The aristocratic classes with traditions of government, the
manufacturing classes with economic experience, will alike be secondary
in Ireland to the small farmers and the wage-earners in the towns. We
must rely on the ideas common among our people, and on their power
to discern among their countrymen the aristocracy of character and
intellect.

Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of
races. They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty,
imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people. That
great mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded by
enemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant in
Europe simply by militarism. That military power depended on and was
fed by a vigorous intellectual life, and the most generally diffused
education and science existing perhaps in the world. The national being
had been enriched by a long succession of mighty thinkers. A great
subjective life and centuries of dream preceded a great objective
manifestation of power and wealth. The stir in the German Empire which
has agitated Europe was, at its root, the necessity laid on a powerful
soul to surround itself with equal external circumstance. That necessity
is laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their external life
correspond in some measure to their internal dream. A lover of beauty
will never contentedly live in a house where all things are devoid of
taste. An intellectual man will loathe a disordered society.

We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people are
a measure of their inner life. Our mean and disordered little country
towns in Ireland, with their drink-shops, their disregard of cleanliness
or beauty, accord with the character of the civilians who inhabit them.
Whenever we develop an intellectual life these things will be altered,
but not in priority to the spiritual mood. House by house, village by
village, the character of a civilization changes as the character of the
individuals change. When we begin to build up a lofty world within the
national soul, soon the country becomes beautiful and worthy of respect
in its externals. That building up of the inner world we have neglected.
Our excited political controversies, our playing at militarism, have
tended to bring men's thoughts from central depths to surfaces. Life
is drawn to its frontiers away from its spiritual base, and behind the
surface