
+the serpents created by the black art of the Egyptian magicians were
+swallowed up by the rod Aaron cast on the floor, and which was made
+animate by the white magic of the Lord.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+
+It will appear to the idealist who has contemplated the heavens more
+closely than the earth that the policy I advocate is one which only
+tardily could be put into operation, and would be paltry and inadequate
+as a basis for society.  The idealist with the Golden Age already in his
+heart believes he has only to erect the Golden Banner and display it for
+multitudes to array themselves beneath its folds;  therefore he
+advocates not, as I do, a way to the life, but the life itself.  I am
+sympathetic with idealists in a hurry, but I do not think the world can
+be changed suddenly by some heavenly alchemy, as St. Paul was smitten by
+a light from 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 the Golden Age," though we think of revolutions, we know that
+the patient marshalling of human forces is wisdom.  We have to devise
+ways and means and light every step clearly before the nation will leave
+its footing in some safe if unattractive locality to plant itself
+elsewhere. The individual may be reckless.  The race never can be so,
+for it carries too great a burden and too high destinies, and it is only
+when the gods wish to destroy or chastise a race that they first make it
+mad.  Not by revolutions 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 them by disorderly methods."  Our spirits may live in the
+Golden Age, but our bodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the
+lantern on the path and the staff struck carefully into the darkness
+before us to see that the path 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 the
+inflexible application of a single idea.  Well, I realize that the net
+which is spread for Leviathan will not capture all the creatures of the
+deep;  and the complexity of human nature is such that it is impossible
+to imagine a policy, however fitting in certain spheres of human
+activity, which could be applied to the whole of life.  What I think we
+should aim at is making the co-operative idea fundamental in Irish life.
+But to say fundamental is not to say absolute.  Always there will be
+enter rising persons--men of creative minds--who will break away from
+the mass and who will insist, perhaps rightly, on an autocratic control
+of the enterprises they found, which were made possible alone by their
+genius, and which would not succeed unless every worker in the
+enterprise was malleable by their will.  It is unlikely that State
+action will cease, or that any Government we may have will not respond
+to the appeal of the people to do this, that, or the other for them
+which they are too indolent to do for themselves, or which by the nature
+of things only governments can undertake.  For a principle to be
+fundamental in a country does not mean that it must be absolute.  I hope
+society in Ireland will be organized that the idea of democratic control
+of its economic life will so pervade Irish thought that it will be in
+the body politic what the spinal column is to the body--the pillar on
+which it rests, the strongest single factor in the body.  Another
+illustration may make still clearer my meaning.  In a red sunsetting the
+glow is so powerful that green hills, white houses, and blue waters,
+touched by its light, assume a ruddy color, partly a local color, and
+partly a reflected light from the sun.  Now in the same way, what is
+most powerful in society multiplies images and shadows of itself, and
+produces harmonies with itself which are yet not identities.  It is by a
+predominating idea that nations achieve the practical unity of their
+citizens, and national progress becomes possible. In the future
+structure of society I have no doubt there will be elements to which the
+socialist, the syndicalist, the capitalist, and the individualist will
+have contributed.  By degrees it will be discovered what enterprises are
+best directed by the State, by municipalities, by groups, or by
+individuals.   But if the idea of democratic control is predominant,
+those enterprises which are otherwise directed will yet meet the
+prevalent mood by adopting the ideas of the treatment of the workers
+enforced in democratically controlled enterprises, and will in every
+respect, except control, make their standards equal.  All the needles of
+being point to the centres where power is most manifested.  The effects
+of the French revolution--a democratic upheaval--invaded men's minds
+everywhere.  Even the autocratically ruled States, hitherto careless
+about the people in their underworlds, had to make advances to
+democracy, and give it some measure of the justice democracy threatened
+to deal to itself.  Without demanding absolutism I do desire a
+predominant democratic character in our national enterprises, rather
+than a confused muddle or struggle of interests where nothing really
+emerges except the egoism of those who struggle.
+
+It will be noticed that in all that has preceded I have referred little
+to action by government, though it is on governments that democracies
+over the world are now fixing all their hopes.  They believe the State
+is the right agency to bring about reforms and changes in society.  And
+I must here explain why I do not share their hopes.  My distrust of the
+State in economic reform is based on the belief that governments in
+great nation-states, even representative governments, are not malleable
+by the general will. They are too easily dominated by the holders of
+economic power, are, in fact, always dominated by aristocracies with
+land or by the aristocracies of wealth.  It is the hand at the helm
+guides the ship. The larger the State is the more easily do the holders
+of economic power gain political power.  The theory of representative
+government held good in practice, I think, so long as parliaments were
+engaged in formulating general rights, the right, for example, of the
+individual to think or profess any religion he pleased;  his right not
+to be deprived of liberty or life without open trial by his fellow-
+citizens.  So long as legislatures were affirming or maintaining these
+rights, which rich and poor equally desired, they were justified.  But
+when legislatures began to intervene in economic matters, in the
+struggles between rich and poor, between capital and labor, it became at
+once apparent the holders of economic power had also political power;
+and that the institution which operated fairly where universal rights
+were considered did not operate fairly when there was a conflict between
+particular interests.
+
+The jury of the nation was found to be packed.  At least nine-tenths of
+the population in Great Britain, for example, belong to the wage-earning
+class.  At least nine-tenths of the members of legislatures belong to
+the classes possessing land or capital.  Now, why any member of the
+wage-earning class should look with hope to such assemblies I cannot
+understand.  Their ideal is, or should be, economic freedom, together
+with democratic control of industries, an ideal in every way opposed to
+the ideal of the majority of the members of the legislatures.  The
+fiction that representative assemblies will work for the general good is
+proclaimed with enthusiasm;  but the moment we examine their actions we
+see it is not so, and we discover the cause.  Where the nation is
+capitalist and capitalism is the dominant economic factor, legislatures
+invariably act to uphold it, and legislation tends to fix the system
+more securely.  We see in Great Britain that wage-earners are now openly
+regarded by the legislatures as a class who must not be allowed the same
+freedom in life as the wealthy.  They must be registered, inspected, and
+controlled in a way which the wealthy would bitterly resent if the
+legislation referred to themselves. After economic inferiority has been
+enforced on them by capital, the stigma of human inferiority is attached
+to the wage-earners by the legislature.  But I must not be led away from
+my theme by the bitter reflections which arise in one who lives in the
+Iron Age and knows it is Iron, who feels at times like the lost wanderer
+on trackless fields of ice, which never melt and will not until earth
+turns from its axis.
+
+I wish to see society organized so that it shall be malleable to the
+general will.  But political and economic progress are obstructed
+because existing political and economic organizations are almost
+entirely unmalleable by the general will.  Public opinion does not
+control the press.  The press, capitalistically controlled, creates
+public opinion.  Our legislators have grown so secure that they confess
+openly they have passed measures which they knew would be hateful to the
+majority of citizens, and which, if they had been voted on, would never
+have been passed.  The theory of representative government has broken
+down.  To tell the truth, the life of the nation is so complicated that
+it is difficult for the private citizen to have any intelligent opinion
+about national policies, and we can hardly blame the politician for
+despising the judgment of the private citizen.  Government departments
+are still less malleable by public opinion than the legislature.  For an
+individual to attack the policy of a Government department is almost as
+hopeless a proceeding as if a laborer were to take pickaxe and shovel
+and determine to level a mountain which obstructed his view.  Yet
+Government departments are supposed to be under popular control.  The
+Castle in Ireland, theoretically, was under popular control, but it was
+adamantine in policy.  If the cant about popular control of legislation
+and Government departments is obviously untrue, how much more is it in
+regard to public services like railways, gas works, mines, the
+distribution of goods, manufacture, purchase and sale, which are almost
+entirely under private control and where public interference is bitterly
+resented and effectively opposed. What chance has the individual who is
+aggrieved against the great carrying companies?  To come lower down, let
+us take the farmer in the fairs.  What way has he of influencing the
+jobbers and dealers to act honestly by him--they who have formed rings
+to 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 same
+thing.  The increase of multiple shops, combines, and rings makes the
+use of the limited power a man had to affect a dealer by transferring
+his custom to another merchant to dwindle yearly. Everywhere we turn we
+find this adamantine front presented by the legislature, the State
+departments, by the agencies of production, distribution, or credit, and
+it is the undemocratic organization of society which is responsible for
+nine-tenths of our social troubles. All the vested interests backed up
+by economic and political power conflict with the public welfare, and
+the general will, which intends the good of all, can act no more than a
+paralyzed cripple can walk. We would all choose the physique of the
+athlete, with his swift, unfettered, easy movements, rather than the
+body of the cripple if we could, and we have this choice before us in
+Ireland.
+
+If we concentrate our efforts mainly on voluntary action, striving to
+make the co-operative spirit predominant, the general will would
+manifest itself through organizations malleable to that will, flexible
+and readily adjusting themselves to the desires of the community.  To
+effect reforms we have not first to labor at the gigantic task of
+affecting national opinion and securing the majorities necessary for
+national action.  In any district a hundred or two hundred men can at
+any time form co-operative societies for production, purchase, sale, or
+credit, and can link themselves by federation with other organizations
+like their own to secure greater strength and economic efficiency.  By
+following this policy steadily we simplify our economic system, and
+reduce to fewer factors the forces in conflict in society.  We beget the
+predominance of one principle, and enable that general will for good,
+which Rousseau theorized about, to find agencies through which it can
+manifest freely, so changing society from the static condition begot by
+conflict and obstruction to a dynamic condition where energies and
+desires manifest freely.
