National Being | Page 2

of an animal
provokes an outburst of pity; some curiosity of nature draws forth the
spirit of scientific inquiry, and so, as the incidents of life reveal the
innate affinities of a child to itself, do the adventures of a nation
gradually reveal to it its own character and the will which is in it.
For all our passionate discussions over self-government we have had
little speculation over our own character or the nature of the civilization
we wished to create for ourselves. Nations rarely, if ever, start with a
complete ideal. Certainly we have no national ideals, no principles of
progress peculiar to ourselves in Ireland, which are a common

possession of our people. National ideals are the possession of a few
people only. Yet we must spread them in wide commonalty over
Ireland if we are to create a civilization worthy of our hopes and our
ages of struggle and sacrifice to attain the power to build. We must
spread them in wide commonalty because it is certain that democracy
will prevail in Ireland. The aristocratic classes with traditions of
government, the manufacturing classes with economic experience, will
alike be secondary in Ireland to the small farmers and the wage-earners
in the towns. We must rely on the ideas common among our people,
and on their power to discern among their countrymen the aristocracy
of character and intellect.
Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of races.
They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty,
imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people. That
great mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded by
enemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant
in Europe simply by militarism. That military power depended on and
was fed by a vigorous intellectual life, and the most generally diffused
education and science existing perhaps in the world. The national being
had been enriched by a long succession of mighty thinkers. A great
subjective life and centuries of dream preceded a great objective
manifestation of power and wealth. The stir in the German Empire
which has agitated Europe was, at its root, the necessity laid on a
powerful soul to surround itself with equal external circumstance. That
necessity is laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their external
life correspond in some measure to their internal dream. A lover of
beauty will never contentedly live in a house where all things are
devoid of taste. An intellectual man will loathe a disordered society.
We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people are
a measure of their inner life. Our mean and disordered little country
towns in Ireland, with their drink-shops, their disregard of cleanliness
or beauty, accord with the character of the civilians who inhabit them.
Whenever we develop an intellectual life these things will be altered,
but not in priority to the spiritual mood. House by house, village by
village, the character of a civilization changes as the character of the
individuals change. When we begin to build up a lofty world within the
national soul, soon the country becomes beautiful and worthy of

respect in its externals. That building up of the inner world we have
neglected. Our excited political controversies, our playing at militarism,
have tended to bring men's thoughts from central depths to surfaces.
Life is drawn to its frontiers away from its spiritual base, and behind
the surfaces we have little to fall back on. Few of our notorieties could
be trusted to think out any economic or social problem thoroughly and
efficiently. They have been engaged in passionate attempts at the
readjustment of the superficies of things. What we require more than
men of action at present are scholars, economists, scientists, thinkers,
educationalists, and litterateurs, who will populate the desert depths of
national consciousness with real thought and turn the void into a
fullness. We have few reserves of intellectual life to draw upon when
we come to the mighty labor of nation-building. It will be indignantly
denied, but I think it is true to say that the vast majority of people in
Ireland do not know the difference between good and bad thinking,
between the essential depths and the shallows in humanity. How could
people, who never read anything but the newspapers, have any genuine
knowledge of any subject on earth or much imagination of anything
beautiful in the heavens?
What too many people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feelings. It is
enough to them to vent like or dislike, inherited prejudices or passions,
and they think when they have expressed feeling they have given
utterance to thought. The nature of our political controversies provoked
passion, and passion has become dominant in our politics. Passion truly
is