National Being | Page 5

of nations too have lost that divine air that many
leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor
them as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute
this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame. In
ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great
kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry
and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great
man was like; and men were influenced by the ideal created, and strove
to win the praise of the bards and to be recrowned by them a second
time in great poetry. So we had Cuchulain and Oscar in Ireland; Hector
of Troy, Theseus in Greece; Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all
bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is the
great defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types. How
hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of an epic.
It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of a genuine
lyric. Whitman, himself the most democratic poet of the modern world,
felt this deficiency in the literature of the later democracies, and
lamented the absence of great heroic figures. The poets have dropped
out of the divine procession, and sing a solitary song. They inspire
nobody to be great, and failing any finger-post in literature pointing to
true greatness our democracies too often take the huckster from his stall,
the drunkard from his pot, the lawyer from his court, and the company
promoter from the director's chair, and elect them as representative men.
We certainly do this in Ireland. It is--how many hundred years since

greatness guided us? In Ireland our history begins with the most ancient
of any in a mythical era when earth mingled with heaven. The gods
departed, the half-gods also, hero and saint after that, and we have
dwindled down to a petty peasant nationality, rural and urban life alike
mean in their externals. Yet the cavalcade, for all its tattered
habiliments, has not lost spiritual dignity. There is still some
incorruptible spiritual atom in our people. We are still in some relation
to the divine order; and while that uncorrupted spiritual atom still
remains all things are possible if by some inspiration there could be
revealed to us a way back or forward to greatness, an Irish polity in
accord with national character.

III.

In formulating an Irish polity we have to take into account the change
in world conditions. A theocratic State we shall have no more. Every
nation, and our own along with them, is now made up of varied sects,
and the practical dominance of one religious idea would let loose
illimitable passions, the most intense the human spirit can feel. The
way out of the theocratic State was by the drawn sword and was lit by
the martyr's fires. The way back is unthinkable for all Protestant fears
or Catholic aspirations. Aristocracies, too, become impossible as rulers.
The aristocracy of character and intellect we may hope shall finally
lead us, but no aristocracy so by birth will renew its authority over us.
The character of great historic personages is gradually reflected in the
mass. The divine right of kings is followed by the idea of the divine
right of the people, and democracies finally become ungovernable save
by themselves. They have seen and heard too much of pride and
greatness not to have become, in some measure, proud and defiant of
all authority except their own. It may be said the history of democracies
is not one to fill us with confidence, but the truth is the world has yet to
see the democratic State, and of the yet untried we may think with hope.
Beneath the Athenian and other ancient democratic States lay a
substratum of humanity in slavery, and the culture, beauty, and bravery
of these extraordinary peoples were made possible by the workers in an
underworld who had no part in the bright civic life.
We have no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy in

politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We
still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as
theocratic king ruling in the name of a god, or aristocracy ruling by
military power; and the forces represented by these twain, superseded
by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power which
took their place of pride. Religion and rank, whether content or not
with the subsidiary place they now occupy, are most often courtiers of
Mammon and support him on his throne. For all the talk about