The National Being Some Thoughts On An Irish Polity

THE

NATIONAL BEING

A.E.

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THE NATIONAL BEING

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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THE

NATIONAL BEING

SOME THOUGHTS ON
AN IRISH POLITY

BY

A. E.

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1937

First frintid KJlft

Riprtmitil 1917, 1918, 1910, 19*7
ntftrrtd * Matmillan V C., Itrf., 11

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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. Tins book is a consequence of your grafting opera-
tion, and so I dedicate it to you.

A. .

THE NATIONAL BEING

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

i B

2 THE NATIONAL BEING

the infant, without which in their make-up in-
dividuals or nations do nothing worthy of remem-
brance, 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 brood-
ing 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 P arliaments, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 3

harsh treatment of an animal provokes an out-
burst 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 Cer-
tainly 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 com-
monalty over Ireland if we are to create a civiliza-
tion 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 govern-
ment, 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 char-
acter and intellect.

Civilizations are externalizations of the soul
and character of races. They are majestic or

4 THE NATIONAL BEING

mean according to the treasure of beauty, imagina-
tion, 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 in-
tellectual 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 5

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, econo-
mists, 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 labour 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 news-
papers, have any genuine knowledge of any
subject on earth or much imagination of anything
beautiful in the heavens ?

6 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 danger-
ous 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 appre-
hended 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 prin-
ciples. 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 7

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 develop-
ment 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 neighbour, allow no freedom
of thought of her or service of her other than their

8 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 dis-
coveries we have yet to make about ourselves to
unite us to fulfil our destiny. We have to dis-
cover 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 brother-
hood, 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, philoso-
phers, and historians did for Germany, or what
the poets and artists of Greece did for the

THE NATIONAL BEING 9

Athenians : and that is, to create national ideals
which will doriiinate the policy of statesmen, the
actions of citizens, the universities, the social
organizations, the administration of State depart-
ments, 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 prin-
ciples 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 undistin-

to THE NATIONAL BEING

guishecL 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
an 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 labours of others for unity and mag-
nificence of effect. So ancient Egypt, with its
temples, sphinxes, pyramids, and symbolic decora-
tions, 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

12 THE NATIONAL BEING

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, moulding 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 Cuchu-
lain, 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 moulded
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 ao

THE NATIONAL BEING 13

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 rumour 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, en-
larging 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
moulding 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

I 4 THE NATIONAL BEING

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. Whit-
man, 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 incorrupted 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*

Ill

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 domin-
ance of one religious idea would let loose illimit-
able 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. Aristo-
cracies, 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

1 6 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 demo-
cratic 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 to-day. 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 archi-

THE NATIONAL BEING 17

tecturc 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 aristo-
cracies. 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 labour whose freedom
to vote confers on them no real power, and who
are most often scorned and neglected by those
who profit by their labours. Indifference turns
to fear and hatred if labour 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 founda-
tions. Can we master these arcane human
forces ? Can we, by any device, draw this

c

1 8 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 inte-
grating labour into its economic structure, it
will wreck that civilization, and it will do that
more swiftly to-day 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 labour in industries

THE NATIONAL BEING 19

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 organiza-
tion 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 pre-
vailing 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 21

with regard to purchase and sale by private
traders and dealers, who are independent of
economic control from the consumers or pro-
ducers, 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 cross-roads ; 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 to-
gether. 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.

22 THE NATIONAL BEING

Nobody has tried to amalgamate them, or to
economize human effort or cheapen the distribu-
tion 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 amalgama-
tion 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 apprentice-
ship in another like it. These numerous com-
stitors of each other do not keep down prices.
hey 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.

