mmunities, for without some kind of communal life men hold
no more together than the drifting sands by the seashore. There is a
natural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves from
the dawn of time. It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees to
build their hexagonal cells. If we read the history of civilization
we will find people in every land forming little clans co-operating
together. Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up; the
greed of powerful men puts an end to them. But, whether broken or not,
the moment the rural dweller is left to himself he begins again, with
nature prompting him, to form little clans--or nations rather--with his
fellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancient
Ireland. The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and the
counties are survivals of these old co-operative colonies, where the men
owned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed their
own social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections. It
was so in every land under the sun. It was so in ancient India and in
ancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them,
are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in
nature--the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. And
it is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that I
have put together these thoughts on the rural community.

VIII.

We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in our
modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The
lordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the least
the relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancient
wisdom, as it is recounted to him on God's day, assures him of his
immortality: that the divine signature is over all his being, that in
some way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in a
likeness to It. He is a symbol of God Himself. He is the child of Deity.
His life is Its very breath. The Habitations of Eternity await his
coming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling within
him of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self. So proud
a tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after the day of
God he finds that none will pay him reverence. He, the destined comrade
of Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children of the King in