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+Project Gutenberg's National Being, by (A.E.)George William Russell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: National Being
+       Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity
+
+Author: (A.E.)George William Russell
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8104]
+Posting Date: July 29, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NATIONAL BEING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jake Jaqua
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NATIONAL BEING
+
+Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity
+
+By "A.E." [George William Russell]
+
+
+
+To The Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett
+
+A good many years ago you grafted a slip of poetry on your 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
+domestic 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 business 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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