THE NATIONAL BEING 23

Let us now for a little consider the small
farmer around whom have gathered these multi-
tudinous 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, bis eggs, his cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep
ure 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

24 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 un-
conscious depth of character of all who live and
labour 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 con-
centration 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 25

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. Dis-
cussing 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 coun-
tries 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
but identities of interest. He also meets the
delegates from other societies in district confer-
ences or general congresses, and those who meet
thus find their interests are common, and a new
friendliness springs up between North and South,

26 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 ad-
ministration 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 men-
tioned 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, thoughtful ness,
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 or the

THE NATIONAL BEING 27

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 experi-
ments. 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 circum-
ference ought to be the nation. The vast majority
of Irish citizens rarely depart from their centre,
or establish those vital relations with their circum-
ference which alone entitle them to the privi-
leges 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
centring 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

a8 THE NATIONAL BEING

course of his daily occupations. This organiza-
tion 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 transforma-
tion of the social order will make men truly
citizens, thinking in terms of the nation, identify-
ing national with personal interests. For those
who believe there is a divine seed in humanity,
this atmosphere, if any, they may hope will pro-
mote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which

THE NATIONAL BEING 29

in the past, in favourable 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 founda-
tions 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.

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

3

THE NATIONAL BEING 31

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 trans-
ference 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 pro-
prietorship, 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 Jerusalem^ 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-

32 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 labours 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 agri-
cultural. It seems only yesterday to the imagina-
tion 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
to-day make Great Britain seem to the acute
diagnoser of politicai 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 33

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
labours 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

34 THE NATIONAL BEING

of the townsman. They cannot be considered
as creatures of a different species. Yet statesmen
who have devoted so much thought to the con-
stitution 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 defence, 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 in-
dustrial 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 com-
munity/' but where do we find rural communities ?
There are rural populations, but that is altogether
a different thing* The word u community "

THE NATIONAL BEING 35

implies an association of people having common
interests and common possessions, bound to-
gether 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 individual-
istic. There are personal friendships, of course,
but few economic or social partnerships. Every-
body pursues his own occupation without regard
to the occupation of his neighbours. 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

36 THE NATIONAL BEING

interest of the individual in the community is
only sentimental, and as there is no organization,
the community lets its units slip away or dis-
appear 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 popula-
tion, 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. \Vhere

THE NATIONAL BEING 37

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 neighbours, but

38 THE NATIONAL BEING

find a complete ignorance on the subject, and
consequent lethargy. There is no social organ-
ism 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 north-west 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 organiza-
tion markets for them the eggs and poultry. It
procures seeds, fertilizers, and domestic require-
ments. It turns the members* pigs into bacon.
They have a village hall and a woman's organiza-
tion. 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-

THE NATIONAL BEING 39

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 ex-
pression 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 defence 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 char-
acter. 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 ab-

4

THE NATIONAL BEING 41

solutely 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 uni-
cellular 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 in-
numerable 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 im-
possible to the separated cells. Now humanity
to-day 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

42 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 them-
selves, 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 labours will
result in their equalling 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 NATIONAL BEING 43

the spirit of man than the feeling that his race
is acting nobly ; and that all together are per-
forming 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 idealism.
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 country-
side 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

44 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 con-
centrate 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 productive-
ness. 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. Individual-
ism was the mode of life. Every farmer manu-
factured and sold as seemed best in his eyes. It

THE NATIONAL BEING 45

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 con-
stituted 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

46 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 in-
dividual 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 47

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 labourers 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

48 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 labour 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 com-
munity 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 com-
munity 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 49

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 neighbouring 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 re-
moving all the hedges and planting the roadsides
and lanes with gooseberry bushes, currant bushes,
and fruit trees, as they do in some German com-
munes to-day. There would be eloquent plead-
ings 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 to-day
between neighbouring creameries, would excite
the imagination of the members, and the organized
community would be as swift to act as the un-
organized 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

E

50 THE NATIONAL BEING

industries of embroidery, crochet, Jace, dress-
making, weaving, spinning, or whatever new
industries the awakened intelligence of women
may devise and lay hold of as the peculiar labour
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 Parlia-
ment of the nation ; for wherever all the economic
power is centred, there also is centred 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 com-
munities naturally growing up in Ireland, with
perhaps a little stimulus from outside from rural

