All these ideals of freedom, of brotherhood, of power, of justice, of beauty, which have been at one time or another the fundamental idea in civilizations, are heaven-born, and descended from the divine world, incarnating first in the highest minds in each race, perceived by them and transmitted to their fellow-citizens; and it is the emergence or manifestation of one or other of these ideals in a group which is the beginning of a nation; and the more strongly the ideal is held the more powerful becomes the national being, because the synchronous vibration of many minds in harmony brings about almost unconsciously a psychic unity, a coalescing of the subconscious being of many. It is that inner unity which constitutes the national being.
The idea of the national being emerged at no recognizable point in our history in Ireland. It is older than any name we know. It is not earth-born, but the synthesis of many heroic and beautiful moments, and these, it must be remembered, are divine in their origin. Every heroic deed is an act of the spirit, and every perception of beauty is vision with the divine eye, and not with the mortal sense. The spirit was subtly intermingled with the shining of old romance, and it is no mere phantasy which shows Ireland at its dawn in a misty light thronged with divine figures, and beneath and nearer to us demi-gods and heroes fading into recognizable men. The bards took cognizance only of the most notable personalities who preceded them, and of these only the acts which had a symbolic or spiritual significance; and these grew thrice refined as generations of poets in enraptured musings along by the mountains or in the woods brooded upon their heritage of story, until, as it passed from age to age, the accumulated beauty grew greater than the beauty of the hour. The dream began to enter into the children of our race, and turn their thoughts from earth to that world in which it had its inception.
It was a common belief among the ancient peoples that each had a national genius or deity who presided over them, in whose all-embracing mind they were contained, and who was the shepherd of their destinies. We can conceive of the national spirit in Ireland as first manifesting itself through individual heroes or kings, and as the history of famous warriors laid hold of the people, extending its influence until it created therein the germs of a kindred nature.
An aristocracy of lordly and chivalrous heroes is bound in time to create a great democracy by the reflection of their character in the mass, and the idea of the divine right of kings is succeeded by the idea of the divine right of the people. If this sequence cannot be traced in any one respect with historical regularity, it is because of the complexity of national life, its varied needs, the vicissitudes of history, and its infinite changes of sentiment. But the threads are all taken up in the end; and ideals which were forgotten and absent from the voices of men will be found, when recurred to, to have grown to a rarer and more spiritual beauty in their quiet abode in the heart. The seeds which were sown at the beginning of a race bear their flowers and fruits towards its close, and already antique names begin to stir us again with their power, and the antique ideals to reincarnate in us and renew their dominion over us.
They may not be recognized at first as a re-emergence of ancient moods. The democratic economics of the ancient clans have vanished almost out of memory, but the mood in which they were established reappears in those who would create a communal or co-operative life in the nation into which those ancient clans long since have melted. The instinct in the clans to waive aside the weak and to seek for an aristocratic and powerful character in their leaders reappears in the rising generation, who turn from the utterer of platitudes to men of real intellect and strong will. The object of democratic organization is to bring out the aristocratic character in leadership, the vivid original personalities who act and think from their own will and their own centres, who bring down fire from the heaven of their spirits and quicken and vivify the mass, and make democracies also to be great and fearless and free. A nation is dead where men acknowledge only conventions. We must find out truth for ourselves, becoming first initiates and finally masters in the guild of life. The intellect of Ireland is in chains where it ought to be free, and we have individualism in our economics which ought to be co-ordinated and sternly disciplined out of the iniquity of free profiteering. To quicken the intellect and imagination of Ireland, to co-ordinate our economic life for the general good, should be the objects of national policy, and will subserve the evolutionary purpose. The free imagination and the aspiring mind alone climb into the higher spheres and deflect for us the ethereal currents. It is the multitude of aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them of service to other nations, and it is by the character of the social order and the quality of brotherhood in it our civilization will endure. Without love we are nothing.
XX.
I beseech audience from the churches for these thoughts on our Irish polity, and would recall to them their early history, how when the fiery spirit of their Lord first manifested on earth, life, near to It, reflected It as in a glowing glass, and impulses of true living arose. Material possessions were held in common. There was no fierce talk of Thine and Mine. His ancient law counseled poverty to the spirit, lest the gates of Paradise should grow narrow before it like the eye of a needle. I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life. What profound spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men to battle with each other for the means of existence? I know well that no political mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only, will of themselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and bring it under the dominion of the spirit. For that, a far higher quality of thought and action than is here indicated is necessary. The economist can provide the daily bread, but that bread of the coming day which Christ wished his followers to aspire to must come otherwise. That should be the labor of the poets, artists, musicians, and of the heroic and aristocratic characters who provide by their life an image to which life can be modeled. Therefore I beseech audience not only of the churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their aid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals which can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create for us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being. I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must be laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang a solitary song; to the writers who had turned from contemplating the great to the portrayal of the little in human nature. I know how difficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to ask artists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create. But we can ask all men—artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists—to be citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. All greatness is brought about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literature certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty conductor; and as a people we shall never manifest the highest qualities in literature or life until we are under the dominion of one, at least, of the great fundamental ideas which have been the inspiration of races. Our feebleness arises from our economic individualism. We continually neutralize each other's efforts. Yet there is no less power in humanity today than there ever was. We see now clearly what untamed elemental fires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world. There was a feeling in society that, just as the earth itself had settled down to be a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient ferocities of earthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and rended sea from sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies we surmised in the cave-dweller or the hunters of mastodon, mammoth, and cave-tiger. But it was all a dream—a dream, we suspect, about the earth as well as about humanity. While we indulged in these pleasing speculations on society, the scientists of our generation were placing beyond question or argument the doctrine of the indestructibility of energy and matter and we may be sure that while there is immortal life there must be immortal energies as its companions through time, and they will never be less powerful than they are today or were in the morning of the world. There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten brotherhood of elemental powers; and, while we cannot hope that by the wastage of time these powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an understanding of them we may get mastery over them. The wild elephant of the woods, with a greater strength than man's, has yet been trained to be his servant, and that arcane power we call electricity, which, if it shoots out of its channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our servant. So we may hope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity itself, which break out in wars and Armageddons, will come under control. We should not hope that man will ever be a less powerful being. To hope that would be to wish for his degradation. We should wish him to become ever more and more powerful by understanding himself, and by the unity of the spiritual faculties and the elemental energies in him into one harmonious whole. At present he is feeble because he is, to use the scriptural illustration, a house divided against itself.
Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflict with each other. Get the two mightiest bulls in a herd, put them opposing each other in a narrow passage, and they, being of equal strength, will reduce each other to feebleness. Neither will make headway. Let them unite together in their charge, and what will oppose them? Men at conflict in their own hearts, opposing each other in the world, reduce themselves and each other to wretchedness. The race which could eliminate the factors which promote internal conflict in society and could organize human energies in harmony, would be powerful beyond our wildest dreams. Every now and then in world-history we come across instances of what organized humanity could accomplish. There are fragments of an architecture so majestic that they awe us as the high rocks of nature do, and they seem almost like portions of nature itself, and truly they are so, being portions of nature remade by man, who is also a nature energy of divine origin. Europe by its conflicts today is reducing itself to barbarism and powerlessness, and these conflicts arose out of the internal conflicts in society, for individuals and nations act outside themselves as they act inside themselves. The problem for Europe is to create a harmonious life, and it is the problem for us in Ireland, and we will have to work this out for ourselves. The creation of a harmonious life among a people must come from within. It can never come by the imposition of an external law imposed by another people: Never did master and slave work in true unison, no matter how benevolent the master or how yielding the slave, for there is in every man, no matter what his condition, a spark of divine life, and it will always be ready to stir him out of subjection, as the fires of earthquake lie below the cultivated plain. Man is a creature who has free will, and it is by self-devised and self-checked efforts he will attain his full human stature. So the problem of creating an organic life in Ireland, a harmony of our people, a union of their efforts for the common good and for the manifestation of whatever beauty, majesty, and spirituality is in us, must be one we ourselves must solve for ourselves.
To be indifferent to the possibilities of human life, to ignore the problem, is to turn our back on heaven, which fashioned the spirit of man in its image. If the spirit of man has likeness to Deity, it means that if it manifests itself fully in the world, the world too becomes a shadowy likeness of the heavens, and our civilizations will make a harmony with the diviner spheres. We give still a service of lip belief to the Scriptures, yet active faith we have not. But they are true, yesterday, today, and for ever; and we have still the root of the matter in us, for when any one utters out of profound conviction his faith, there are always multitudes ready to respond. What really prevents an organic unity in Ireland is the economic individualism of our lives. The science of economics deals with the efforts of men to mine out of nature the food, minerals, and materials necessary to preserve life. There is nothing more certain than that where men work alone or only with the aid of their families they are little higher than the animals. When they tend to unite civilization begins. Then arise the towers, the temples, the cities, the achievements of the architect and engineer. The earth is tapped of its arcane energies, the very air yields to us its mysterious powers. We control the etheric waves and send the message of our deeds across the ocean. Yet in the midst of these vast external manifestations of power, multitudes of men and women live in squalor, isolated in their labors, living in the slums of cities; and this, if we examine it, comes about because the organization of human energies into a harmonious unity is not complete. There is really no lack of food, clothing, building material, land. Nature has provided bountifully for more myriads than we are likely to see peopling the earth. But people compete with each other and undersell each other, and those who labor are mulcted of their due, and instead of turning to the earth—the inexhaustible mother—and working unitedly for the common weal, they continue that fierce competition and stultify each other's efforts and reduce each other to wretchedness. Humanity is a house divided against itself. Those who feel this to be true must gather round any movement which gives a hope for the future, which indicates a policy by which the organic unity of society in Ireland might be attained, and our people work harmoniously to make beauty and health prevail in our civilization. What each gives up to society in the making of a civilization he gets back a thousandfold. Now, the co-operative movement alone of all movements in Ireland has aspired to make an economic solidarity in Ireland. Whatever the aims of other movements may be—and many of them have high ideals and are necessary for the spiritual and intellectual development of our people—there is none of them which has for aim the unity of economic life. They all leave untouched this problem—how are we to organize society so that people will not be in conflict with each other, will not nullify each other's efforts, but all will conspire together for unity, so that none shall be forgotten or oppressed or left out of our brotherhood? The policy I put forward is incomplete and imperfect, and it must necessarily be so, being mainly the work of one mind, and to complete it and perfect it there must be many minds and many workers fired by the ideal. But I have indicated in some completeness how the rural population could be co-operatively organized, federated together, and how the urban population could be organized and brought into a harmony of economic purpose with the folk of the country. Within the limits of object these suggestions amount to a policy for the nation.