The National Being

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 fantasies 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