The National Being

his society he learns a new respect for the man of special or expert knowledge. Discussing the business of his association with other members he becomes something of a practical economist. He knows now where his produce goes. He learns that he has to compete with Americans, Europeans, and Colonials⁠—indeed with the farmers of the world, hitherto concealed from his view by a mountainous mass of middlemen. He begins to be interested in these countries and reads about them. He becomes a citizen of the world. His horizon is no longer bounded by the wave of blue hills beyond his village. The roar of the planet begins to sound in his ears. What is more important is that he is becoming a better citizen of his own country. He meets on his committee his religious and political opponents, not now discussing differences but identities of interest. He also meets the delegates from other societies in district conferences or general congresses, and those who meet thus find their interests are common, and a new friendliness springs up between North and South, and local cooperation leads on to national cooperation. The best intellects, the best business men in the societies, meet in the big centres as directors of federations and wholesales, and they get an all-Ireland view of their industry. They see the parish from the point of view of the nation, and this vision does not desert them when they go back to the parish. They realize that their interests are bound up with national interests, and they discuss legislation and administration with practical knowledge. Eyes getting keener every year, minds getting more instructed, begin to concentrate on Irish public men. Presently Patrick will begin to seek for men of special knowledge and administrative ability to manage Irish affairs. Ireland has hitherto been to Patrick a legend, a being mentioned in romantic poetry, a little dark Rose, a mystic maiden, a vague but very simple creature of tears and aspirations and revolts. He now knows what a multitudinous being a nation is, and in contact with its complexities Patrick’s politics take on a new gravity, thoughtfulness, and intellectual character.

Under the influence of these associations and the ideas pervading them our typical Irish farmer gets drawn out of his agricultural sleep of the ages, developing rapidly as mummy-wheat brought out of the tomb and exposed to the eternal forces which stimulate and bring to life. I have taken an individual as a type, and described the original circumstance and illustrated the playing of the new forces on his mind. It is the only way we can create a social order which will fit our character as the glove fits the hand. Reasoning solely from abstract principles about justice, democracy, the rights of man and the like, often leads us into futilities, if not into dangerous political experiments. We have to see our typical citizen in clear light, realize his deficiencies, ignorance, and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we can wisely enlarge his boundaries. The centre of the citizen is the home. His circumference ought to be the nation. The vast majority of Irish citizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital relations with their circumference which alone entitle them to the privileges of citizenship, and enable them to act with political wisdom. An emotional relationship is not enough. Our poets sang of a united Ireland, but the unity they sang of was only a metaphor. It mainly meant separation from another country. In that imaginary unity men were really separate from each other. Individualism, fanatically centering itself on its family and family interests, interfered on public boards to do jobs in the interests of its kith and kin. The cooperative movement connects with living links the home, the centre of Patrick’s being, to the nation, the circumference of his being. It connects him with the nation through membership of a national movement, not for the political purposes which call on him for a vote once every few years, but for economic purposes which affect him in the course of his daily occupations. This organization of the most numerous section of the Irish democracy into cooperative associations, as it develops and embraces the majority, will tend to make the nation one and indivisible and conscious of its unity. The individual, however meagre his natural endowment of altruism, will be led to think of his community as himself; because his income, his social pleasures even, depend on the success of the local and national organizations with which he is connected. The small farmers of former times pursued a petty business of barter and haggle, fighting for their own hand against half the world about them. The farmers of the new generation will grow up in a social order, where all the transactions which narrowed their fathers’ hearts will be communal and national enterprises. How much that will mean in a change of national character we can hardly realize, we who were born in an Ireland where petty individualism was rampant, and where every child had it borne in upon him that it had to fight its own corner in the world, where the whole atmosphere about it tended to the hardening of the personality.

We may hope and believe that this transformation of the social order will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation, identifying national with personal interests. For those who believe there is a divine seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they may hope will promote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in the past, in favorable airs, has made beauty or grandeur or spirituality the characteristics of ancient civilizations in Greece, in Egypt, and in India. No one can work for his race without the hope that the highest, or more than the highest, humanity has reached will be within reach of his race also. We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping