Often with sadness I hear people speak of industrial development in
Ireland, for I feel they contemplate no different system than that which
fills workers with despair in countries where it is more successfully
applied. All these energetic people are conspiring to build factories
and mills and to fill them with human labor, and they believe the more
they do this the better it will be for Ireland. They talk of Ireland
as if it was only admirable as a quantity rather than a quality. They
express delight at swelling statistics and increased trade, but where
do we hear any reflection on the quality of life engendered by this
industrial development? Our civilization is to differ in no way from any
other. No new ideal of life is suggested to differentiate us. We are to
go on exploiting human labor. Our working classes are to increase and
multiply and earn profits for an employing class, as labor has one from
time immemorial in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Rome, and in London
today. But a choice yet remains to us, because the character of our
civilization is not yet fixed. It is mainly germinal. It fills the
spirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path,
without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and more
beautiful life. Every now and then, when the world was still vast and
full of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor,
and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities and
over unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer and
ampler than that they had known. Is the old daring gone? Are there
not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all
adventures--the building up of a civilization--so that the human might
reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and
solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to
love; and when it is free and acts by its own will it is most united
with all other life. Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motion
about the heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as its
adorers. But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has the
dividing quality of the prism, which resolves pure light into distinct
rays; and so on earth we get the principle of freedom and the virtue of
solidarity as separated ideals continually at warfare with each other,
and the reconcilement on earth of these principles in man is the
conquest of matter by the spirit. This dramatic sundering on earth
of virtues in unison in the heavens explains the struggle between
Protestantism and Catholicism, between nationality and imperialism,
between individualist and socialist, between dynamic and static in
philosophy. Indeed in the last analysis all human conflicts are the
balancing on earth of the manifestation of divine principles which are
one in the unmanifest spirit.
The civilization we create, the social order we build up, must provide
for essential freedom for the individual and for solidarity of the
nation. Now essential freedom is denied to men if they are in their
condition servile. Can we contemplate the permanent existence of a
servile class in Ireland? For, disguise it how we will, our present
industrial system is practically a form of slavery for the workers,
differing in externals only from the ages when the serf had a collar
round his neck. He has now freedom to change from master to master, and
can even seek for a master in other countries; but he must, in any
case, accept the relation of servant to master. The old slave could be
whipped. In the new order the wage slave can be starved, and the fact
that many of the rulers of industry use their power benevolently does
not make the existing relation between employer and employed right, or
the social order one whose permanence can be justified. Men will gladly
labor if they feel that their labor conspires with that of all other
workers for the general good; but there is something loathsome to the
spirit in the condition of the labor market, where labor is regarded as
a commodity to be bought and sold like soap or candles. For that truly
describes how it is with labor in our industrial system: we can buy
labor, which means we can buy human life and thought, a portion of God's
being, and make a profit out of it. By so selling himself the worker is
enslaved and limited in a thousand ways. The power of dismissal of one
person by another at whim acts against independence of character, or the
free expression or opinion in thought, in politics, and in religion. The
soul is stunted in its growth, and spiritual life made subordinate
to material interests. To deny essential freedom to the soul is the
greatest of all crimes, and such denial has in all ages evoked the
deepest anger among men. When freedom has been threatened nations have
risen up maddened and exultant, and the clang of martial arms has been
heard and the stony kings of the past have been encountered in battle.
In Ireland we shall have our greatest fight of all to gain this freedom:
not alone material independence for man, but the freedom of the soul,
its right to choose its own heroes and its own ideals without let or
hindrance by other men.
We have many of the vices of a slave race, and we treat others as we
have been treated. Our national aspirations were overborne by material
power, and we in turn use cudgel and curse on our countrymen when they
differ from us in opinion and policy. Men, when they cannot match their
intellect against another's, suppress him and howl him down, putting
faith in their own brainlessness. I would make the most passionate plea
for freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel or
know. What right have we to ask for ourselves what we deny to another?
The bludgeon at meetings is a blow struck against heaven. Those who will
not argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are prowling
back again on all fours in their minds to the brute. It matters not in
what holy name men war with violence on freedom of thought, whether in
the name of God or nation they are enemies of both. We are only right
in controversy when we overcome by a superior beauty or truth. The
first fundamental idea inspiring an Irish polity should be this idea of
freedom in all spheres of thought, and it is most necessary to fight
for this because the devil and hell have organized their forces in this
unfortunate land in sectarian and secret societies, of which it might
be written they love darkness rather than light for the old God-given
reasons.