_ It seems inevitable that the domination of the individual by the State must become ever greater. It is in the evolutionary process. The amalgamation of individuals into nationalities and empires is as much in the cosmic plan as the development of highly organized beings out of unicellular organisms. I believe this process will continue until humanity itself is so psychically knit together that, as a being, it will manifest some form of cosmic consciousness in which the individual will share. Our spiritual intuitions and the great religions of the world alike indicate some such goal as that to which this turbulent cavalcade of humanity is wending. A knowledge of this must be in our subconscious being, or we would find the sacrifices men make for the State otherwise inexplicable. The State, though now ostensibly secular, makes more imperious claims on man than the ancient gods did. It lays hold of life. It asserts its right to take father, brother, and son, and to send them to meet death in its own defense. It denies them a choice or judgment as to whether its action is right or wrong. Right or wrong, the individual must be prepared to give his body for the commonwealth, and when one gives the body unresistingly, one gives the soul also. The marvelous thing about the authority of the State is that it is recognized by the vast majority of citizens. During eras of peace the citizen may be always in conflict with the policy of the State. He may call it a tyranny, but yet when it is in peril he will die to preserve for it an immortal life. The hold the State establishes over the spirit of man is the more wonderful when we look rearward on history, and see with what labor and sacrifice the State was established. But we see also how readily, once the union has been brought about, men will die to preserve it, even although it is a tyranny, a bad State. For what do they die unless the spirit in man has some inner certitude that the divine event to which humanity tends is a unity of its multitudinous life, and that a State--even a bad State--must be preserved by its citizens, because it is at least an attempt at organic unity? It is a simulacrum of the ideal; it contains the germ or possibility of that to which the spirit of man is traveling. It disciplines the individual in service to that greater being in which it will find its fulfillment, and a bad State is better than no State at all. To be without a State is to prowl backwards from the divinity before us to the beast behind us.
The power the State exerts is a spiritual power, acting on or through the will of man. The volunteer armies do not really march to die with more readiness than the conscript armies. The sacrifice is not readily explicable by material causes. There is no material reason why the proletarian--who has no property to defend, who is more or less sure as a skilled craftsman of employment under any ruler--should concern himself whether his ruler be King, Kaiser, or President. But not one in a hundred proletarians really thinks like that. It is not the hope of personal profit works upon men to risk life. Let some exploiter of industry desire to employ a thousand men at dangerous work, with the risks of death or disablement equal to those of war; let it be known that one in six will be killed and another be disabled, and what sum will purchase the service of workers? They will risk life for the State, though given a bare subsistence or a pay which they would describe as inhuman if offered by one of the autocrats of industry. Men working for the State will make the most extraordinary sacrifices; but they stand stubbornly and sullenly as disturbers and blockers of all industry which is run for private profit. Is it not clear of the two policies for the State to adopt, to promote personal interests among its citizens or to unite men for the general good, that the first path is full of danger to the State, while through the other men will march cheerfully, though it be to death, in defense of the State. Something, a real life above the individual, acts through the national being, and would almost suggest to us that Heaven cannot fully manifest its will to humanity through the individual, but must utter itself through multitudes. There must be an orchestration of humanity ere it can echo divine melodies. In real truth we are all seeking in the majesties we create for union with a greater Majesty.
I wrote in an earlier page that the ancient conception of Nature as a manifestation of spirit was incarnating anew in the minds of modern thinkers; that Nature was no longer conceived of as material or static in condition, but as force and continual motion; that they were trying to identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces of Nature manifest with more power in society. The real nature of these energies manifesting in humanity I do not know, but they have been hinted at in the Scriptures, the oracles of the Oversoul, which speak of the whole creation laboring upwards and the entry of humanity into the Divine Mind, and of the re-introcession of That Itself with all Its myriad unity into Deity, so that God might be all in all. I believe profoundly that men do not hold the ideas of liberty or solidarity, which have moved them so powerfully, merely as phantasies which are pleasant to the soul or make ease for the body; but because, whether they struggle passionately for liberty or to achieve a solidarity, in working for these two ideals, which seem in conflict, they are divinely supported, in unison with the divine nature, and energies as real as those the scientist studies--as electricity, as magnetism, heat or light--do descend into the soul and reinforce it with elemental energy. We are here for the purposes of soul, and there can be no purpose in individualizing the soul if essential freedom is denied to it and there is only a destiny. Wherever essential freedom, the right of the spirit to choose its own heroes and its own ideals, is denied, nations rise in rebellion. But the spirit in man is wrought in a likeness to Deity, which is that harmony and unity of Being which upholds the universe; and by the very nature of the spirit, while it asserts its freedom, its impulses lead it to a harmony with all life, to a solidarity or brotherhood with it.
All these ideals of freedom, of brotherhood, of power, of justice, of beauty, which have been at one time or another the fundamental idea in civilizations, are heaven-born, and descended from the divine world, incarnating first in the highest minds in each race, perceived by them and transmitted to their fellow-citizens; and it is the emergence or manifestation of one or other of these ideals in a group which is the beginning of a nation; and the more strongly the ideal is held the more powerful becomes the national being, because the synchronous vibration of many minds in harmony brings about almost unconsciously a psychic unity, a coalescing of the subconscious being of many. It is that inner unity which constitutes the national being.
The idea of the national being emerged at no recognizable point in our history in Ireland. It is older than any name we know. It is not earth-born, but the synthesis of many heroic and beautiful moments, and these, it must be remembered, are divine in their origin. Every heroic deed is an act of the spirit, and every perception of beauty is vision with the divine eye, and not with the mortal sense. The spirit was subtly intermingled with the shining of old romance, and it is no mere phantasy which shows Ireland at its dawn in a misty light thronged with divine figures, and beneath and nearer to us demi-gods and heroes fading into recognizable men. The bards took cognizance only of the most notable personalities who preceded them, and of these only the acts which had a symbolic or spiritual significance; and these grew thrice refined as generations of poets in enraptured musings along by the mountains or in the woods brooded upon their heritage of story, until, as it passed from age to age, the accumulated beauty grew greater than the beauty of the hour. The dream began to enter into the children of our race, and turn their thoughts from earth to that world in which it had its inception.
It was a common belief among the ancient peoples that each had a national genius or deity who presided over them, in whose all-embracing mind they were contained, and who was the shepherd of their destinies. We can conceive of the national spirit in Ireland as first manifesting itself through individual heroes or kings, and as the history of famous warriors laid hold of the people, extending its influence until it created therein the germs of a kindred nature.
An aristocracy of lordly and chivalrous heroes is bound in time to create a great democracy by the reflection of their character in the mass, and the idea of the divine right of kings is succeeded by the idea of the divine right of the people. If this sequence cannot be traced in any one respect with historical regularity, it is because of the complexity of national life, its varied needs, the vicissitudes of history, and its infinite changes of sentiment. But the threads are all taken up in the end; and ideals which were forgotten and absent from the voices of men will be found, when recurred to, to have grown to a rarer and more spiritual beauty in their quiet abode in the heart. The seeds which were sown at the beginning of a race bear their flowers and fruits towards its close, and already antique names begin to stir us again with their power, and the antique ideals to reincarnate in us and renew their dominion over us.
They may not be recognized at first as a re-emergence of ancient moods. The democratic economics of the ancient clans have vanished almost out of memory, but the mood in which they were established reappears in those who would create a communal or co-operative life in the nation into which those ancient clans long since have melted. The instinct in the clans to waive aside the weak and to seek for an aristocratic and powerful character in their leaders reappears in the rising generation, who turn from the utterer of platitudes to men of real intellect and strong will. The object of democratic organization is to bring out the aristocratic character in leadership, the vivid original personalities who act and think from their own will and their own centres, who bring down fire from the heaven of their spirits and quicken and vivify the mass, and make democracies also to be great and fearless and free. A nation is dead where men acknowledge only conventions. We must find out truth for ourselves, becoming first initiates and finally masters in the guild of life. The intellect of Ireland is in chains where it ought to be free, and we have individualism in our economics which ought to be co-ordinated and sternly disciplined out of the iniquity of free profiteering. To quicken the intellect and imagination of Ireland, to co-ordinate our economic life for the general good, should be the objects of national policy, and will subserve the evolutionary purpose. The free imagination and the aspiring mind alone climb into the higher spheres and deflect for us the ethereal currents. It is the multitude of aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them of service to other nations, and it is by the character of the social order and the quality of brotherhood in it our civilization will endure. Without love we are nothing. _