THE NATIONAL BEING 51

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 deter-
mined to eliminate the middleman in agriculture
we will fail to effect anything worth while attempt-
ing. 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 condi-
tion 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

$2 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 permanenc.
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 organ-
izations, must control the entire business con-
nected 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 whole-
sale prices. Every other kind of manufacturer
in the world gets trade terms when he buys.
Those who buy not to consume, but to manu-
facture and sell again get their requirements
at wholesale terms in every country in the world.
If a publisher of books is approached by a book-
seller 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 53

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 differentia-
tion 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 neces-
sary organization work among the farmers must
be carried on by an organizing body which is
entirely controlled by those interested in agricul-
ture farmers and their friends. To ask the
State or a State Department to undertake this
work is to ask a body influenced and often con-
trolled 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 educa-
tion 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

54 THE NATIONAL BEING

of farmers in these islands, is the only kind of
body which can pursue its work fearlessly, un-
hampered by alien interests. The moment such
a body declares its aims, its declaration automatic-
ally separates the sheep from the goats, and its
enemies are outside and not inside. The organ-
izing 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 move-
ment 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 stead-
fastly 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 labourer the pro-
letarian 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
labourer without, however inadequately, indicat-
ing some curves in his future evolution. These
labourers 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
labourers. Labour 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 to-day and dropped to-inorrow

55

56 THE NATIONAL BEING

will in modern times remain long in a country.
Employers often act as if they thought labour
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
labourers. 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 labour, should be organized in a
national union. That is bound to come. But
the agricultural labourer should, I think, no more
than labour 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 per-
manent employment by the community rather
than casual employment by the individual. Agri-
cultural labour undoubtedly will have to struggle
for better remuneration. Yet it has to be re-
membered that agriculture is a protean industry.
It is not like mining, where the colliery produces
coal and nothing but coal, and where the miners

THE NATIONAL BEING 57

have a practical monopoly of supply. It 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 labour
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 labourer 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 labour. If this takes place, as I hope it will,
the rural labourer, instead of being a manual
worker using primitive implements, will have
the status of a skilled mechanic employed per-

58 THE NATIONAL BEING

manently by a co-operative 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 pro-
portion to their trade.

A second policy open to agricultural labour
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 labourers in Italy, Rou-
mania, 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 labour, 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-o'perative society of
skilled labourers 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
labour 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,

THE NATIONAL BEING 59

or which would increase the sum of national
obligations. Land purchase on the old terms
I believe cannot be continued. Yet we will
demand the intensive cultivation of the national
estate, and increased production of wealth, especi-
ally 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 popula-
tion, 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 Govern-
ment is in power should facilitate the settlement
of men in co-operative 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 labourers 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 what-
ever the labourer may produce on his allotment.
The growth of national conscience and the spirit
of human brotherhood, and a feeling of shame

60 THE NATIONAL BEING

that any should be poor and neglected in the
national household, will be needed to bring the
rural labourer 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 labourers and bring them into the co-
operative community, then labour will be organ-
ized 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 labourers, and
the increase of the area in grass, and the im-
poverishing 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 im-
portance 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.

THE NATIONAL BEING 61

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
honour 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

62 THE NATIONAL BEING

more in the country and 1'ess 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 genera-
tion 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 sub-
stance of earth ? Is it not from Nature we draw
life ? Do we not perish without sunlight and

THE NATIONAL BEING 63

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 1
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 ?

