I beseech audience from the churches for these thoughts on our Irish
polity, and would recall to them their early history, how when the
fiery spirit of their Lord first manifested on earth, life, near to It,
reflected It as in a glowing glass, and impulses of true living arose.
Material possessions were held in common. There was no fierce talk of
Thine and Mine. His ancient law counseled poverty to the spirit, lest
the gates of Paradise should grow narrow before it like the eye of a
needle. I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due
to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life. What profound
spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men to
battle with each other for the means of existence? I know well that no
political mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only, will of
themselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and bring
it under the dominion of the spirit. For that, a far higher quality of
thought and action than is here indicated is necessary. The economist
can provide the daily bread, but that bread of the coming day which
Christ wished his followers to aspire to must come otherwise. That
should be the labor of the poets, artists, musicians, and of the heroic
and aristocratic characters who provide by their life an image to
which life can be modeled. Therefore I beseech audience not only of the
churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their
aid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals
which can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create for
us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and
to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being.
I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must be
laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang
a solitary song; to the writers who had turned from contemplating
the great to the portrayal of the little in human nature. I know how
difficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to ask
artists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create. But
we can ask all men--artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists--to be
citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of
the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the
State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will,
consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being
which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a
tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical
the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. All greatness is brought
about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literature
certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty
only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty
conductor; and as a people we shall never manifest the highest qualities
in literature or life until we are under the dominion of one, at least,
of the great fundamental ideas which have been the inspiration of races.
Our feebleness arises from our economic individualism. We continually
neutralize each other's efforts. Yet there is no less power in humanity
today than there ever was. We see now clearly what untamed elemental
fires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world. There was a
feeling in society that, just as the earth itself had settled down to
be a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient ferocities of
earthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and rended sea
from sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies we surmised
in the cave-dweller or the hunters of mastodon, mammoth, and cave-tiger.
But it was all a dream--a dream, we suspect, about the earth as well
as about humanity. While we indulged in these pleasing speculations on
society, the scientists of our generation were placing beyond question
or argument the doctrine of the indestructibility of energy and matter
and we may be sure that while there is immortal life there must be
immortal energies as its companions through time, and they will never be
less powerful than they are today or were in the morning of the world.
There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten brotherhood of
elemental powers; and, while we cannot hope that by the wastage of time
these powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an understanding of
them we may get mastery over them. The wild elephant of the woods, with
a greater strength than man's, has yet been trained to be his servant,
and that arcane power we call electricity, which, if it shoots out of
its channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our servant. So we may
hope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity itself, which break
out in wars and Armageddons, will come under control. We should not hope
that man will ever be a less powerful being. To hope that would be to
wish for his degradation. We should wish him to become ever more
and more powerful by understanding himself, and by the unity of
the spiritual faculties and the elemental energies in him into one
harmonious whole. At present he is feeble because he is, to use the
scriptural illustration, a house divided against itself.
Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflict
with each other. Get the two mightiest bulls in a herd, put them
opposing each other in a narrow passage, and they, being of equal
strength, will reduce each other to feebleness. Neither will make
headway. Let them unite together in their charge, and what will oppose
them? Men at conflict in their own hearts, opposing each other in the
world, reduce themselves and each other to wretchedness. The race which
could eliminate the factors which promote internal conflict in society
and could organize human energies in harmony, would be powerful beyond
our wildest dreams. Every now and then in world-history we come across
instances of what organized humanity could accomplish. There are
fragments of an architecture so majestic that they awe us as the high
rocks of nature do, and they seem almost like portions of nature itself,
and truly they are so, being portions of nature remade by man, who is
also a nature energy of divine origin. Europe by its conflicts today
is reducing itself to barbarism and powerlessness, and these conflicts
arose out of the internal conflicts in society, for individuals and
nations act outside themselves as they act inside themselves. The
problem for Europe is to create a harmonious life, and it is the problem
for us in Ireland, and we will have to work this out for ourselves. The
creation of a harmonious life among a people must come from within. It
can never come by the imposition of an external law imposed by another
people: Never did master and slave work in true unison, no matter how
benevolent the master or how yielding the slave, for there is in every
man, no matter what his condition, a spark of divine life, and it
will always be ready to stir him out of subjection, as the fires of
earthquake lie below the cultivated plain. Man is a creature who has
free will, and it is by self-devised and self-checked efforts he will
attain his full human stature. So the problem of creating an organic
life in Ireland, a harmony of our people, a union of their efforts for
the common good and for the manifestation of whatever beauty, majesty,
and spirituality is in us, must be one we ourselves must solve for
ourselves.