+
+The general will, as Rousseau demonstrated, always intends the good, and
+if permitted to act would act in a large and noble way.  The change from
+static to dynamic, from fixed forms to fluid forms, has been coming
+swiftly over the world owing to the liberation of thought, and this in
+spite of the obstruction of a society organized, I might almost say,
+with egomania as the predominant psychological factor.  The ancient
+conception of Nature as a manifestation of spirit is incarnating anew in
+the minds of modern thinkers, and Nature is not conceived of as
+material, but as force and continual motion;  and they are trying to
+identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces of
+Nature have freer play in humanity. We begin to catch glimpses of
+civilizations as far exceeding ours as ours surpasses society in the
+Stone Age.  In all our democratic movements, in these efforts towards
+the harmonious fusion of human forces, humanity is obscurely intent on
+mightier collective exploits than anything conceived of before.  The
+nature of these energies manifesting in humanity I shall try to indicate
+later on.  But to let the general will have free play ought to be the
+aim of those who wish to build up national organizations for whatever
+purpose; and to let the general will have free play we require something
+better than the English invention of representative government, which,
+as it exists at present, is simply a device to enable all kinds of
+compromises to be made on matters where there should be no compromise,
+as if right and wrong could come to an agreement honestly to let things
+be partly right and partly wrong.  We are importing into Ireland some
+political machinery of this antiquated pattern.  I have written the
+foregoing because I dread Irish people becoming slaves of this machine.
+I fear the importers of this machinery will desire to make it do things
+it can only do badly, and will set it to work with the ferocity of the
+new broom and will make it an obstruction, so that the real genius of
+the Irish people will be unable freely to manifest itself.  The less we
+rely on this machinery at present, and the more we desire a machinery of
+progress, at once flexible and efficient, the better will it be for us
+later on.  What must be embodied in State action is the national will
+and the national soul, and until that giant being is manifested it is
+dangerous to let the pygmies set powers in motion which may enchain us
+for centuries to come.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+
+It may seem I have spoken lightly of that infant whose birth I referred
+to with more solemnity in the opening pages of this book, and indeed I
+am a little dubious about that infant.  The signature of the Irish mind
+is nowhere present in it, and I look upon it with something of the
+hesitating loyalty the inhabitant of a new Balkan State night feel for
+his imported prince, doubtful whether that sovereign will reflect the
+will of his new subjects or whether his policy will not constrain
+national character into an alien mould. The signature of the Irish mind
+is not apparent anywhere in this new machinery for self-government.  Our
+politicians seem to have been unaware that they had any wisdom to learn
+from the more obvious failures of representative government as they knew
+it.  So far, as I have knowledge, no Irishman during the past century of
+effort for political freedom took the trouble to think out a form of
+government befitting Irish circumstance and character.  We left it
+absolutely to those whom we declared incapable of understanding us or
+governing us to devise for us a system by which we might govern
+ourselves.  I do not criticize those who devised the new machinery of
+self-government, but those who did not devise it, and who discouraged
+the exercise of political imagination in Ireland. It is said of an
+artist that it was his fantasy first to paint his ideal of womanly
+beauty, and, when this was done, to approximate it touch by touch to the
+sitter, and when the sitter cried, "Ah, now it is growing like!" the
+artist ceased, combining the maximum of ideal beauty possible with the
+minimum of likeness.  Now if we had thought out the ideal structure of
+Irish government we might have offered it for criticism by those in
+whose power it was to accept or reject, and have gradually approximated
+it until a point was reached where the compromise left at least
+something of our making and imagination in it.  There is nothing of us
+in the Act which is in abeyance as I write.  I am less concerned with it
+than with the creation of a social order, for the social order in a
+country is the strong and fast fortress where national character is
+created and preserved.  A legislature may theoretically allow self-
+government, but by its constitution may operate against national
+character and its expression in a civilization.  We have accepted the
+principle of representative government, and that, I readily concede, is
+the ideal principle, but the method by which a representative character
+is to be given to State institutions we have not thought out at all.  We
+have committed the error our neighbors have committed of assuming that
+the representative assembly which can legislate for general interests
+can deal equally with particular interests;  that the body of men who
+will act unitedly so as to secure the liberty of person or liberty of
+thought, which all desire for themselves, will also act wisely where
+class problems and the development of particular industries are
+concerned.  The whole history of representative assemblies shows that
+the machinery adequate for the furtherance and protection of general
+interests operates unjustly or stupidly in practice against particular
+interests.  The long neglect of agriculture and the actual condition of
+the sweated are instances.  I agree that representative government is
+the ideal, but how is it to operate in the legislature and still more in
+administration?  Are government departments to be controlled by
+Parliament or by the representatives of the particular class to promote
+whose interests special departments were created.  I hold that the
+continuous efficiency of State departments can only be maintained when
+they are controlled in respect of policy, not by the casual politician
+whom the fluctuations of popular emotion places at their head, but by
+the class or industry the State institution was created to serve.  A
+department of State can conceivably be preserved from stagnation by a
+minister of strong will, who has a more profound knowledge of the
+problems connected with his department than even his permanent
+officials. He might vitalize them from above.  But does the party system
+yield us such Ministers?  In practice is not high position the reward of
+service to party?  Is special knowledge demanded of the controller of a
+Board of Trade or a Board of Agriculture?  Do we not all know that the
+vast majority of Ministers are controlled by the permanent officials of
+their department.  Failing great Ministers, the operations of a
+department may be vitalized by control over its policy exercised, not by
+a general assembly like Parliament, but by a board elected from the
+class or industry the department ostensibly was created to serve.  An
+agricultural department controlled by a council or board composed solely
+of those making their livelihood out of agriculture and elected solely
+by their own class, would, we may be certain, be practical in its
+methods. It would receive perpetual stimulus from those engaged in
+making their living by the industry.  Parliaments or senates should
+confine themselves to matters of general interest, leaving particular or
+special interests to those who understand them, to the specialists, and
+only intervene when national interests are involved by a clashing of
+particular interests.  Our State institutions will never fulfill their
+functions efficiently until they are subject in respect of policy not to
+general control, but the control of the class they were created to
+serve.
+
+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 guardian
+of the unorganized, but, once an industry is organized, once it has come
+of age, it must resent domination by bodies without the special
+knowledge of which it has the monopoly within itself.  It should not
+tolerate domination by the unexpert outsider, whatever may be his repute
+in other spheres.  It is only when industries are organized that the
+democratic system of election can justify itself by results in
+administration.  When a county, let us say, chooses a member of
+Parliament to represent every interest, only too often it chooses a man
+who can represent few interests except his own.  The greatest common
+denominator of the constituents is as a rule some fluent utterer of
+platitudes.  But if the farmers in a county, or the manufacturers in a
+county, or the workers in a county, had each to choose a man to
+represent them, we may be certain the farmers would choose one whom they
+regarded as competent to interpret their needs, the manufacturers a man
+of real ability, and labor would select its best intelligence.  Persons
+engaged in special work rarely fall to recognize the best men in their
+own industry.  Then they judge somewhat as experts, whereas they are by
+no means experts when they are asked to select a representative to
+represent everybody in every industry.  To secure good government I
+conceive we must have two kinds of representative assemblies running
+concurrently with their spheres of influence well defined.  One, the
+supreme body, should be elected by counties or cities to deal with
+general interests, taxation, justice, education, the duties and rights
+of individual citizens as citizens. The other bodies should be elected
+by the people engaged in particular occupations to control the policy of
+the State institutions created to foster particular interests.  The
+average man will elect people to his mind whose deliberations will be in
+a sphere where the ideas of the average man ought to be heard and must
+be respected.  The specialists in their department of industry will
+elect experts 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 ought to
+be easily understood by the citizens.  In Ireland, where we have at
+present no thought of foreign policy, no question of army or navy,
+departments of State should fall naturally into a few divisions
+concerned with agriculture, education, local government, justice,
+police, and taxation.  The administration of some of these are matters
+of national concern, and they should and must be under parliamentary
+control, and that control should be jealously protected. Others are
+sectional, and these should be controlled in respect of policy by
+persons representative of these sections, and elected solely by them.  I
+think there should also be a department of Labor. I am not sure that the
+main work of the Minister in charge ought not to be the organization of
+labor in its proper unions or guilds. It is a work as important to the
+State as the organization of agriculture, and indeed from a humanitarian
+point of view more urgent.  Nothing is more lamentable, nothing fills
+the heart more with despair, than the multitude of isolated workers,
+sweated, unable to fix a price for their work, ignorant of its true
+economic value;  connected with no union, unable to find any body to
+fall back 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
+rising largely composed of those who were economically neglected and
+oppressed?  Society bears a heavier burden for its indifference than it
+would bear if it accepted responsibility for the organization of labor
+in its own defense.  The State in these islands recommends farmers to
+organize for the protection of their interests and assists in the
+organization, and leaves the organized farmers free to use their
+organizations as they will.  As good a case could be made for the State
+aiding in the organization of labor for the protection of its own
+interests.  A ministry of labor should seek out all wage-earners;  where
+there is no trade union one should be organized, and, where one exists,
+all workers should be pressed to join it.  Such a ministry ought to be
+the city of refuge for the proletarian, and the Minister be the Father
+of Labor, fighting its battles for an entry into humanity and its
+rightful place in civilization.