64 THE NATIONAL BEING

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

THE NATIONAL BEING 65

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 to-day 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 labour
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 labour. 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 foetid slum and murky alleys, where the
devil hath his many mansions, where light and

66

THE NATIONAL BEING 67

air, the great purifiers, are already dimmed and
corrupted before they do him service. He is
insecure in the labour by which he lives. He
works to-day, and to-morrow 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 labouring 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
labours 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

68 THE NATIONAL BEING

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. In-
stinctively 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 69

with which I realized in a great labour 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

70 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 un-
corrupted, and those who turn to it find it there
as all finally must turn to it to fulfil 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 labour, 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 re-
flection 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 labour. Our working
classes are to increase and multiply and earn
profits for an employing class, as labour has
done from time immemorial in Babylon, in
Nineveh, in Rome, and in London to-day. But
a choice yet remains to us, because the character
of our civilization is not yet fixed. It is mainly

71

72 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 harbour, and steer their galleys
past the known coast and the familiar cities and
over untravelled 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 morion 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,

THE NATIONAL BEING 73

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 contem-
plate 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 labour if they feel
that their labour conspires with that of all other
workers for the general good ; but there is some-
thing loathsome to the spirit in the condition of
the labour market, where labour is regarded as a
commodity to be bought and sold like soap of

74 THE NATIONAL BEING

candles. For that truly describes how it is with
labour in our industrial system : we can buy
labour, 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 of opinion in thought,
-ill 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 en-
countered 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 75

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 reasoiis.

X

WHENEVER in Ireland there has been a revolt
of labour 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 labour
agitators misleading ignorant men. Every wild
phrase uttered by an exasperated worker is quoted
against the cause of labour, 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 realisation was to
bring not peace but a sword,

76

THE NATIONAL BEING 77

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 labour
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 labour should
set before itself is not a transitory improvement
in its wage, because a wage war never truly or
permanently improves the position of labour.
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

78 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 tran-
sitory 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 labour 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 k.
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.

THE NATIONAL BEING 79

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 analyse the
forces at the command of labour and capital, that
the latter has attached to itself by the bonds of
self-interest the scientific men engineers, in-
ventors, chemists, bacteriologists, designers, or-
ganizers, all the intellect of industry without
which, in alliance with itself, revolting labour
would be unable to continue production as before.
Labour 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 labour 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 labour, but it is one with
which it is difficult to imagine labour dealing a
knock-out blow to the present social order. I
believe in an orderly evolution of society, at least

80 THE NATIONAL BEING

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. Extraordin-
ary 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 she'd.
One can only say with Whitman :

Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued

retribution ?

Could I wish humanity different r
Could I wish the people made of wood and stone, or that

there be no justice in destiny or time ?

THE NATIONAL BEING 81

There is danger in revolution if the revolu-
tionary 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 labour, I believe, will not be gained by revolu-
tion 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 te pp c wers, 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 aLeady 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 labour 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 de-
pends 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 sbme 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 83

for trust to be placed in revolution. A machine-
gun with a few experts behind it is worth a
thousand revolutionary workers, however mad-
dened 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 legis-
latures 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 repre-
sentative 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 jn
many countries ; and what is needed here is to
study and co-ordinate these applications of co-
working, and to form a general staff of labour 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.

84 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 co-ordination 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 fail, 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 consump-
tion, 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 succeejd, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 85

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 surrend-
ered 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 in-
dividual, 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 labour. It ought to be
as much a matter of class honour 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 labour."
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

86 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 pro-
duction. 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 auto-
crats 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 advertise-
ment 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-opera-
tive 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 87

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 labour
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 in-
stitutions, all supporting each other and leaning
on each other ana 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

88 THE NATIONAL BEING

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. To-day our civil life is
a tangle of petty personal interests and competi-
tions. 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 psycho-
logical change takes place the democratic associa-
tions which have grown up haphazard as the
workers found it easiest to create them will be
changed and remodelled 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 organiza-
tions, and these react again in the national soul,
which would, I believe, willingly pass away from
that mood, but finds itself incarnated in organiza-
tions 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 con-
quered 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

89

90 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 labour 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 labour or labour
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 opera-
tive, 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 ?