To be indifferent to the possibilities of human life, to ignore the
problem, is to turn our back on heaven, which fashioned the spirit of
man in its image. If the spirit of man has likeness to Deity, it means
that if it manifests itself fully in the world, the world too becomes
a shadowy likeness of the heavens, and our civilizations will make a
harmony with the diviner spheres. We give still a service of lip belief
to the Scriptures, yet active faith we have not. But they are true,
yesterday, today, and for ever; and we have still the root of the matter
in us, for when any one utters out of profound conviction his faith,
there are always multitudes ready to respond. What really prevents an
organic unity in Ireland is the economic individualism of our lives. The
science of economics deals with the efforts of men to mine out of nature
the food, minerals, and materials necessary to preserve life. There is
nothing more certain than that where men work alone or only with the
aid of their families they are little higher than the animals. When they
tend to unite civilization begins. Then arise the towers, the temples,
the cities, the achievements of the architect and engineer. The earth is
tapped of its arcane energies, the very air yields to us its mysterious
powers. We control the etheric waves and send the message of our deeds
across the ocean. Yet in the midst of these vast external manifestations
of power, multitudes of men and women live in squalor, isolated in their
labors, living in the slums of cities; and this, if we examine it, comes
about because the organization of human energies into a harmonious unity
is not complete. There is really no lack of food, clothing, building
material, land. Nature has provided bountifully for more myriads than we
are likely to see peopling the earth. But people compete with each other
and undersell each other, and those who labor are mulcted of their
due, and instead of turning to the earth--the inexhaustible mother--and
working unitedly for the common weal, they continue that fierce
competition and stultify each other's efforts and reduce each other to
wretchedness. Humanity is a house divided against itself. Those who feel
this to be true must gather round any movement which gives a hope for
the future, which indicates a policy by which the organic unity of
society in Ireland might be attained, and our people work harmoniously
to make beauty and health prevail in our civilization. What each
gives up to society in the making of a civilization he gets back a
thousandfold. Now, the co-operative movement alone of all movements in
Ireland has aspired to make an economic solidarity in Ireland. Whatever
the aims of other movements may be--and many of them have high ideals
and are necessary for the spiritual and intellectual development of our
people--there is none of them which has for aim the unity of economic
life. They all leave untouched this problem--how are we to organize
society so that people will not be in conflict with each other, will not
nullify each other's efforts, but all will conspire together for
unity, so that none shall be forgotten or oppressed or left out of our
brotherhood? The policy I put forward is incomplete and imperfect, and
it must necessarily be so, being mainly the work of one mind, and to
complete it and perfect it there must be many minds and many workers
fired by the ideal. But I have indicated in some completeness how the
rural population could be co-operatively organized, federated together,
and how the urban population could be organized and brought into a
harmony of economic purpose with the folk of the country. Within the
limits of object these suggestions amount to a policy for the nation.
If the tragic condition of the world leaves us unstirred, if we draw
no lessons from it, if there is no fiery stirring of will in Ireland to
make it a better place to live in, then indeed we may lose hope for our
country. Let us remember the most scornful condemnation in Scripture was
not given to the evil but to the indifferent: "Because thou art neither
hot nor cold I will spew thee out of my mouth." Let us not be the
Laodiceans of Europe, listless and indifferent to human needs,
swallowing our whisky and our porter, stupefying our souls, while our
poor are sweated; letting the children of our cities die with more
carelessness about life than the people of any other European country,
with sectarian organization's crawling in secrecy like poisonous
serpents through the undergrowth of swamps and forests. The co-operative
movement is at least open and ideal in its aims and objects. It is
national and not sectional. It seeks the triumph of no section but the
unity of our people, where unity alone is possible. Our intransigents
and extremists of all parties are not hurt or wounded by their adhesion
to the co-operative ideal. We may make up our minds that the stubborn
Irish temperament will never be overcome, but it may be won, and the
movement which invites all parties and creeds into its ranks and gives
them the largest opportunities of working together and understanding
each other, gives also the largest hope of the gradual melting of old
bitterness into a common tolerance where what is best essentially wins;
for all true triumphs are triumphs not of force, but the conquest by a
superior beauty of what is less beautiful. We should aim at a society
where people will be at harmony in their economic life, will readily
listen to different opinions from their own, will not turn sour faces
on those who do not think as they do, but will, by reason and sympathy,
comprehend each other and come at last, through sympathy and affection,
to a balancing of their diversities, as in that multitudinous diversity,
which is the universe, powers and dominions and elements are balanced,
and are guided harmoniously by the Shepherd of the Ages.