+
+If we consider the problem of representation, it should not be
+impossible to devise a system of which the foundation might be the
+County Councils, where there would be as sub-divisions, committees for
+local government, agriculture, and technical instruction or trade to
+deal with local administration in these matters.  These committees
+should send representatives to general councils of local government,
+agriculture, and trade.  The election should not be by the County
+Council as a body, but by the committees, so that traders would have no
+voice in choosing a representative for farmers, nor farmers interfere in
+the choice of manufacturers or traders selecting a representative on a
+general Council of Trade, and it should be regarded as ridiculous any
+such intervention as for a War Office to claim it should have a voice
+along with the Admiralty in the selection of captains and commanders of
+vessels of war.  At these general councils, which might meet twice a
+year for whatever number of days may be expedient, general policies
+would be decided and boards elected to ensure the carrying out by the
+officials of the policies decided upon.  By this process of selection
+men who had to control Boards of Agriculture, Trade, or Local Government
+would be three times elected, each time by a gradually decreasing
+electorate, with a gradually increasing special knowledge of the matters
+to be dealt with.  A really useless person may contrive to be chosen as
+representative by a thousand electors.  It requires an able man to
+convince a committee of ten persons, themselves more or less
+specialists, that his is the best brain among them.  Where national
+education, a thorny subject in Ireland, is concerned, I think the
+educationalists in provinces might be asked to elect representatives
+from their own profession on a Council of Education to act as an
+advisory body to the Minister of Education.  County Council elections
+are not exactly means by which miracles of culture are discovered.  A
+man who came to be member of a board of control would at least have
+proved his ability to others engaged on work like his own who have
+special knowledge of it and of his capacity to deal with it.  If this
+system was accepted, we would not have traders on our Council of
+Agriculture protesting against the farmers organizing their industry,
+because none but persons concerned with agriculture would be a owed to
+be members of agricultural committees, and this would, of course,
+involve the concentration of merchants and manufacturers upon the work
+of a Board of Trade and the control of a policy of technical instruction
+suitable for industrial workers, where agricultural advisers in their
+turn would be out of place.  Control so exercised over the policy of
+State institutions would vitalize them, and tend to make them enter more
+intimately into the department of national effort they were created to
+foster.  The stagnation which falls on most Government departments is
+due to this, that the responsible heads rarely have a knowledge great
+enough to enable them to inaugurate new methods, that parliamentary
+control is never adequate, is rarely exercised with knowledge, and there
+is always a party in power to defend the policy of their Minister, for
+if one Minister is successfully attacked a whole party goes out of
+power.  We, in Ireland, should desire above all things efficiency in our
+public servants.  They will stagnate in their offices unless they are
+continually stimulated by intimate connection with the class they work
+for and who have a power of control.  This system would also, I believe,
+lead to less jobbery.  Men in an assembly, where theoretically every
+class and interest are represented, often conspire to make bad
+appointments, because only a minority have knowledge of what
+qualifications the official ought to have, and they are outvoted by
+representatives who do their friends such good turns often in sheer
+ignorance that they are betraying their constituents.  Where specialists
+have power, and where the well-being of their own industry is concerned,
+they never willingly appoint the inefficient.  Such an organization of
+our County Council system would operate also to break up sectarian
+cliques. The feeling of organized classes, farmers, or industrialists,
+concerned about their own well-being, would oppose itself to sectarian
+sentiment where its application was unfitting.
+
+In the system of representative government I have outlined, we would
+have one supreme or national assembly concerned with general interests,
+justice, taxation, education, the apportioning of revenue to its various
+uses, reserving to itself direct control over the policy of the
+departments of treasury, police, judiciary, all that affects the
+citizens equally;  and, beneath it, other councils, representative of
+classes and special interests, controlling the policy and administration
+of the State departments concerned with their work.  Where everybody was
+concerned everybody would have that measure of control which a vote
+confers;  where particular interests were concerned these interests
+would not be hampered in their development by the intervention of
+busybodies from outside. Of course on matters where particular interests
+clashed with general interests, or were unable to adjust themselves to
+other interests, the supreme Assembly would have to decide.  The more
+sectional interests are removed from discussion in the National
+Assembly, and the more it confines itself to general interests the more
+will it approximate to the ideal sense, be less the haunt of greed, and
+more the vehicle of the national will and the national being.
+
+By the application of the principle of representative government now in
+force, one is reminded of nothing so much as the palette of an artist
+who had squeezed out the primary colors and mixed them into a greasy
+drab tint, where the purity of every color was lost, or the most
+powerful pigment was in dull domination.  If the modification of the
+representative principle I have outlined was in operation, with each
+interest or industry organized, and freed from alien interference, the
+effect might be likened to a disc with the seven primary colors raying
+from a centre, and made to whirl where the motion produced rather the
+effect of pure light. We must not mix the colors of national life until
+conflicting interests muddle themselves into a gray drab of human
+futility, but strive, so far as possible, to keep them pure and unmixed,
+each retaining its own peculiar lustre, so that in their conjunction
+with others they will harmonize, as do the pure primary colors, and in
+their motion make a light of true intelligence to prevail in the
+national 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 prevailing
+mood or tendency recurring again and again, and assert these are
+fundamental?  It is difficult to define national character, even in
+long-established States whose history lies open to the world; but it is
+most difficult in Ireland, which for centuries has not acted by its own
+will from its own centre, where national activity was mainly by way of
+protest against external domination, or a readjustment of itself to
+external power.  We can no more deduce the political character of the
+Irish from the history of the past seven hundred years than we can
+estimate the quality of genius in an artist whom we have only seen when
+grappling with a burglar.  The political character of a people emerges
+only when they are shaping in freedom their own civilization.  To get a
+clue in Ireland we must slip by those seven centuries of struggle and
+study national origins, as the lexicographer, to get the exact meaning
+of a word, traces it to its derivation.  The greatest value our early
+history 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 more
+complicated life and era.
+
+In every nation which has been allowed free development, while it has
+the qualities common to all humanity, it will be found that some one
+idea was predominant, and in its predominance regrouped about itself
+other ideas.  With our neighbors I believe the idea of personal liberty
+has been the inspiring motive of all that is best in its political
+development, whatever the reactions and oppressions may have been.  In
+ancient Attica the idea of beauty, proportion, or harmony in life so
+pervaded the minds of the citizens that the surplus revenues of the
+State were devoted to the beautifying of the city.  We find that love
+for beauty in its art, its literature, its architecture;  and to Plato,
+the highest mind in the Athenian State, Deity itself appeared as Beauty
+in its very essence.  That mighty mid-European State, whose ambitions
+have upset the world, seems to conceive of the State as power.  Other
+races have had a passion for justice, and have left codes of law which
+have profoundly affected the life of nations which grew up long after
+they were dead. The cry of ancient Israel for righteousness rings out
+above all other passions, and its laws are essentially the laws of a
+people who desired that morality should prevail.  We have to discover
+for ourselves the ideas which lie at the root of national character, and
+so inculcate these principles that they will pervade the nation and make
+it a spiritual solidarity, and unite the best minds in their service,
+and so control those passionate and turbulent elements which are the
+cause of the downfall and wreckage of nations by internal dissensions.
+I desire as much as any one to preserve our national identity, and to
+make it worthy of preservation, and this can only be done by the
+domination of some inspiring ideal which will draw all hearts to it;
+which may at first have that element of strangeness in it which Ben
+Jonson said was in all excellent beauty, and which will later become--as
+all high things we love do finally become--familiar to us, and nearer
+and closer to us than the beatings of our own hearts.
+
+When ideals which really lie at the root of our being are first
+proclaimed, all that is external in life protests.  So were many great
+reformers martyred, but they left their ideals behind them in the air,
+and men breathed them and they became part of their very being.
+Nationality is a state of consciousness, a mood of definite character in
+our intellectual being, and it is not perceived first except in profound
+meditation;  it does not become apparent from superficial activities any
+more than we could, by looking at the world and the tragic history of
+mankind, discover that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us.  That
+knowledge comes to those who go within themselves, and not to those who
+seek without for the way, the truth, and the life.  But, once
+proclaimed, the incorruptible spiritual element in man intuitively
+recognizes it as truth, and it has a profound effect on human action.
+There is, I believe, a powerful Irish character which has begun to
+reassert itself in modern times, and this character is in essentials
+what it was two thousand years ago.  We discover its first manifestation
+in the ancient clans.  The clan was at once aristocratic and democratic.
+It was aristocratic in leadership and democratic in its economic basis.
+The most powerful character was elected as chief, while the land was the
+property of the clan.  That social order indicates the true political
+character of the Irish.  Races which last for thousands of years do not
+change in essentials. They change in circumstance.  They may grow better
+or worse, but throughout their history the same fundamentals appear and
+reassert themselves.  We can see later in Irish literature or politics,
+as powerful personalities emerged and expressed themselves, how the
+ancient character persisted.  Swift, Goldsmith, Berkeley, O'Grady, Shaw,
+Wilde, Parnell, Davitt, Plunkett, and many others, however they differed
+from each other, in so far as they betrayed a political character, were
+intensely democratic in economic theory, adding that to an aristocratic
+freedom of thought.  That peculiar character, I believe, still persists
+among our people in the mass, and it is by adopting a policy which will
+enable it to manifest once more that we will create an Irish
+civilization, which will fit our character as the glove fits the hand.
+During the last quarter of a century of comparatively peaceful life the
+co-operative principle has once more laid hold on the imagination of the
+Irish townsman and the Irish countryman.  The communal character is
+still preserved.  It still wills to express itself in its external
+aspects in a communal civilization, in an economic brotherhood.  That
+movement alone provides in Ireland for the aristocratic and democratic
+elements in Irish character.  It brings into prominence the aristocracy
+of character and intelligence which it is really the Irish nature to
+love, and its economic basis is democratic.  A large part of our failure
+to achieve anything memorable in Ireland is due to the fact that,
+influenced by the example of our great neighbors, we reversed the
+natural position of the aristocratic and democratic elements in the
+national being.  Instead of being democratic in our economic life, with
+the aristocracy of character and intelligence to lead us, we became
+meanly individualistic in our economics and meanly democratic in
+leadership.  That is, we allowed individualism--the devilish doctrine of
+every man for himself--to be the keynote of our economic life;  where,
+above all things, the general good and not the enrichment of the
+individual should be considered.  For our leaders we chose energetic,
+common-place types, and made them represent us in the legislature;
+though it is in leadership above all that we need, not the aristocracy
+of birth, but the aristocracy of character, intellect, and will.  We had
+not that aristocracy to lead us.  We chose instead persons whose ideas
+were in no respect nobler than the average to be our guides, or rather
+to be guided by us.  Yet when the aristocratic character appeared,
+however imperfect, how it was adored!  Ireland gave to Parnell--an
+aristocratic character--the love which springs from the deeps of its
+being, a love which it gave to none other in our time.