THE NATIONAL BEING 91

Should he wish for the triumph of labour 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 jeweller would probably desire the per-
manence 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
labourer 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

92 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 employ-
ment, but it will not be a division of the money
so much to the interests of the farmer. However
we analyse the problem it appears to be to the
farmer's interests to support democratic move-
ments 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 trans-
ferred 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 93

clear, but it is, I think, just as sound. If agricul-
ture is neglected in any country the rural popula-
tion pour into the towns. The country becomes
a fountain of blackleg labour. Rural labour
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 manu-
facture, purchase, and sale, and with which both
rural and urban associations will find it to their

94 THE NATIONAL BEING

interest to be affiliated. Now the townsman
cannot to any extent supply foed for his stores by
buying farms. To control agricultural produc-
tion in that way would necessitate a financial
operation which the State would shrink from,
and which it would be impossible for urban co-
operators 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 eco-
nomically. 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 95

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 pro-
duction. 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, har-
rows, and many other implements of tillage. It

96 THE NATIONAL BEING

is an immense industry and yet to be co-opera-
tively 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-opera-
tive 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 favour an evolu-
tion of manufacturing industry 5 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 cf 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,

THE NATIONAL BEING 97

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 meet-
ing-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

H

9 8 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 to-day. 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 con-
tinually, " 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

99

ioo THE NATIONAL BEING

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 enterprising
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

THE NATIONAL BEING 101

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 colour, partly a local colour, 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 syndi-
calist, the capitalist, and the individualist will
have contributed. By degrees it will be dis-
covered what enterprises are best directed by the
State, by municipalities, by groups, or by in-
dividuals. But if the idea of democratic control

THE NATIONAL BEING

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 autocratic-
ally 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 govern-
ments, are not malleable by the general will.
They are too easily dominated by the holders of
economic power, are, in fact, always dominated

THE NATIONAL BEING 103

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 parlia-
ments 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 labour,
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

io 4 THE NATIONAL BEING

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

THE NATIONAL BEING 105

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 despis-
ing the judgment of the private citizen. Govern-
ment 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 labourer
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 rail-
ways, 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 com-
panies ? To come lower down, let us take the
farmer in the fairs* What way has he of in-

106 THE NATIONAL BEING

fluencing 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. Every-
where we turn we find this adamantine front
presented by the legislature, the State depart-
ments, 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 paralysed 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-opera-
tive spirit predominant, the general will would
manifest itself through organizations malleable
to that will, flexible and readily adjusting them-
selves to the desires of the community. To
effect reforms we have not first to labour at the

THE NATIONAL BEING 107

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 organiza-
tions 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 pre-
dominant psychological factor. The ancient con-
ception 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

io8 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 govern-
ment, 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 com-
promise, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 109

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 might 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-govern-
ment. 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

THE NATIONAL BEING in

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 neighbours have

ii2 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 un-
justly 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 govern-
ment 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 NATIONAL BEING 113

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 exer-
cised, 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. Parlia-
ments 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 fulfil 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

I

ii 4 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 administra-
tion. 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 manu-
facturers a man of real ability, and labour would
select its best intelligence. Persons engaged in
special work rarely fail to recognize the best men
in their own industry. Then they judge some-
what as experts, whereas they are by no means
experts when they are asked to select a repre-
sentative 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 in-
fluence well defined. One, the supreme body,
should be elected by counties or cities to deal

THE NATIONAL BEING 115

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 delibera-
tions 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 under-
stood 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 con-
trolled in respect of policy by persons represen-
tative of these sections, and elected solely by them.
I think there should also be a department of
Labour. I am not sure that the main work of
the Minister in charge ought not to be the
organization of labour in its proper unions or
guilds. It is a work as important to the State

ii6 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 labour in
its own defence. The State in these islands
recommends farmers to organize for the protec-
tion of their interests and assists in the organiza-
tion, 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 labour for the protection of its
own interests. A ministry of labour 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 Labour, fighting its battles for an entry into
humanity and its rightful place in civilization.
If we consider the problem of representation,

THE NATIONAL BEING 117

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

n 8 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 allowed 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 119

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

120 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 develop-
ment by the intervention of busy bodies 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 senate, 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 repre-
sentative government now in force, one is re-
minded of nothing so much as the palette of an
artist who had squeezed out the primary colours
and mixed them into a greasy drab tint, where
the purity of every colour 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 inter-

THE NATIONAL BEING 121

ference, the effect might be likened to a disc with
the seven primary colours raying from a centre,
and made to whirl where the motion produced
rather the effect of pure light. We must not mix
the colours of national life until conflicting
interests muddle themselves into a grey 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 colours, 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,

THE NATIONAL BEING 123

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 com-
plicated 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
neighbours I believe the idea of personal liberty
has been the inspiring motive of all that is best
in its political development, whatever the re-
actions 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.

