It seems inevitable that the domination of the individual by the
State must become ever greater. It is in the evolutionary process. The
amalgamation of individuals into nationalities and empires is as much
in the cosmic plan as the development of highly organized beings out
of unicellular organisms. I believe this process will continue until
humanity itself is so psychically knit together that, as a being, it
will manifest some form of cosmic consciousness in which the individual
will share. Our spiritual intuitions and the great religions of the
world alike indicate some such goal as that to which this turbulent
cavalcade of humanity is wending. A knowledge of this must be in our
subconscious being, or we would find the sacrifices men make for the
State otherwise inexplicable. The State, though now ostensibly secular,
makes more imperious claims on man than the ancient gods did. It lays
hold of life. It asserts its right to take father, brother, and son, and
to send them to meet death in its own defense. It denies them a choice
or judgment as to whether its action is right or wrong. Right or wrong,
the individual must be prepared to give his body for the commonwealth,
and when one gives the body unresistingly, one gives the soul also.
The marvelous thing about the authority of the State is that it is
recognized by the vast majority of citizens. During eras of peace the
citizen may be always in conflict with the policy of the State. He may
call it a tyranny, but yet when it is in peril he will die to preserve
for it an immortal life. The hold the State establishes over the spirit
of man is the more wonderful when we look rearward on history, and see
with what labor and sacrifice the State was established. But we see
also how readily, once the union has been brought about, men will die
to preserve it, even although it is a tyranny, a bad State. For what
do they die unless the spirit in man has some inner certitude that the
divine event to which humanity tends is a unity of its multitudinous
life, and that a State--even a bad State--must be preserved by its
citizens, because it is at least an attempt at organic unity? It is a
simulacrum of the ideal; it contains the germ or possibility of that to
which the spirit of man is traveling. It disciplines the individual in
service to that greater being in which it will find its fulfillment, and
a bad State is better than no State at all. To be without a State is to
prowl backwards from the divinity before us to the beast behind us.
The power the State exerts is a spiritual power, acting on or through
the will of man. The volunteer armies do not really march to die with
more readiness than the conscript armies. The sacrifice is not readily
explicable by material causes. There is no material reason why the
proletarian--who has no property to defend, who is more or less sure
as a skilled craftsman of employment under any ruler--should concern
himself whether his ruler be King, Kaiser, or President. But not one in
a hundred proletarians really thinks like that. It is not the hope
of personal profit works upon men to risk life. Let some exploiter of
industry desire to employ a thousand men at dangerous work, with the
risks of death or disablement equal to those of war; let it be known
that one in six will be killed and another be disabled, and what sum
will purchase the service of workers? They will risk life for the State,
though given a bare subsistence or a pay which they would describe as
inhuman if offered by one of the autocrats of industry. Men working for
the State will make the most extraordinary sacrifices; but they stand
stubbornly and sullenly as disturbers and blockers of all industry which
is run for private profit. Is it not clear of the two policies for the
State to adopt, to promote personal interests among its citizens or to
unite men for the general good, that the first path is full of danger to
the State, while through the other men will march cheerfully, though it
be to death, in defense of the State. Something, a real life above the
individual, acts through the national being, and would almost suggest
to us that Heaven cannot fully manifest its will to humanity through the
individual, but must utter itself through multitudes. There must be an
orchestration of humanity ere it can echo divine melodies. In real truth
we are all seeking in the majesties we create for union with a greater
Majesty.
I wrote in an earlier page that the ancient conception of Nature as
a manifestation of spirit was incarnating anew in the minds of modern
thinkers; that Nature was no longer conceived of as material or static
in condition, but as force and continual motion; that they were trying
to identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces of
Nature manifest with more power in society. The real nature of these
energies manifesting in humanity I do not know, but they have been
hinted at in the Scriptures, the oracles of the Oversoul, which speak of
the whole creation laboring upwards and the entry of humanity into the
Divine Mind, and of the re-introcession of That Itself with all Its
myriad unity into Deity, so that God might be all in all. I believe
profoundly that men do not hold the ideas of liberty or solidarity,
which have moved them so powerfully, merely as phantasies which are
pleasant to the soul or make ease for the body; but because, whether
they struggle passionately for liberty or to achieve a solidarity, in
working for these two ideals, which seem in conflict, they are divinely
supported, in unison with the divine nature, and energies as real as
those the scientist studies--as electricity, as magnetism, heat or
light--do descend into the soul and reinforce it with elemental energy.