+
+With our great neighbors what are our national characteristics were
+reversed.  They are an individualistic race.  This individualism has
+expressed itself in history and society in a thousand ways. Being
+individualistic in economics, they were naturally democratic in
+politics.  They have a genius for choosing forcible average men as
+leaders.  They mistrust genius in high places, Intensely individualistic
+themselves, they feared the aristocratic character in politics.  They
+desired rather that general principles should be asserted to encircle
+and keep safe their own national eccentricity. They have gradually
+infected us with something of their ways, and as they were not truly our
+ways we never made a success of them. It is best for us to fall back on
+what is natural with us, what is innate in character, what was visible
+among us in the earliest times, and what, I still believe, persists
+among us--a respect for the aristocratic intellect, for freedom of
+thought, ideals, poetry, and imagination, as the qualities to be looked
+for in leaders, and a bias for democracy in our economic life.  We were
+more Irish truly in the heroic ages.  We would not then have taken, as
+we do today, the huckster or the publican and make them our
+representative men, and allow them to corrupt the national soul.  Did
+not the whole vulgar mob of our politicians lately unite to declare to
+the world that Irish nationality was impossible except it was floated on
+a sea of liquor?  The image of Kathleen ni Houlihan anciently was beauty
+in the hearts of poets and dreamers.  We often thought her unwise, but
+never did we find her ignoble;  never was she without a flame of
+idealism in her eyes, until this ignoble crew declared alcohol to be the
+only possible basis of Irish nationality.
+
+In the remote past we find the national instincts of our people fully
+manifested.  We find in this early literature a love for the truth-
+teller and for the hero.  Indeed they did not choose as chieftains of
+their clans men whom the bards could not sing.  They reverenced wisdom,
+whether in king, bard, or ollav, and at the same time there was a
+communal basis for economic life.  This heroic literature is, as our
+Standish O'Grady declared, rather prophecy than history.  It reveals
+what the highest spirits deemed the highest, and what was said lay so
+close to the heart of the race that it is still remembered and read.
+That literature discloses the character of the national being, still to
+be manifested in a civilization, and it must flame out before the tale
+which began among the gods is closed.  Whatever brings this communal
+character into our social order, and at the same time desires the
+independent aristocratic intellect, is in accord with the national
+tradition. The co-operative movement is the modern expression of that
+mood. It is already making a conquest of the Irish mind, and in its
+application to life predisposing our people to respect for the man of
+special attainments, independent character, and intellect. A social
+order which has made its economics democratic in character needs such
+men above all things.  It needs aristocratic thinkers to save the social
+order from stagnation, the disease which eats into all harmonious life.
+We shall succeed or fail in Ireland as we succeed or fail to make
+democracy prevail in our economic life, and aristocratic ideals to
+prevail in our political and intellectual life.
+
+In all things it is best for a people to obey the law of their own
+being.  The lion can never become the ox, and "one law for the lion and
+the ox is oppression."
+
+Now that the hammer of Thor is wrecking our civilizations, is destroying
+the body of European nationalities, the spirit is freer to reshape the
+world nearer to the heart's desire.  Necessity will drive us along with
+the rest to recast our social order and to fix our ideals.  Necessity
+and our own hearts should lead us to a brotherhood in industry.  It
+should be horrible to us the thought of the greedy profiteer, the
+pursuit of wealth for oneself rather than the union of forces for the
+good of all and the creation of a brotherly society.  The efforts of
+individuals to amass for themselves great personal wealth should be
+regarded as ignoble by society, and as contrary to the national spirit,
+as it is indeed contrary to all divine teaching.  Our ideal should be
+economic harmony and intellectual diversity.  We should regard as alien
+to the national spirit all who would make us think in flocks, and
+discipline us to an unintellectual commonalty of belief.  The life of
+the soul is a personal adventure, a quest for the way and the truth and
+the life.  It may be we shall find the ancient ways to be the true ways,
+but if we are led to the truth blindfolded and without personal effort,
+we are like those whom the Scripture condemns for entering into
+Paradise, not by the straight gate, but over the wall, like thieves and
+robbers.  If we seek it for ourselves and come to it, we shall be true
+initiates and masters in the guild.
+
+No people seem to have greater natural intelligence than the Irish. No
+people have been so unfortunately cursed with organizations which led
+them to abnegate personal thought, and Ireland is an intellectual desert
+where people read nothing and think nothing; where not fifty in a
+hundred thousand could discern the quality of thought in the Politics of
+Aristotle or the Republic of Plato as being in any way deeper than a
+leading article in one of their daily papers.  And we, whose external
+life is so mean, whose ignorance of literature is so great, are yet
+flattered by the suggestion that we have treasures of spiritual and
+intellectual life which should not be debased by external influences,
+and so it comes about that good literature is a thing unpurchasable
+except in some half-dozen of the larger towns.  Any system which would
+suppress the aristocratic, fearless, independent intellect should be
+regarded as contrary to the Irish genius and inimical to the national
+being.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 body
+for the great soul, and it would be an error to overlook--among other
+modern uprisings of ancient Irish character--the revival of the military
+spirit and its possible development in relation to the national being.
+National solidarity may be brought about by pressure from without, or by
+the fusion of the diverse elements in a nation by a heat engendered from
+within.  But to Create national solidarity by war is to attain but a
+temporary and unreal unity, a gain like theirs who climb into the
+Kingdom not by the straight gate, but over the wall like a robber.  When
+one nation is threatened by another, great national sacrifices will be
+made, and the latent solidarity of its humanity be kindled.  But when
+the war is over, when the circumstances uniting the people for a time
+are past, that spirit rapidly dies, and people begin their old
+antagonisms because the social order, in its normal working, does not
+constantly promote a consciousness of identity of interest.
+
+Almost all the great European states have fortified their national being
+by militarism.  Everything almost in their development has been
+subordinated to the necessities of national defense, and hence it is
+only 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 transitory
+brotherhood.  It is a paradoxical phenomenon, possible only in the Iron
+Age, that the highest instances of national sacrifice are evoked by
+warfare--the most barbarous of human enterprises.  To make normal that
+spirit of unity which is now only manifested in abnormal moments in
+history should be our aim;  and as it is the Iron Age, and material
+forces are more powerful than spiritual, we must consider how these
+fierce energies can be put in relation with the national being with
+least debasement of that being.  If the body of the national soul is too
+martial in character, it will by reflex action communicate its character
+to the spirit, and make it harsh and domineering, and unite against it
+in hatred all other nations.  We have seen that in Europe but yesterday.
+The predominance in the body of militarist practice will finally drive
+out from the soul those unfathomable spiritual elements which are the
+body's last source power in conflict, and it will in the end defeat its
+own object, which is power.  When nations at war call up their reserves
+of humanity to the last man capable of bearing arms, their leaders begin
+also to summon up those bodiless moods and national sentiments which are
+the souls of races, and their last and most profound sources of
+inspiration and deathless courage.  The war then becomes a conflict of
+civilizations and of spiritual ideals, the aspirations and memories
+which constitute the fundamental basis of those civilizations. Without
+the inspiration of great memories or of great hopes, men are incapable
+of great sacrifices.  They are rationalists, and the preservation of the
+life they know grows to be a desire greater than the immortality of the
+spiritual life of their race.  A famous Japanese general once said it
+was the power to hold out for the last desperate quarter of an hour
+which won victories, and it is there spiritual stamina reinforces
+physical power.  It is a mood akin to the ecstasy of the martyr through
+his burning.  Though in these mad moments neither spiritual nor material
+is consciously differentiated, the spiritual is there in a fiery fusion
+with all other forces.  If it is absent, the body unsupported may take
+to its heels or will yield.  It has played its only card, and has not
+eternity to fling upon the table in a last gamble for victory.
+
+A military organization may strengthen the national being, but if it
+dominates it, it will impoverish its life.  How little Sparta has given
+to the world compared with Attica.  Yet when national ideals have been
+created they assume an immeasurably greater dignity when the citizens
+organize themselves for the defense of their ideals, and are prepared to
+yield up life itself as a sacrifice if by this the national being may be
+preserved.  A creed always gains respect through its martyrs.  We may
+grant all this, yet be doubtful whether a militarist organization should
+be the main support of the national being in Ireland.  The character of
+the ideal should, I believe, be otherwise created, and I am not certain
+that it could not be as well preserved and defended by a civil
+organization, such as I have indicated, as by armed power.  Our
+geographical position and the slender population of our country also
+make it evident that the utmost force Ireland could organize would make
+but a feeble barrier against assault by any of the greater States.  We
+have seen how Belgium, a country with a population larger than that of
+Ireland, was thrust aside, crushed and bleeding, by one stroke from the
+paw of its mighty neighbor.*  The military and political institutions of
+a small country are comparatively easy to displace, but it would be a
+task infinitely more difficult to destroy ideals or to extinguish a
+national being based on a social order, democratic and co-operative in
+character, the soul of the country being continually fed by institutions
+which, by their very nature, would be almost impossible to alter unless
+destruction of the whole humanity of the country was aimed at. National
+ideals, based on a co-operative social order, would have the same power
+of resistance almost as a religion, which is, of all things, most
+unconquerable by physical force, and, when it is itself militant, the
+most powerful ally of military power. The aim of all nations is to
+preserve their immortality.  I do not oppose the creation of a national
+army for this purpose.  There are occasions when the manhood of a nation
+must be prepared to yield life rather than submit to oppression, when it
+must perish in self-contempt or resist by force what wrong would be
+imposed by force.  But I would like to point out that for a country in
+the position of Ireland the surest means of preserving the national
+being by the sacrifice and devotion of the people are economic and
+spiritual.