124 THE NATIONAL BEING

We have to discover for ourselves the ideas which
lie at the root of national character, and so in-
culcate 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 strange-
ness 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 125

within themselves, and not to those who seek
without for the way, the truth, and the life. But,
once proclaimed, the incorruptible spiritual ele-
ment 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 aristo-
cratic 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

126 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 com-
paratively 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 neighbours,
we reversed the natural position of th^ 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 leader-
ship. 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 127

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 imper-
fect, 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 neighbours 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

THE NATIONAL BEING

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 to-day, 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 in-
stincts 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 re-
veals 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 129

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 ex-
pression 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

K

130 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 un-
intellectual 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 a
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.

Y 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 131

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.

132

THE NATIONAL BEING 133

Almost all the great European states have
fortified their national being by militarism.
Everything almost in their development has been
subordinated tp the necessities of national defence,
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 enter-
prises. 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 com-
municate 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 of 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

134 THE NATIONAL BEING

sentiments which are the souls effaces, 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

freat hopes, men are incapable of great sacrifices,
hey 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 defence of their
ideals, and are prepared to yield up life itself as

THE NATIONAL BEING 13$

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 popula-
tion larger than that of Ireland, was thrust aside,
crushed and bleeding, by one stroke from the
paw of its mighty neighbour. 1 The military and
political institutions of a small country are com-
paratively 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

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

136 THE NATIONAL BEING

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.

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 NATIONAL BEING 137

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 im-
portance 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

138 THE NATIONAL BEING

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. Exer-
cise, drill, manoeuvre, 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
mitfd, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 139

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 organi-
zation, 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 nation-

140 THE NATIONAL BEING

hood, 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 corre-
spondent 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

141

I 4 2 THE NATIONAL BEING

does to-day, 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 conscrip-
tion, 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 NATIONAL BEING 143

the imagination of those who have nbble concep-
tions 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 pur-
poses ? Why should not every young man in
Ireland give up two years of his life in a comrade-
ship of labour with other young men, and be
employed under skilled direction in great works
of public utility, in the erection of public build-
ings, 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 con-
servation 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.

144 THE NATIONAL BEING

As things stand to-day, 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. Labour, 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 Man-
chester, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 145

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 labour 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 occupa-
tion. 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 labour, and the phrase,
" the dignity of labour," about which so much
cant has been written, would have a real signifi-
cance 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 labour 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*

L

t 4 6 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 labour army
under its control ? Public works might be under-
taken at a cost greatly below that which would
otherwise be incurred, and the estimates which
now paralyse 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 road-
sides might be planted with fruit trees. National
schools, picture-galleries, public halls, libraries,
and a thousand enterprises which now hang
fire because at present labour for public service is
the most expensive labour, all could be under-
taken. 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 147

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 equalled
with as powerful an argument for civil conscrip-
tion. I am not at all sure that if the State in
Ireland decided to utilise 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 re-
sponsible for the keeping of public law and order,
leaving only the officers as permanent profes-
sionals, 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
sendee. It must find out some way in which
public services can be continued, and if possible

148 THE NATIONAL BEING

improved, and the open way to that is civil con-
scription 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 defence 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, atd 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 hide-
bound 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 char-
acter of the purposes for which nations have
hitherto claimed service from their young citizens
on behalf of the State. Debarred by a fate not

THE NATIONAL BEING 149

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 neighbours, 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 tempera-
ment, and even in the manner of expression, as
those who hated our neighbours most. All
hatreds long persisted in bring us to every base-
ness 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

150

THE NATIONAL BEING 151

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 under-
stand 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 charac-

1 52 THE NATIONAL BEING

teristics : why in the North, having passion-
ately 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 obedi-
ence to an Act of Parliament. We will understand
also why it was their opponents came themselves
to address to Ulster all the arguments and de-
nunciations 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 every-
where 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 153

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

154 THE NATIONAL BEING

opposed to war. Their citizens were in conflict
with each other already, generating the moods
which lead on to war. Emperors, foreign secre-
taries, 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 in-
dividuals 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 155

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

1 56 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 to-day, and we can begin building them up
within our present empires and nationalities
just as we are building up the co-operative move-
ment in a social order antagonistic to it. The
people who are trying to create these new ideals
in the world are outposts, sentinels, and frontiers-
men thrown out before the armies of the intel-
lectual and spiritual races yet to come into being.

THE NATIONAL BEING 157

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 pro-
testing 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 congre-

i $8 THE NATIONAL BEING

gation must gather before the preacher can deliver
what is in him to say. The economic brother-
hood 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 neighbours and all
other nations., and will wish them the good-will
we have among ourselves, and will receive from
them the same good- will. 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 amalgama-
tion 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 to-
gether 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 other-
wise inexplicable. The State, though now ostens-
ibly 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 defence. It denies them a choice or judg-
ment as to whether its action is right or wrong,

159

160 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 marvellous tiling 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 labour 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 travelling. It disciplines the individual
in service to that greater being in which it will
find its fulfilment, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 161

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 extra-
ordinary 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 defence of the State, Something, a
real life above the individual, acts through the
national being, and would almost suggest to us

M

1 6a THE NATIONAL BEING

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 tKis 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
labouring 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 pro-
foundly that men do not hold the ideas of liberty
or solidarity, which have moved them so power-
fully, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 163

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. Wher-
ever 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 un-
consciously 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

164 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 remem-
bered, 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 cognisance 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 manifest-
ing itself through individual heroes or kings, and

THE NATIONAL BEING 165

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

1 66 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 organiza-
tion 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 acknow-
ledge 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 posses-
sions were held in common. There was no
fierce talk of Thine and Mine. His ancient law
counselled 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

167

i68 THE NATIONAL BEING

the coming day which Christ wished his followers
to aspire to must come otherwise* That should
be the labour of the poets, artists, musicians, and
of the heroic and aristocratic characters who
provide k y their life an image to which life can
be modelled. Therefore I beseech audience not
only of the churches, but of the poets, writers,
and thinkers of Ireland for their aid in this labour.
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 imagina-
tively the spiritual conception of the State, we may
assume that this imaginative realization of the
State will influence the labours 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 labours,
or liberate and make more majestical the spirit

THE NATIONAL BEING 169

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 to-day
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 com-
panions through time, and they will never be less

i yo THE NATIONAL BEING

powerful than they are to-day or were in the
morning of the world. There will be no weaken-
ing 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 ele-
mental 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 feeble-
ness. Neither will make headway. Let them
unite together in their charge, and what will
oppose them ? Men at conflict in their own

THE NATIONAL BEING 171

hearts, opposing each other in the world, reduce
themselves and each other to wretchedness. The
race which could eliminate the factors which pro-
mote 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 to-day 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 them-
selves. The problem for Europe is to create a
harmonious lire, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING

is by self- devised and self- checked efforts he
will attain his full human stature. So the pro-
blem 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, to-day, 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 173

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 labours,
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 otherj
and those who labour are mulcted of their due,
and instead of turning to the earth the in-
exhaustible mother and working unitedly for
the common weal, they continue that fierce com-
petition 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

174 THE NATIONAL BEING

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 dra\v 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

THE NATIONAL BEING 175

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 careless-
ness about life than the people of any other
European country, with sectarian organizations
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 intransigeants 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,

176 THE NATIONAL BEING

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

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