We are here for the purposes of soul, and there can be no purpose in
individualizing the soul if essential freedom is denied to it and there
is only a destiny. Wherever essential freedom, the right of the spirit
to choose its own heroes and its own ideals, is denied, nations rise
in rebellion. But the spirit in man is wrought in a likeness to Deity,
which is that harmony and unity of Being which upholds the universe;
and by the very nature of the spirit, while it asserts its freedom,
its impulses lead it to a harmony with all life, to a solidarity or
brotherhood with it.
All these ideals of freedom, of brotherhood, of power, of justice, of
beauty, which have been at one time or another the fundamental idea in
civilizations, are heaven-born, and descended from the divine world,
incarnating first in the highest minds in each race, perceived by them
and transmitted to their fellow-citizens; and it is the emergence or
manifestation of one or other of these ideals in a group which is the
beginning of a nation; and the more strongly the ideal is held the more
powerful becomes the national being, because the synchronous vibration
of many minds in harmony brings about almost unconsciously a psychic
unity, a coalescing of the subconscious being of many. It is that inner
unity which constitutes the national being.
The idea of the national being emerged at no recognizable point in
our history in Ireland. It is older than any name we know. It is not
earth-born, but the synthesis of many heroic and beautiful moments, and
these, it must be remembered, are divine in their origin. Every heroic
deed is an act of the spirit, and every perception of beauty is vision
with the divine eye, and not with the mortal sense. The spirit was
subtly intermingled with the shining of old romance, and it is no mere
phantasy which shows Ireland at its dawn in a misty light thronged with
divine figures, and beneath and nearer to us demi-gods and heroes
fading into recognizable men. The bards took cognizance only of the
most notable personalities who preceded them, and of these only the acts
which had a symbolic or spiritual significance; and these grew thrice
refined as generations of poets in enraptured musings along by the
mountains or in the woods brooded upon their heritage of story, until,
as it passed from age to age, the accumulated beauty grew greater than
the beauty of the hour. The dream began to enter into the children of
our race, and turn their thoughts from earth to that world in which it
had its inception.
It was a common belief among the ancient peoples that each had a
national genius or deity who presided over them, in whose all-embracing
mind they were contained, and who was the shepherd of their destinies.
We can conceive of the national spirit in Ireland as first manifesting
itself through individual heroes or kings, and as the history of famous
warriors laid hold of the people, extending its influence until it
created therein the germs of a kindred nature.
An aristocracy of lordly and chivalrous heroes is bound in time to
create a great democracy by the reflection of their character in the
mass, and the idea of the divine right of kings is succeeded by the idea
of the divine right of the people. If this sequence cannot be traced
in any one respect with historical regularity, it is because of the
complexity of national life, its varied needs, the vicissitudes of
history, and its infinite changes of sentiment. But the threads are all
taken up in the end; and ideals which were forgotten and absent from the
voices of men will be found, when recurred to, to have grown to a rarer
and more spiritual beauty in their quiet abode in the heart. The seeds
which were sown at the beginning of a race bear their flowers and fruits
towards its close, and already antique names begin to stir us again with
their power, and the antique ideals to reincarnate in us and renew their
dominion over us.
They may not be recognized at first as a re-emergence of ancient moods.
The democratic economics of the ancient clans have vanished almost out
of memory, but the mood in which they were established reappears in
those who would create a communal or co-operative life in the nation
into which those ancient clans long since have melted. The instinct in
the clans to waive aside the weak and to seek for an aristocratic and
powerful character in their leaders reappears in the rising generation,
who turn from the utterer of platitudes to men of real intellect and
strong will. The object of democratic organization is to bring out the
aristocratic character in leadership, the vivid original personalities
who act and think from their own will and their own centres, who bring
down fire from the heaven of their spirits and quicken and vivify the
mass, and make democracies also to be great and fearless and free. A
nation is dead where men acknowledge only conventions. We must find out
truth for ourselves, becoming first initiates and finally masters in the
guild of life. The intellect of Ireland is in chains where it ought to
be free, and we have individualism in our economics which ought to
be co-ordinated and sternly disciplined out of the iniquity of free
profiteering. To quicken the intellect and imagination of Ireland,
to co-ordinate our economic life for the general good, should be the
objects of national policy, and will subserve the evolutionary purpose.
The free imagination and the aspiring mind alone climb into the higher
spheres and deflect for us the ethereal currents. It is the multitude
of aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them of
service to other nations, and it is by the character of the social
order and the quality of brotherhood in it our civilization will endure.
Without love we are nothing.