+
+------------------* 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 we
+were uncultured as a nation.  National ideals have been the possession
+of the few in Ireland, and have not been diffused.  That is the cause of
+our comparative failure as a nation.  If we would create an Irish
+culture, and spread it widely among our people, we would have the same
+unfathomable sources of inspiration and sacrifice to draw upon in our
+acts as a nation as the individual has who believes he is immortal, and
+that 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. The
+great problem of all civilizations is the creation of citizens: that is,
+of people who are dominated by the ideal of the general welfare, who
+will sink private desire and work harmoniously with their fellow-
+citizens for the highest good of their race.  While we may all agree
+that war brings about an eruption of the arcane and elemental forces
+which lie normally in the pit of human life, as the forces which cause
+earthquakes lie normally asleep in the womb of the world, none the less
+we must admit that military genius has discovered and applied with
+mastery a law of life which is of the highest importance to
+civilization--far more important to civil even than to military
+development--and that is the means by which the individual will forget
+his personal danger and sacrifice life itself for the general welfare.
+In no other organization will men in great masses so entirely forget
+themselves as men will in battle under military discipline.  What is the
+cause of this?  Can we discover how it is done and apply the law to
+civil life?
+
+The military discipline works miracles.  The problem before the captains
+of armies is to take the body of man, the most naturally egoistic of all
+things, which hates pain and which will normally take to its legs in
+danger and try to save itself, and to dominate it so that the body and
+the soul inhabiting it will stand still and face all it loathes.  And
+the problem is solved in the vast majority of cases.  After military
+training the civilians who formerly would fly before a few policemen
+will manfully and heroically stand, not the blows of a baton, but a
+whole hail of bullets, a cannonade lasting through a day;  nay, they
+will for weeks and months, day by day, risk and lose life for a cause,
+for an idea, at a word of command.  They may not have half as good a
+cause to lose life for as they had as a mob of angry civilians, but they
+will face death now, and the chances of mutilation and agony worse than
+death.  Can we inspire civilians with the same passionate self-
+forgetfulness in the pursuit of the higher ideals of peace?  Men in a
+regiment have to a large extent the personal interests abolished.  The
+organization they now belong to supports them and becomes their life.
+By their union with it a new being is created.  Exercise, drill,
+maneuver, accentuate that unity, and esprit de corps arises, so that
+they feel their highest life is the corporate one;  and that feeling is
+fostered continually, until at last all the units, by some law of the
+soul, are as it were in spite of themselves, in spite of the legs which
+want to run, in spite of the body which trembles with fear, constrained
+to move in obedience to the purpose of the whole organism expressed by
+its controlling will;  and so we get these devoted masses of men who
+advance again and again under a hail more terrible than Dante imagined
+falling in his vision of the fiery world.
+
+There is nothing like it in civilian life, but yet the aim of the higher
+minds in all civilizations is to create a similar devotion to civic
+ideals, so that men will not only, as Pericles said, "give their bodies
+for the commonwealth," but will devote mind, will, and imagination with
+equal assiduity and self-surrender to the creation of a civilization
+which 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 of
+life than he could finally reach by the utmost private efforts of which
+he 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 like
+power of turning the thoughts to the general good.
+
+I may say also that to create a militarist organization, before the
+natural principles to be safe-guarded are well understood and a common
+possession of all the people in the country, would be a danger akin to
+the peril of allowing children to play with firearms. We may find it a
+bad business to create natural ideals as they are required, just as it
+is a perilous business to try to create an army when a country is in a
+state of war.  If we do not rapidly create a national culture embodying
+the fundamental ideas we wish to see prevailing in society our volunteer
+armies will be subject to influences from the baser sort of politicians
+who would force party aims on the country.  We shall have a wretched
+future unless the soul of the country can dominate the physical forces
+in it, unless ideals of national conduct, liberty of speech and thought,
+of justice and brotherhood, exist to inspire and guide it, and are
+recognized by all and appealed to by all parties equally.
+
+We are standing on the threshold of nationhood, and it is problems like
+these we should be setting ourselves to solve, unless we are to be an
+unimportant province of the world, a mere administrative area inhabited
+by a quite undistinguished people.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+
+But there are other methods of devotion to the national being possible
+to us through collective action, and I was moved to imagine one, having
+once received a letter from a bloodthirsty correspondent--one of that
+rather numerous class whose minds are always loaded with ball cartridge,
+whose fingers are always on the trigger, and who are always calling on
+the authorities not to hesitate to shoot.  He wrote to me during a
+railway strike, advocating military conscription in order that railway
+men who went out on strike could be called up by the military
+authorities, as the French railway strikers were, and who were subject
+to martial law if they disobeyed.  I do not think with those who believe
+the venerable remedy of blood-letting is the best cure for social
+maladies;  and I would have thought no more about that stern
+disciplinarian, 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 the
+hope that our people in some future, when the social order will create
+public spirit and the passion for the State more plentifully than it
+does today, may recur to the idea and apply it.  Nearly every State in
+the 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 the
+imagination in the idea of war, and I am altogether with that noble body
+of men who are trying, by means of arbitration treaties, to solve
+national differences by reason rather than by force.  But we all
+recognize something noble in the spirit of the nation where the
+community agrees that every man shall give up some years of his life to
+the State for the preservation of the State, and may be called upon to
+surrender life absolutely in that service.  While the manhood of a race
+does this on the whole with cheerfulness, there must be something of
+high character in the manhood of that nation.  A certain gravity
+attaches to national decisions which are made, as it were, upon the
+slopes of death, because none are exempt from service, and there is no
+delirious mob ready to yell for a war in which it does not run the risk
+of having its own dirty skin perforated by bullets.  In Ireland we have
+never had military conscription, for reasons which are well known to
+all, and upon which I need not enter.  I am well satisfied it should be
+so, for it leaves open to us the possibility of a much nobler service,
+one which has never yet been attempted by any modern nation, and that is
+civil conscription.
+
+I throw out this suggestion, which may hold the imagination of those who
+have noble conceptions of what national life should be and what a nation
+should work for, in the hope that some time it may fructify.  There is a
+prohibition laid on the people in this island against conscription for
+military purposes.  Is there any reason why we should not have
+conscription for civil purposes?  Why should not every young man in
+Ireland give up two years of his life in a comradeship of labor with
+other young men, and be employed under skilled direction in great works
+of public utility, in the erection of public buildings, the beautifying
+of our cities, reclamation of waste lands, afforestation, and other
+desirable objects?  The principle of service for the State for military
+purposes is admitted in every country, even at last by the English-
+speaking peoples.  It is easy to be seen how this principle of
+conscription could be applied to infinitely nobler ends--to the building
+up of a beautiful civilization--and might make the country adopting it
+in less than half a century as beautiful as ancient Attica or majestic
+as ancient Egypt.  While other nations take part of the life of young
+men for instruction in war, why should not the State in Ireland, more
+nobly inspired, ask of its young men that they should give equally of
+their lives to the State, not for the destruction of life, but for the
+conservation of life?  This service might be asked from all--high and
+low, well and humbly born--except from those who can plead the reasons
+which exempt people abroad from military service.  As things stand
+today, if the State undertakes any public work, it does it more
+expensively by far than it would be if undertaken by private enterprise.
+Every person puts up prices for the State or for municipalities.  Labor,
+land, and materials are all charged at the highest possible rates,
+whereas if there was any really high conception of citizenship and of
+the functions of the State, the citizens would agree so that works of
+public utility, or those which conspired to add to national dignity,
+should be done at least cost to the community.  Where there is no
+national sacrifice there is no national pride.  Because there is no
+national pride our modern civilizations show meanly compared with the
+titanic architecture of the cities and majestic civilizations of the
+past. We know from the ruins of these proud cities that he who walked
+into ancient Rome, Athens, Thebes, Memphis and Babylon, walked amid
+grandeurs which must have exalted the spirit.  To walk into Manchester,
+Sheffield, or Liverpool is to feel a weight upon the soul.  There is no
+national feeling for beauty in our industrial civilizations.
+
+Let us suppose Ireland had through industrial conscription about fifty
+thousand young men every year at its disposal under a national works
+department.  What could be done?  First of all it would mean that every
+young man in the country would have received an industrial training of
+some kind.  The work of technical instruction could be largely carried
+on in connection with this industrial army.  People talk of the benefit
+of discipline and obedience secured by military service.  This and much
+more could be secured by a labor conscription. Every man in the island
+would have got into the habit of work at a period of life when it is
+most necessary, 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 department
+of national works should open up prospects of rapid employment in the
+ordinary industrial life of the country when the period of public
+service was closed.  For those engaged there would be a true comradeship
+in labor, and the phrase, "the dignity of labor," about which so much
+cant has been written, would have a real significance where young men
+were working together for the public benefit with the knowledge that any
+completed work would add to the health, beauty, dignity, and prosperity
+of the State.  In return for this labor the State should feed and clothe
+its industrial army, educate them, and familiarize them with some branch
+of employment, and make them more competent after this period of service
+was over to engage in private enterprise. Two years of such training
+would dissipate all the slackness, lack of precision, and laziness which
+are so often apparent in young men who have never had any strict
+discipline in their homes, and whom parental weakness has rendered unfit
+for the hard usiness of life.
+
+The benefit to those undergoing such a training would of itself justify
+civil conscription;  but when we come to think of the nation--what might
+not be done by a State with a national labor army under its control?
