--as all high things
we love do finally become--familiar to us, and nearer and closer to us
than the beatings of our own hearts.

When ideals which really lie at the root of our being are first
proclaimed, all that is external in life protests. So were many great
reformers martyred, but they left their ideals behind them in the
air, and men breathed them and they became part of their very being.
Nationality is a state of consciousness, a mood of definite character in
our intellectual being, and it is not perceived first except in profound
meditation; it does not become apparent from superficial activities any
more than we could, by looking at the world and the tragic history
of mankind, discover that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. That
knowledge comes to those who go within themselves, and not to those who
seek without for the way, the truth, and the life. But, once proclaimed,
the incorruptible spiritual element in man intuitively recognizes it
as truth, and it has a profound effect on human action. There is, I
believe, a powerful Irish character which has begun to reassert itself
in modern times, and this character is in essentials what it was two
thousand years ago. We discover its first manifestation in the ancient
clans. The clan was at once aristocratic and democratic. It was
aristocratic in leadership and democratic in its economic basis. The
most powerful character was elected as chief, while the land was the
property of the clan. That social order indicates the true political
character of the Irish. Races which last for thousands of years do not
change in essentials. They change in circumstance. They may grow better
or worse, but throughout their history the same fundamentals appear and
reassert themselves. We can see later in Irish literature or politics,
as powerful personalities emerged and expressed themselves, how the
ancient character persisted. Swift, Goldsmith, Berkeley, O'Grady, Shaw,
Wilde, Parnell, Davitt, Plunkett, and many others, however they differed
from each other, in so far as they betrayed a political character, were
intensely democratic in economic theory, adding that to an aristocratic
freedom of thought. That peculiar character, I believe, still persists
among our people in the mass, and it is by adopting a policy which
will enable it to manifest once more that we will create an Irish
civilization, which will fit our character as the glove fits the hand.
During the last quarter of a c