Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/88

 destructive element within the State, would become a fighting quality of the State itself in its rivalry with other States, every man's effort within the Nation being bent to this end. The technical education of the schools, in the application of the highest science to the Nation's business, would be drafted to this end under the control of the State and the administration of the stateships.

Nor would the life of culture be neglected. The stateship so constituted would employ, for example, its own chemist, not only for its technical work, but for lectures. So would it also employ its own historian and its own body of musicians. For when men are relieved from the necessity of competition among themselves, and realise the dignity of a life fellowship, they realise also the other dignities end beauties of life. The finer flowers of life cannot bloom over a soil choked by mutual rapacity, but when the soil is cleared by a cleaner and more economical order those flowers, being a purer output of the spirit of man, would find their natural life possible again. The old stateships are the best indication of this. Men were neither more nor less naturally corrupt then than they are now. Yet they were proud of their poets; they esteemed the possession of a poet whose fame was wide to be a high honour; poets coming from other stateships were received with distinction and hospitality; and when in the Contention of the Bards in the seventeenth century poets all over the country conducted a controversy, it was not only they who rivalled one another, but the stateships whom they