+Public works might be undertaken at a cost greatly below that which
+would otherwise be incurred, and the estimates which now paralyze the
+State, when it considers this really needed service or that, would
+assume a different appearance, as it would be embracing in one
+enterprise technical education and the accomplishment of beneficial
+works.  With such an army under skilled control the big cities could
+have 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 planted
+with fruit trees.  National schools, picture-galleries, public halls,
+libraries, and a thousand enterprises which now hang fire because at
+present labor for public service is the most expensive labor, all could
+be undertaken.  If the State becomes very poor, as indeed it is certain
+to be, it may be forced into some such method of fulfilling its
+functions.  Are we, with enormous burdens of debt, to hang up every
+useful public work because of the expense, and spend our lives in paying
+State debts while the body for whom we work is unable, on account of the
+expense, to do anything for us in return?  If the State is to continue
+its functions we shall have to commandeer people for its service in
+times of peace as is done in times of war.  There is hardly an argument
+which could be used to defend military conscription which could not be
+equaled with as powerful an argument for civil conscription.  I am not
+at all sure that if the State in Ireland decided to utilize two years of
+every young man's life for State purposes that we could not disband most
+of our expensive constabulary and make certain squads of our civil
+recruits responsible for the keeping of public law and order, leaving
+only the officers as permanent professionals, for of course there must
+be expert control of the conscripts.  The postal service might also be
+carried on largely by conscripted civilians.
+
+This may appear a fantastic programme, but I would like to see it argued
+out.  It would create a real brotherhood in work, just as the army
+creates in its own way a brotherhood between men in the same regiments.
+The nation adopting civil conscription could clean itself up in a couple
+of generations, so that in respect of public services it would be
+incomparable.  The alternative to this is to starve all public services,
+to make the State simply the tax-collector, to pay the interest on a
+huge debt, and so get it hated because it can do nothing except collect
+money to pay the interest on a colossal national debt.  Obviously the
+State as an agency to bring about civilization cannot perform both
+services--pay interest on huge public loans, and continue an expensive
+service.  It must find out some way in which public services can be
+continued, and if possible improved, and the open way to that is civil
+conscription and the assertion of a claim to two or three years of the
+work of every citizen for civil purposes, just as it now asserts a claim
+on the services of citizens for the defense of the State.  As national
+debts are more and more piled up, it has seemed to many that here must
+be an end to what was called social reform, that we were entering on a
+black era, and no dawn would show over Europe for another century.
+There is always a way out of troubles if people are imaginative enough
+and brotherly enough to conceive of it and bold enough to take action
+when they have found the way. The real danger for society is that it may
+become spiritless and hidebound and tamed, and have none of those high
+qualities necessary in face of peril, and the more people get accustomed
+to thinking of bold schemes the better.  They will get over the first
+shock, 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 to
+beauty;  when its people are living under unsanitary conditions and yet
+the 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 the
+possibilities of industrial conscription, and of revising the character
+of the purposes for which nations have hitherto claimed service from
+their young citizens on behalf of the State.  Debarred by a fate not
+altogether unkind from training every citizen in the arts of war Ireland
+might--if the love of country and the desire for service are really so
+strong as we are told--suddenly become eminent among the nations of the
+world by adopting a policy which in half a century would make our mean
+cities and our backward countryside the most beautiful in the modern
+world.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+
+I have not in all this written anything about the relations of Ireland
+with other countries, or even with our neighbors, in whose political
+household 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 old
+hostility.  Race hatred is the cheapest and basest of all national
+passions, 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 grow
+nobly like what we adore, and ignobly like what we hate;  and no people
+in Ireland became so anglicized in intellect and temperament, and even
+in the manner of expression, as those who hated our neighbors most.  All
+hatreds long persisted in bring us to every baseness for which we hated
+others.  The only laws which we cannot break with impunity are divine
+laws, and no law is more eternally sure in its workings than that which
+condemns us to be even as that we condemned.  Hate is the high commander
+of so many armies that an inquiry into the origin of this passion is at
+least as needful as histories of other contemporary notorieties. Not
+emperors or parliaments alone raise armies, but this passion also. It
+will sustain nations in defeat.  When everything seems lost this wild
+captain will appear and the scattered forces are reunited. They will be
+as oblivious of danger as if they were divinely inspired, but if they
+win their battle it is to become like the conquered foe. All great wars
+in history, all conquests, all national antagonisms, result in an
+exchange 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 as
+a force in national life.  It is always possible to win a cause without
+the 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 in
+himself, he should take it as a warning that conscience is battling in
+his own being with that very thing he loathes.  Nations hate other
+nations for the evil which is in themselves;  but they are as little
+given to self-analysis as individuals, and while they are right to
+overcome evil, they should first try to understand the genesis of the
+passion in their own nature.  If we understand this, many of the ironies
+of history will be intelligible.  We will understand why it was that our
+countrymen in Ulster and our countrymen in the rest of Ireland, who have
+denounced each other so vehemently, should at last appear to have
+exchanged characteristics: why in the North, having passionately
+protested against physical force movements, no-rent manifestos, and
+contempt for Imperial Parliament, they should have come themselves at
+last to organize a physical force movement, should threaten to pay no
+taxes, and should refuse obedience to an Act of Parliament.  We will
+understand also why it was their opponents came themselves to address to
+Ulster all the arguments and denunciations Ulster had addressed to them.
+I do not point this out with intent to annoy, but to illustrate by late
+history a law in national as well as human psychology.  If this
+unpopular psychology I have explained was adopted everywhere as true, we
+would never hear expressions of hate.  People would realize they were
+first revealing and then stabbing their own characters before the world.
+
+Nations act towards other nations as their own citizens act towards each
+other.  When slavery existed in a State, if that nation attacked another
+it was with intent to enslave.  Where there is a fierce economic
+competition between citizen and citizen then in war with another nation,
+the object of the war is to destroy the trade of the enemy.  If the
+citizens in any country could develop harmonious life among themselves
+they would manifest the friendliest feelings towards the people of other
+countries.  We find that it is just among groups of people who aim at
+harmonious life, co-operators and socialists, that the strongest
+national impulses to international brotherhood arise;  and wars of
+domination are brought about by the will of those who within a State are
+dominant 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.
+Moral forces are really more powerful than physical forces.  One Christ
+changed the spiritual life of Europe;  one Buddha affected more myriads
+in Asia.
+
+The co-operative ideal of brotherhood in industry has helped to make
+stronger the ideal of the brotherhood of humanity, and no body of men in
+any of the countries in the great War of our time regarded it with more
+genuine sorrow than those who were already beginning to promote schemes
+for international co-operation.  It must be mainly in movements inspired
+with the ideal of the brotherhood of man, that the spirit will be
+generated which, in the future, shall make the idea of war so detestable
+that statesmen will find it is impossible to think of that solution of
+their disputes as they would think now of resorting to private
+assassination of political opponents. The great tragedy of Europe was
+brought about, not by the German Emperor, nor by Sir Edward Grey, nor by
+the Czar, nor by any of the other chiefs ostensibly controlling foreign
+policy, but by the nations themselves.  These men may have been agents,
+but their action would have been impossible if they did not realize that
+there was a vast body of national feeling behind them not opposed to
+war. Their citizens were in conflict with each other already, generating
+the moods which lead on to war.  Emperors, foreign secretaries,
+ambassadors, cabinet ministers are not really powerful to move nations
+against 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 by edict the religion of his subjects, and a week would see him
+bereft of place and power.  They could not do this, because the will of
+the nation would be against it.  They resort to war and prepare for it
+because the will of the nation is with them, and this throws us back on
+the private citizens, who finally are individually and collectively
+responsible for the actions of the State.  In the everlasting battle
+between good and evil, private soldiers are called upon to fight as well
+as the captains, and it is only through the intensive cultivation by
+individuals and races of the higher moral and intellectual qualities,
+until in intensity they outweigh the mood and passion of the rest, that
+war will finally become obsolete as the court of appeal.  When there is
+a panic of fire in a crowded building men are suddenly tested as to
+character.  Some will become frenzied madmen, fighting and trampling
+their way out.  Others will act nobly, forgetting themselves.  They have
+no time to think.  What they are in their total make up as human beings,
+overbalanced either for good or evil, appears in an instant.  Even so,
+some time in the heroic future, some nation in a crisis will be weighed
+and will act nobly rather than passionately, and will be prepared to
+risk national extinction rather than continue existence at the price of
+killing myriads of other human beings, and it will oppose moral and
+spiritual forces to material forces, and it will overcome the world by
+making gentleness its might, as all great spiritual teachers have done.
+It comes to this, we cannot overcome hatred by hatred or war by war, but
+by the opposites of these.  Evil is not overcome by evil but by good;
+and any race like the Irish, eager for national life, ought to learn
+this truth--that humanity will act towards their race as their race acts
+towards humanity.  The noble and the base alike beget their kin.
+Empires, ere they disappear, see their own mirrored majesty arise in the
+looking-glass of time.  Opposed to the pride and pomp of Egypt were the
+pride and pomp of Chaldaea. Echoing the beauty of the Greek city state
+were many lovely cities made in their image.  Carthage evoked Rome.  The
+British Empire, by the natural balance and opposition of things, called
+into being another empire with a civilization of coal and steel, and
+with ambitions for colonies and for naval power, and with that image of
+itself it must wrestle for empire.  The great armadas that throng the
+seas, the armed millions upon the earth betray the fear in the minds of
+races, nay, the inner spiritual certitude the soul has, that pride and
+lust of power must yet be humbled by their kind. They must at last meet
+their equals face to face, called to them as steel to magnet by some
+inner 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 race
+conflicts except the equally determined and heroic development of the
+spiritual, moral, and intellectual forces which disdain to use the force
+and fury of material powers.
