National Being | Page 6

democracy our social order is truly little more democratic than Rome
was under the Caesars, and our new rulers have not, with all their
wealth, created a beauty which we could imagine after-generations
brooding over with uplifted heart.
The people in theocratic States like Egypt or Chaldea, ruled in the
name of gods, saw rising out of the plains in which they lived an
architecture so mysterious and awe-inspiring that they might well
believe the master-minds who designed the temples were inspired from
the Oversoul. The aristocratic States reflected the love of beauty which
is associated with aristocracies. The oligarchies of wealth in our time,
who have no divine sanction to give dignity to their rule nor traditions
of lordly life like the aristocracies, have not in our day created beauty
in the world. But whatever of worth the ancient systems produced was
not good enough to make permanent their social order. Their
civilizations, like ours, were built on the unstable basis of a vast
working-class with no real share in the wealth and grandeur it helped to
create. The character of his kingdom was revealed in dream to
Nebuchadnezzar by an image with a golden head and feet of clay, and
that image might stand as symbol of the empires the world has known.
There is in all a vast population living in an underworld of labor whose
freedom to vote confers on them no real power, and who are most often
scorned and neglected by those who profit by their labors. Indifference
turns to fear and hatred if labor organizes and gathers power, or makes
one motion of its myriad hands towards the sceptre held by the
autocrats of industry. When this class is maddened and revolts,
civilization shakes and totters like cities when the earthquake stirs
beneath their foundations. Can we master these arcane human forces?
Can we, by any device, draw this submerged humanity into the light
and make them real partners in the social order, not partners merely in

the political life of the nation, but, what is of more importance, in its
economic life? If we build our civilization without integrating labor
into its economic structure, it will wreck that civilization, and it will do
that more swiftly today than two thousand years ago, because there is
no longer the disparity of culture between high and low which existed
in past centuries. The son of the artisan, if he cares to read, may
become almost as fully master of the wisdom of Plato or Aristotle as if
he had been at a university. Emerson will speak to him of his divinity;
Whitman, drunken with the sun, will chant to him of his inheritance of
the earth. He is elevated by the poets and instructed by the economists.
But there are not thrones enough for all who are made wise in our
social order, and failing even to serve in the social heaven these men
will spread revolt and reign in the social hell. They are becoming too
many for higher places to be found for them in the national economy.
They are increasing to a multitude which must be considered, and the
framers of a national polity must devise a life for them where their
new-found dignity of spirit will not be abased. Men no more will be
content under rulers of industry they do not elect themselves than they
were under political rulers claiming their obedience in the name of God.
They will not for long labor in industries where they have no power to
fix the conditions of their employment, as they were not content with a
political system which allowed them no power to control legislation.
Ireland must begin its imaginative reconstruction of a civilization by
first considering that type which, in the earlier civilizations of the world,
has been slave, serf, or servile, working either on land or at industry,
and must construct with reference to it. These workers must be the
central figures, and how their material, intellectual, and spiritual needs
are met must be the test of value of the social order we evolve.

IV.

In Ireland we begin naturally our consideration of this problem with the
folk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal--the linking
up of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since the
destruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factor
in rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other and from
the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action; and that was so

until the movement for the organization of agriculture was initiated by
Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in that patriotic association, the
Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Though its actual achievement
is great; though it may be said to