The National Being

on urban industry. More and more men and women in our modern civilization drift out of Nature, out of sweet air, health, strength, beauty, into the cities, where in the third generation there is a rickety population, mean in stature, vulgar or depraved in character, with the image of the devil in mind and matter more than the image of Deity. Those who go like it at first; but city life is like the roll spoken of by the prophet, which was sweet in the mouth but bitter in the belly. The first generation are intoxicated by the new life, but in the third generation the cord is cut which connected them with Nature, the Great Mother, and life shrivels up, sundered from the source of life. Is there any prophet, any statesman, any leader, who will⁠—as Moses once led the Israelites out of the Egyptian bondage⁠—excite the human imagination and lead humanity back to Nature, to sunlight, starlight, earth-breath, sweet air, beauty, gaiety, and health? Is it impossible now to move humanity by great ideas, as Muhammad fired his dark hosts to forgetfulness of life; or as Peter the Hermit awakened Europe to a frenzy, so that it hurried its hot chivalry across a continent to the Holy Land? Is not the earth mother of us all? Are not our spirits clothed round with the substance of earth? Is it not from Nature we draw life? Do we not perish without sunlight and fresh air? Let us have no breath of air and in five minutes life is extinct. Yet in the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on day by day. The lover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any big city and may look into ten thousand faces and see none that is lovely. Is not the return of man to a natural life on the earth a great enough idea to inspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid the green trees and fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but men say there is no intellectual life working on the land. No intellectual life when man is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When the mysterious forces which bring to birth and life are yet undiscovered; when the earth is teeming with life, and the dumb brown lips of the ridges are breathing mystery! Is not the growth of a tree from a tiny cell hidden in the earth as provocative of thought as the things men learn at the schools? Is not thought on these things more interesting than the sophistries of the newspapers? It is only in Nature, and by thought on the problems of Nature, that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to the Mighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world.

Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities? The memory lies on one “heavy as frost and deep almost as life.” It is terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements; the depletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from the flaring drink-shops. The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it while it moves amid such things. And outside these places the clouds are flying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, the winds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leaf to leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk. The creation of a rural civilization is the greatest need of our time. It may not come in our days, but we can lay the foundations of it, preparing the way for the true prophet when he will come. The fight now is not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who are on the land contented, happy, and prosperous. And we must begin by organizing them to defend what is left to them; to take back, industry by industry, what was stolen from them. We must organize the country people into communities, for without some kind of communal life men hold no more together than the drifting sands by the seashore. There is a natural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves from the dawn of time. It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees to build their hexagonal cells. If we read the history of civilization we will find people in every land forming little clans cooperating together. Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up; the greed of powerful men puts an end to them. But, whether broken or not, the moment the rural dweller is left to himself he begins again, with nature prompting him, to form little clans⁠—or nations rather⁠—with his fellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancient Ireland. The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and the counties are survivals of these old cooperative colonies, where the men owned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed their own social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections. It was so in every land under the sun. It was so in ancient India and in ancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in nature⁠—the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. And it is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that I have put together these thoughts on the rural community.

VIII

We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in our modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The lordliest things