Page:The national being - some thoughts on an Irish polity (IA nationalbeingsom00aeduiala).pdf/19

Rh Athenians: and that is, to create national ideals, which will dominate the policy of statesmen, the actions of citizens, the universities, the social organizations, the administration of State departments, and unite in one spirit urban and rural life. Unless this is done Ireland will be like Portugal, or any of the corrupt little penny-dreadful nationalities which so continually disturb the peace of the world with internal revolutions and external brawlings, and we shall only have achieved the mechanism of nationality, but the spirit will have eluded us.

What I have written hereafter on the national being, my thoughts on an Irish polity, are not to be taken as an attempt to deal with more than a few essentials. I offer it to my countrymen, to start thought and discussion upon the principles which should prevail in an Irish civilization. If to readers in other countries the thought appears primitive or elementary, I would like them to remember that we are at the beginning of our activity as a nation, and we have yet to settle fundamentals. Races hoary with political wisdom may look with disdain on the attempts at political thinking by a new self-governing nationality, or the theories of civilization discussed about the cradle of an infant State. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character of its thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist in developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earth together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistin-