e are building
up the co-operative movement in a social order antagonistic to it.
The people who are trying to create these new ideals in the world are
outposts, sentinels, and frontiersmen thrown out before the armies of
the intellectual and spiritual races yet to come into being. We can all
enlist in these armies and be comrades to the pioneers. I hope many
will enlist in Ireland. I would cry to our idealists to come out of this
present-day Irish Babylon, so filled with sectarian, political, and race
hatreds, and to work for the future. I believe profoundly, with the most
extreme of Nationalists, in the future of Ireland, and in the vision
of light seen by Bridget which she saw and confessed between hopes and
tears to Patrick, and that this is the Isle of Destiny and the destiny
will be glorious and not ignoble, and when our hour is come we will have
something to give to the world, and we will be proud to give rather than
to grasp. Throughout their history Irishmen have always wrought better
for others than for themselves, and when they unite in Ireland to
work for each other, they will direct into the right channel all that
national capacity for devotion to causes for which they are famed. We
ought not only to desire to be at peace with each other, but with
the whole world, and this can only be brought about by the individual
citizen at all times protesting against sectarian and national passions,
and taking no part in them, coming out of such angry parties altogether,
as the people of the Lord were called by the divine voice to come out of
Babylon. It may seem a long way to set things right, but it is the swift
way and the royal road, and there is no other; and nobody, no prophet
crying before his time, will be listened to until the people are ready
for him. The congregation must gather before the preacher can deliver
what is in him to say. The economic brotherhood which I have put forward
as an Irish ideal would, in its realization, make us at peace with
ourselves, and if we are at peace with ourselves we will be at peace
with our neighbors and all other nations, and will wish them the
goodwill we have among ourselves, and will receive from them the same
goodwill. I do not believe in legal and formal solutions of national
antagonisms. While we generate animosities among ourselves we will
always display them to other nations, and I prefer to search out how it
is national hatreds are begotten, and to show how that canc