Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/83

 necessary to see that their constitution simply invites corruption, just as it invites their capture by one or two interests that rule them to the exclusion of all other interests. Not only because they purport to represent unreal and arbitrarily distinguished parts of a life that is a fellowship (without even doing that much well), but also because of their very form and constitution, such bodies have reduced the local life of Ireland to a tangle of conflicting and corrupt interests.

These two criticisms suggest an obvious remedy. The first need is to restore the life of the community, in a fellowship of town and country, urban and rural, within a given area. The second need is to let that community express its life, and assume control of all its local affairs, in a legislative assembly of not less than fifty and not more than a hundred. The satisfaction of these two needs suggests difficulties that are incidental to each of them in turn as new enterprises in statesmanship. Fortunately, as we are following a historical continuity in the life of a Nation, answers are suggested to both of these difficulties out of the old State, and only require adaptation and re-framing to make them suit modern conditions.

The first difficulty is to find the natural area within which the life of a community would be comprised. Here, manifestly, the past would supply a very helpful answer, if it could be found. The area comprised by the old stateships would naturally finally be decreed by their internal needs and their external play and interplay upon one another—that