as withheld vision
and power and beauty from you, for this your verse is but a shallow
newspaper article made to rhyme. Truly ought the golden spurs to be
hacked from your heels and you be thrust out of the Court.

1912

IDEALS OF THE NEW RURAL SOCIETY

For a country where political agitations follow each other as rapidly
as plagues in an Eastern city, it is curious how little constructive
thought we can show on the ideals of a rural civilization. But economic
peace ought surely to have its victories to show as well as political
war. I would a thousand times rather dwell on what men and women working
together may do than on what may result from majorities at Westminster.
The beauty of great civilizations has been built up far more by the
people working together than by any corporate action of the State. In
these socialistic days we grow pessimistic about our own efforts and
optimistic about the working of the legislature. I think we do right to
expect great things from the State, but we ought to expect still greater
things from ourselves. We ought to know full well that, if the State did
twice as much as it does, we shall never rise out of mediocrity among
the nations unless we have unlimited faith in the power of our personal
efforts to raise and transform Ireland, and unless we translate the
faith into works. The State can give a man an economic holding, but
only the man himself can make it into Earthly Paradise, and it is a dull
business, unworthy of a being made in the image of God, to grind away
at work without some noble end to be served, some glowing ideal to be
attained.

Ireland is a horribly melancholy and cynical country. Our literary men
and poets, who ought to give us courage, have taken to writing about
the Irish as people who "went forth to battle, but always fell,"
sentimentalizing over incompetence instead of invigorating us and
liberating us and directing our energies. We have developed a new and
clever school of Irish dramatists who say they are holding up the mirror
to Irish peasant nature, but they reflect nothing but decadence. They
delight in the broken lights of insanity, the ruffian who beats his
wife, the weakling who is unfortunate in love and who goes and drinks
himself to death, while the little decaying country towns are seized on
with avidity and exhibited on the stage in every kind of decay and human
futility and meanness. Well, it is good to be chastened in spirit,
but it is