e?
If we build our civilization without integrating labor into its economic
structure, it will wreck that civilization, and it will do that more
swiftly today than two thousand years ago, because there is no longer
the disparity of culture between high and low which existed in past
centuries. The son of the artisan, if he cares to read, may become
almost as fully master of the wisdom of Plato or Aristotle as if he
had been at a university. Emerson will speak to him of his divinity;
Whitman, drunken with the sun, will chant to him of his inheritance of
the earth. He is elevated by the poets and instructed by the economists.
But there are not thrones enough for all who are made wise in our social
order, and failing even to serve in the social heaven these men will
spread revolt and reign in the social hell. They are becoming too many
for higher places to be found for them in the national economy. They are
increasing to a multitude which must be considered, and the framers of
a national polity must devise a life for them where their new-found
dignity of spirit will not be abased. Men no more will be content under
rulers of industry they do not elect themselves than they were under
political rulers claiming their obedience in the name of God. They will
not for long labor in industries where they have no power to fix
the conditions of their employment, as they were not content with a
political system which allowed them no power to control legislation.
Ireland must begin its imaginative reconstruction of a civilization by
first considering that type which, in the earlier civilizations of the
world, has been slave, serf, or servile, working either on land or at
industry, and must construct with reference to it. These workers must be
the central figures, and how their material, intellectual, and spiritual
needs are met must be the test of value of the social order we evolve.

IV.

In Ireland we begin naturally our consideration of this problem with the
folk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal--the linking
up of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since the
destruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factor
in rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other and
from the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action; and that was
so until the movement for the organization of agriculture was initiated
by Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in th