+
+We may be assured that the divine law is not mocked, and it cannot be
+deceived.  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 true to its type:  moods and thoughts just as much as birds and
+beasts and fishes.  When I hear people raging against England or Germany
+or Russia I know that rage will beget rage, and go on begetting it, and
+so the whole devilish generation of passions will be continued.  There
+are no nations to 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 womb of time, for whose coming we pray.  Those
+countries of the future we must carve out of the humanity of today, and
+we can begin building them up within our present empires and
+nationalities just as we are building up the co-operative movement in a
+social order antagonistic to it.  The people who are trying to create
+these new ideals in the world are outposts, sentinels, and frontiersmen
+thrown out before the armies of the intellectual and spiritual races yet
+to come into being.  We can all enlist in these armies and be comrades
+to the pioneers.  I hope many will enlist in Ireland.  I would cry to
+our idealists to come out of this present-day Irish Babylon, so filled
+with sectarian, political, and race hatreds, and to work for the future.
+I believe profoundly, with the most extreme of Nationalists, in the
+future of Ireland, and in the vision of light seen by Bridget which she
+saw and confessed between hopes and tears to Patrick, and that this is
+the Isle of Destiny and the destiny will be glorious and not ignoble,
+and when our hour is come we will have something to give to the world,
+and we will be proud to give rather than to grasp.  Throughout their
+history Irishmen have always wrought better for others than for
+themselves, and when they unite in Ireland to work for each other, they
+will direct into the right channel all that national capacity for
+devotion to causes for which they are famed.  We ought not only to
+desire to be at peace with each other, but with the whole world, and
+this can only be brought about by the individual citizen 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 of Babylon.  It may
+seem a long way to set things right, but it is the swift way and the
+royal road, and there is no other; and nobody, no prophet crying before
+his time, will be listened to until the people are ready for him.  The
+congregation must gather before the preacher can deliver what is in him
+to say.  The economic brotherhood which I have put forward as an Irish
+ideal would, in its realization, make us at peace with ourselves, and if
+we are at peace with ourselves we will be at peace with our neighbors
+and all other nations, and will wish them the goodwill we have among
+ourselves, and will receive from them the same goodwill. I do not
+believe in legal and formal solutions of national antagonisms. While we
+generate animosities among ourselves we will always display them to
+other nations, and I prefer to search out how it is national hatreds are
+begotten, and to show how that cancer can be cut out of the body
+politic.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+
+
+It seems inevitable that the domination of the individual by the State
+must become ever greater.  It is in the evolutionary process. The
+amalgamation of individuals into nationalities and empires is as much in
+the cosmic plan as the development of highly organized beings out of
+unicellular organisms.  I believe this process will continue until
+humanity itself is so psychically knit together that, as a being, it
+will manifest some form of cosmic consciousness in which the individual
+will share.  Our spiritual intuitions and the great religions of the
+world alike indicate some such goal as that to which this turbulent
+cavalcade of humanity is wending.  A knowledge of this must be in our
+subconscious being, or we would find the sacrifices men make for the
+State otherwise inexplicable. The State, though now ostensibly secular,
+makes more imperious claims on man than the ancient gods did.  It lays
+hold of life. It asserts its right to take father, brother, and son, and
+to send them to meet death in its own defense.  It denies them a choice
+or 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 is recognized by the vast majority of citizens. During eras of peace
+the citizen may be always in conflict with the policy of the State.  He
+may call it a tyranny, but yet when it is in peril he will die to
+preserve for it an immortal life. The hold the State establishes over
+the spirit of man is the more wonderful when we look rearward on
+history, and see with what labor and sacrifice the State was
+established.  But we see also how readily, once the union has been
+brought about, men will die to preserve it, even although it is a
+tyranny, a bad State.  For what do they die unless the spirit in man has
+some inner certitude that the divine event to which humanity tends is a
+unity of its multitudinous life, and that a State--even a bad State--
+must be preserved by its citizens, because it is at least an attempt at
+organic unity?  It is a simulacrum of the ideal;  it contains the germ
+or possibility of that to which the spirit of man is traveling.  It
+disciplines the individual in service to that greater being in which it
+will find its fulfillment, and a bad State is better than no State at
+all.  To be without a State is to prowl backwards from the divinity
+before us to the beast behind us.
+
+The power the State exerts is a spiritual power, acting on or through
+the will of man.  The volunteer armies do not really march to die with
+more readiness than the conscript armies.  The sacrifice is not readily
+explicable by material causes.  There is no material reason why the
+proletarian--who has no property to defend, who is more or less sure as
+a skilled craftsman of employment under any ruler--should concern
+himself whether his ruler be King, Kaiser, or President.  But not one in
+a hundred proletarians really thinks like that.  It is not the hope of
+personal profit works upon men to risk life.  Let some exploiter of
+industry desire to employ a thousand men at dangerous work, with the
+risks of death or disablement equal to those of war;  let it be known
+that one in six will be killed and another be disabled, and what sum
+will purchase the service of workers?  They will risk life for the
+State, though given a bare subsistence or a pay which they would
+describe as inhuman if offered by one of the autocrats of industry.  Men
+working for the State will make the most extraordinary sacrifices; but
+they stand stubbornly and sullenly as disturbers and blockers of all
+industry which is run for private profit.  Is it not clear of the two
+policies for the State to adopt, to promote personal interests among its
+citizens or to unite men for the general good, that the first path is
+full of danger to the State, while through the other men will march
+cheerfully, though it be to death, in defense of the State. Something, a
+real life above the individual, acts through the national being, and
+would almost suggest to us that Heaven cannot fully manifest its will to
+humanity through the individual, but must utter itself through
+multitudes.  There must be an orchestration of humanity ere it can echo
+divine melodies. In real truth we are all seeking in the majesties we
+create for union with a greater Majesty.
+
+I wrote in an earlier page that the ancient conception of Nature as a
+manifestation of spirit was incarnating anew in the minds of modern
+thinkers;  that Nature was no longer conceived of as material or static
+in condition, but as force and continual motion;  that they were trying
+to identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces of
+Nature manifest with more power in society. The real nature of these
+energies manifesting in humanity I do not know, but they have been
+hinted at in the Scriptures, the oracles of the Oversoul, which speak of
+the whole creation laboring upwards and the entry of humanity into the
+Divine Mind, and of the re-introcession of That Itself with all Its
+myriad unity into Deity, so that God might be all in all.  I believe
+profoundly that men do not hold the ideas of liberty or solidarity,
+which have moved them so powerfully, merely as phantasies which are
+pleasant to the soul or make ease for the body;  but because, whether
+they struggle passionately for liberty or to achieve a solidarity, in
+working for these two ideals, which seem in conflict, they are divinely
+supported, in unison with the divine nature, and energies as real as
+those the scientist studies--as electricity, as magnetism, heat or
+light--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 in
+individualizing the soul if essential freedom is denied to it and there
+is only a destiny.  Wherever essential freedom, the right of the spirit
+to choose its own heroes and its own ideals, is denied, nations rise in
+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 or
+brotherhood with it.
+
+All these ideals of freedom, of brotherhood, of power, of justice, of
+beauty, which have been at one time or another the fundamental idea in
+civilizations, are heaven-born, and descended from the divine world,
+incarnating first in the highest minds in each race, perceived by them
+and transmitted to their fellow-citizens;  and it is the emergence or
+manifestation of one or other of these ideals in a group which is the
+beginning of a nation;  and the more strongly the ideal is held the more
+powerful becomes the national being, because the synchronous vibration
+of many minds in harmony brings about almost unconsciously a psychic
+unity, a coalescing of the subconscious being of many.  It is that inner
+unity which constitutes the national being.
+
+The idea of the national being emerged at no recognizable point in our
+history in Ireland.  It is older than any name we know.  It is not
+earth-born, but the synthesis of many heroic and beautiful moments, and
+these, it must be remembered, are divine in their origin.  Every heroic
+deed is an act of the spirit, and every perception of beauty is vision
+with the divine eye, and not with the mortal sense.  The spirit was
+subtly intermingled with the shining of old romance, and it is no mere
+phantasy which shows Ireland at its dawn in a misty light thronged with
+divine figures, and beneath and nearer to us demi-gods and heroes fading
+into recognizable men.  The bards took cognizance only of the most
+notable personalities who preceded them, and of these only the acts
+which had a symbolic or spiritual significance;  and these grew thrice
+refined as generations of poets in enraptured musings along by the
+mountains or in the woods brooded upon their heritage of story, until,
+as it passed from age to age, the accumulated beauty grew greater than
+the beauty of the hour.  The dream began to enter into the children of
+our race, and turn their thoughts from earth to that world in which it
+had its inception.
+
+It was a common belief among the ancient peoples that each had a
+national genius or deity who presided over them, in whose all-embracing
+mind they were contained, and who was the shepherd of their destinies.
+We can conceive of the national spirit in Ireland as first manifesting
+itself through individual heroes or kings, and as the history of famous
+warriors laid hold of the people, extending its influence until it
+created therein the germs of a kindred nature.
+
+An aristocracy of lordly and chivalrous heroes is bound in time to
+create a great democracy by the reflection of their character in the
+mass, and the idea of the divine right of kings is succeeded by the idea
+of the divine right of the people.  If this sequence cannot be traced in
+any one respect with historical regularity, it is because of the
+complexity of national life, its varied needs, the vicissitudes of
+history, and its infinite changes of sentiment. But the threads are all
+taken up in the end;  and ideals which were forgotten and absent from
+the voices of men will be found, when recurred to, to have grown to a
+rarer and more spiritual beauty in their quiet abode in the heart.  The
+seeds which were sown at the beginning of a race bear their flowers and
+fruits towards its close, and already antique names begin to stir us
+again with their power, and the antique ideals to reincarnate in us and
+renew their dominion 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 out
+of memory, but the mood in which they were established reappears in
+those who would create a communal or co-operative life in the nation
+into which those ancient clans long since have melted.  The instinct in
+the clans to waive aside the weak and to seek for an aristocratic and
+powerful character in their leaders reappears in the rising generation,
+who turn from the utterer of platitudes to men of real intellect and
+strong will.  The object of democratic organization is to bring out the
+aristocratic character in leadership, the vivid original personalities
+who act and think from their own will and their own centres, who bring
+down fire from the heaven of their spirits and quicken and vivify the
+mass, and make democracies also to be great and fearless and free.  A
+nation is dead where men acknowledge only conventions.  We must find out
+truth for ourselves, becoming first initiates and finally masters in the
+guild of life.  The intellect of Ireland is in chains where it ought to
+be free, and we have individualism in our economics which ought to be
+co-ordinated and sternly disciplined out of the iniquity of free
+profiteering.  To quicken the intellect and imagination of Ireland, to
+co-ordinate our economic life for the general good, should be the
+objects of national policy, and will subserve the evolutionary purpose.
