National Being | Page 9

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 experiments. 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
circumference ought to be the nation. The vast majority of Irish citizens

rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital relations with
their circumference which alone entitle them to the privileges 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 centering 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 course of his daily occupations. This
organization 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 transformation of the social order
will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation, identifying
national with personal interests. For those who believe there is a divine
seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they may hope will promote
the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in the past, in favorable
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 foundations 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.

V.

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