a thousand times better to be invigorated in spirit. To be
positive is always better than to be negative. These writers understand
and sympathize with Ireland more through their lower nature than their
higher nature. Judging by the things people write in Ireland, and by
what they go to see performed on the stage, it is more pleasing to them
to see enacted characters they know are meaner than themselves than to
see characters which they know are nobler than themselves.

All this is helping on our national pessimism and self-mistrust. It
helps to fix these features permanently in our national character,
which were excusable enough as temporary moods after defeat. The
younger generation should hear nothing about failures. It should not be
hypnotized into self-contempt. Our energies in Ireland are sapped by a
cynical self-mistrust which is spread everywhere through society. It
is natural enough that the elder generation, who were promised so many
millenniums, but who actually saw four million people deducted from the
population, should be cynical. But it is not right they should give only
to the younger generation the heritage of their disappointments without
any heritage of hope. From early childhood parents and friends are
hypnotizing the child into beliefs and unbeliefs, and too often they are
exiling all nobility out of life, all confidence, all trust, all hope;
they are insinuating a mean self-seeking, a self-mistrust, a vulgar
spirit which laughs at every high ideal, until at last the hypnotized
child is blinded to the presence of any beauty or nobility in life. No
country can ever hope to rise beyond a vulgar mediocrity where there is
not unbounded confidence in what its humanity can do. The self-confident
American will make a great civilization yet, because he believes with
all his heart and soul in the future of his country and in the powers of
the American people. What Whitman called their "barbaric yawp" may yet
turn into the lordliest speech and thought, but without self-confidence
a race will go no whither. If Irish people do not believe they can equal
or surpass the stature of any humanity which has been upon the globe,
then they had better all emigrate and become servants to some superior
race, and leave Ireland to new settlers who may come here with the same
high hopes as the Pilgrim Fathers had when they went to America.

We must go on imagining better than the best we know. Even in their
ruins now, Greece