+The free imagination and the aspiring mind alone climb into the higher
+spheres and deflect for us the ethereal currents.  It is the multitude
+of aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them of
+service to other nations, and it is by the character of the social order
+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 Irish
+polity, and would recall to them their early history, how when the fiery
+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 of
+Thine and Mine.  His ancient law counseled poverty to the spirit, lest
+the gates of Paradise should grow narrow before it like the eye of a
+needle.  I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is
+due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life.  What
+profound spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces
+men to battle with each other for the means of existence?  I know well
+that no political mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only,
+will of themselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and
+bring it under the dominion of the spirit.  For that, a far higher
+quality of thought and action than is here indicated is necessary. The
+economist can provide the daily bread, but that bread of the coming day
+which Christ wished his followers to aspire to must come otherwise.
+That should be the labor of the poets, artists, musicians, and of the
+heroic and aristocratic characters who provide by their life an image to
+which life can be modeled.  Therefore I beseech audience not only of the
+churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their
+aid in this labor.  They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals
+which can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create for
+us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and
+to 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 be
+laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang
+a solitary song;  to the writers who had turned from contemplating the
+great to the portrayal of the little in human nature.  I know how
+difficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to ask
+artists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create.  But we
+can ask all men--artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists--to be
+citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of
+the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the State
+will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will,
+consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being
+which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a
+tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical
+the spirit of man if we imagine rightly.  All greatness is brought about
+by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will.  Our literature
+certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty
+only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty
+conductor;  and as a people we shall never manifest the highest
+qualities in 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
+continually neutralize each other's efforts.  Yet there is no less power
+in humanity today than there ever was.  We see now clearly what untamed
+elemental fires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world.
+There was a feeling in society that, just as the earth itself had
+settled down to be a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient
+ferocities of earthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and
+rended sea from sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies
+we surmised in 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 well as about humanity.  While we indulged in these pleasing
+speculations on society, the scientists of our generation were placing
+beyond question or argument the doctrine of the indestructibility of
+energy and matter and we may be sure that while there is immortal life
+there must be immortal energies as its companions through time, and they
+will never be less powerful than they are today or were in the morning
+of the world.  There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten
+brotherhood of elemental powers;  and, while we cannot hope that by the
+wastage of time these powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an
+understanding of them we may get mastery over them.  The wild elephant
+of the woods, with a 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 of its channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our
+servant.  So we may hope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity
+itself, which break out in wars and Armageddons, will come under
+control.  We should not hope that man will ever be a less powerful
+being.  To hope that would be to wish for his degradation.  We should
+wish him to become ever more and more powerful by understanding himself,
+and by the unity of the spiritual faculties and the elemental energies
+in him into one harmonious whole.  At present he is feeble because he
+is, to use the scriptural illustration, a house divided against itself.
+
+Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflict
+with each other.  Get the two mightiest bulls in a herd, put them
+opposing each other in a narrow passage, and they, being of equal
+strength, will reduce each other to feebleness.  Neither will make
+headway.  Let them unite together in their charge, and what will oppose
+them?  Men at conflict in their own hearts, opposing each other in the
+world, reduce themselves and each other to wretchedness.  The race which
+could eliminate the factors which promote internal conflict in society
+and could organize human energies in harmony, would be powerful beyond
+our wildest dreams. Every now and then in world-history we come across
+instances of what organized humanity could accomplish.  There are
+fragments of an architecture so majestic that they awe us as the high
+rocks 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 is
+also a nature energy of divine origin.  Europe by its conflicts today is
+reducing itself to barbarism and powerlessness, and these conflicts
+arose out of the internal conflicts in society, for individuals and
+nations act outside themselves as they act inside themselves.  The
+problem for Europe is to create a harmonious life, and it is the problem
+for us in Ireland, and we will have to work this out for ourselves.  The
+creation of a harmonious life among a people must come from within.  It
+can never come by the imposition of an external law imposed by another
+people:  Never did master and slave work in true unison, no matter how
+benevolent the master or how yielding the slave, for there is in every
+man, no matter what his condition, a spark of divine life, and it will
+always be ready to stir him out of subjection, as the fires of
+earthquake lie below the cultivated plain.  Man is a creature who has
+free will, and it is by self-devised and self-checked efforts he will
+attain his full human stature.  So the problem of creating an organic
+life in Ireland, a harmony of our people, a union of their efforts for
+the common good and for the manifestation of whatever beauty, majesty,
+and spirituality is in us, must be one we ourselves must solve for
+ourselves.
+
+To be indifferent to the possibilities of human life, to ignore the
+problem, is to turn our back on heaven, which fashioned the spirit of
+man in its image.  If the spirit of man has likeness to Deity, it means
+that if it manifests itself fully in the world, the world too becomes a
+shadowy likeness of the heavens, and our civilizations will make a
+harmony with the diviner spheres.  We give still a service of lip belief
+to 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
+matter in us, for when any one utters out of profound conviction his
+faith, there are always multitudes ready to respond.  What really
+prevents an organic unity in Ireland is the economic individualism of
+our lives.  The science of economics deals with the efforts of men to
+mine out of nature the food, minerals, and materials necessary to
+preserve life.  There is nothing more certain than that where men work
+alone or only with the aid of their families they are little higher than
+the animals.  When they tend to unite civilization begins.  Then arise
+the towers, the temples, the cities, the achievements of the architect
+and engineer.  The earth is tapped of its arcane energies, the very air
+yields to us its mysterious powers.  We control the etheric waves and
+send the message of our deeds across the ocean.  Yet in the midst of
+these vast external manifestations of power, multitudes of men and women
+live in squalor, isolated in their labors, living in the slums of
+cities;  and this, if we examine it, comes about because the
+organization of human energies into a harmonious unity is not complete.
+There is really no lack of food, clothing, building material, land.
+Nature has provided bountifully for more myriads than we are likely to
+see peopling the earth.  But people compete with each other and
+undersell each other, and those who labor are mulcted of their due, and
+instead of turning to the earth--the inexhaustible mother--and working
+unitedly for the common weal, they continue that fierce competition and
+stultify each other's efforts and reduce each other to wretchedness.
+Humanity is a house divided against itself.  Those who feel this to be
+true must gather round any movement which gives a hope for the future,
+which indicates a policy by which the organic unity of society in
+Ireland might be attained, and our people work harmoniously to make
+beauty and health prevail in our civilization.  What each gives up to
+society in the making of a civilization he gets back a thousandfold.
+Now, the co-operative movement alone of all movements in Ireland has
+aspired to make an economic solidarity in Ireland.  Whatever the aims of
+other movements may be--and many of them have high ideals and are
+necessary for the spiritual and intellectual development of our people--
+there is none of them which has for aim the unity of economic life.
+They all leave untouched this problem--how are we to organize society so
+that people will not be in conflict with each other, will not nullify
+each other's efforts, but all will conspire together for unity, so that
+none shall be forgotten or oppressed or left out of our brotherhood?
+The policy I put forward is incomplete and imperfect, and it must
+necessarily be so, being mainly the work of one mind, and to complete it
+and perfect it there must be many minds and many workers fired by the
+ideal.  But I have indicated in some completeness how the rural
+population could be co-operatively organized, federated together, and
+how the urban population could be organized and brought into a harmony
+of economic purpose with the folk of the country.  Within the limits of
+object these suggestions amount to a policy for the nation.
+
+If the tragic condition of the world leaves us unstirred, if we draw no
+lessons from it, if there is no fiery stirring of will in Ireland to
+make it a better place to live in, then indeed we may lose hope for our
+country.  Let us remember the most scornful condemnation in Scripture
+was not given to the evil but to the indifferent:  "Because thou art
+neither hot nor cold I will spew thee out of my mouth."  Let us not be
+the Laodiceans of Europe, listless and indifferent to human needs,
+swallowing our whisky and our porter, stupefying our souls, while our
+poor are sweated; letting the children of our cities die with more
+carelessness about life than the people of any other European country,
+with sectarian organization's crawling in secrecy like poisonous
+serpents through the undergrowth of swamps and forests.  The co-
+operative movement is at least open and ideal in its aims and objects.
+It is national and not sectional.  It seeks the triumph of no section
+but the unity of our people, where unity alone is possible.  Our
+intransigents and extremists of all parties are not hurt or wounded by
+their adhesion to the co-operative ideal.  We may make up our minds that
+the stubborn Irish temperament will never be overcome, but it may be
+won, and the movement which invites all parties and creeds into its
+ranks and gives them the largest opportunities of working together and
+understanding each other, gives also the largest hope of the gradual
+melting of old bitterness into a common tolerance where what is best
+essentially wins;  for all true triumphs are triumphs not of force, but
+the conquest by a superior beauty of what is less beautiful.  We should
+aim at a society where people will be at harmony in their economic life,
+will readily listen to different opinions from their own, will not turn
+sour faces on 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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's National Being, by (A.E.)George William Russell
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