The Gaelic State in the Past & Future/Chapter 7

by Darrell Figgis

VII.

At the Gates of the Future.

If there is one thing sure for the future of an Ireland free to develop its own State it is this, that one by one the moulds shaped by England for its governance will be thrown back into the cauldron and new moulds made to accord with the Nation's own sense of wisdom and economy. Urban Councils, District Councils, Poor Law Guardians, and County Councils, all that they are and all that they represent are destined for the cauldron in the forms in which they at present are known. The whole English political configuration of Ireland is destined to rejection (it never really existed otherwise than in a partial state of rejection) simply because it expresses little that is real in the life of the people. No organisation is good or bad in itself as a scheme; it is only good or bad in the degree in which it does, or does not, effectively and economically organise a flexible life for some definite end which it has to serve. In fact, the better it is the less will it be in evidence as a thing in itself, apart from the elements comprising it. The old Irish State was a good organisation, because it is almost impossible to think of it apart from the life which it contained and conveyed, so nearly identical were the two things. The stateships were the people and the people were the stateships; and that is why the conqueror found plantations necessary; for it was impossible to break one without removing the other. The modern state of Ireland is not, in that sense, an organisation at all; it is simply a configuration imposed upon its life, not fitting that life at all, neither expressing, containing nor conveying that life, and therefore used or abused by it according as occasion offers.

Even the very counties, those -results of the breaking up of the stateships and the making of English shire-lands, are unreal things that express little of the life of the people. Their long continuance has made them familiar, and so has given them a fictitious reality; but they again are a configuration and not an organisation. They may persist for awhile with that fictitious life, chiefly because they have become themes of local partisanship; but in the degree in which the Nation sets about to displace its configuration by a real organisation, they must inevitably pass into a historical memory,;and not a very pleasing historical memory at that.

Everything that has been introduced by England into Ireland is destined to rejection, and not as a matter of prejudice, but as an inevitable fact in statesmanship. Suits cut for other people, or demanded by other people's necessities, are the proper wear for clowns. At best these things were wrung as concessions given with poor grace after long and bitter war; at worst they were anticipations of further war and the spontaneous creation of an alien thought. The first was better than the second because it did spring from the initiative of the people, and partially and ineffectually answered that demand, while the second sprang from the same alien intention that has created three centuries of almost unremitting warfare. And whether that intention stalk as an undisguised foe, or prank about with the antics of a philanthropist, the result in statesmanship is the same. Instead of effecting an organisation it creates a configuration; instead of producing human contentment, comfort and ease it produces irritation, exasperation and enmity; instead of being as flexible as the life it contains it is as rigid as the thought that made it; instead of being capable of development it is only capable of being broken or abused; instead of being a National State it is a national despair and futility. Therefore statesmanship must neglect its achievements (though continuity of government may compel their continuance for awhile) and must make a direct approach to the national life, and its needs and necessities, human and economic, in order to build again, however slowly to build, from the foundations the structure that those foundations decree and suggest.

It is in the discovery of those foundations that history becomes a matter of first importance. Not a portion of that history; not the history of the eighteenth century, which did not express the life of the people but the life of a small colony the proportion of which to the whole is even smaller now than it was then, besides being under the influence of the awakening of the nineteenth century; but the whole of that history, from the beginnings to the present, for in Irish history probably more than in any other the end is in the beginning and the beginning in the end. That we have already seen. We have seen, first, the National State as it existed, and we saw that it was indeed a National State although it was not finally centralised before it was assaulted. We have seen the assault that suspended its completion, and we saw that that assault meant for some centuries the war of a State against a State, a Polity against a Polity, a foreign and alien polity seeking to break and displace the polity of the Nation. We have seen that polity broken arid displaced, and we saw the ideas that went to the building of that polity lying resident in the people and creating a continual warfare with the alien polity that had been imposed upon the country from without. We have seen that those ideas maintained the warfare unceasingly, it being the first principle of life to find an outlet for the ideas of the mind and the impulses of the blood, and to war for them when they are thwarted; and we saw that warfare successful in winning back much of what had been lost, and especially winning back the land on which the old polity had been based. We have seen those ideas breaking out in some remarkable acts reminiscent of the old process of law; and we saw that when some scheme was advocated to the people that could be worked independently of the alien polity it was taken and bent into the form of the stateships in which the old polity had been expressed . In a word, we have seen the end in the beginning, and the beginning in the end, with a persistent continuity throughout. The question is, how may that continuity be carried forward, and some State be devised that shall express the National intuition and desire, and be the old State re-born into modern conditions while perfectly fitting and conveying the requirements of a new and intricate life?

Manifestly in the first place the incompleted work of the nineteenth century, where the nation clearly asserted its desire, must be brought as speedily as possible to an end. That is to say, Land Purchase must be completed. This is necessary for several reasons, all of which vitally affect each part of the country, since nations are not tissues of separate interests, nor even an entanglement of separate interests, but co-ordinated wholes. It is economically necessary. Industrial centres, such as Belfast, depend for their enterprise on capital accumulated, not primarily from their own reserves, but from other sources. In Ireland those other sources are mainly derived from farmers' deposits. The sooner, therefore, farmers can be relieved from the uneconomical drain on their industry known as rent the sooner will they be able to accumulate balances that will be available for industrial enterprise. Sound economy suggests that the main source of a nation's wealth, its land, should be freed from the burden of rents, especially as these rents are usually spent to the advantage of other countries. It is also politically necessary. It is not at all likely that an agitation that convulsed the nineteenth century will die away with its work incompleted; and no nation can afford to lets its path be encumbered by a continual agitation the justice of which has been admitted. The necessity in statesmanship follows closely upon this. The nation has clearly indicated that, just as the old State was built on the free possession of the land, so must the new State be built. It being the task of statesmanship to give expression to the desires of a nation while preserving the unity and balance of the whole, this particular desire must be satisfied, and built into the Polity, if the work of statesmanship is not to fall into ruin in its hands.

Yet in order that Land Purchase should be completed the Nation must be financially free, without burdens placed upon it by any considerations outside its shores. Needless to say, Land Purchase under an Irish State will be a different matter from the same purchase as devised by foreign governments. The Nation will pay a single-minded attention to its own interests. Its good faith will be an essential part of those interests; but it will not be easily embarrassed by fictitious prices and delaying methods to inflate values. Nevertheless, much of the world 's wealth having somehow escaped in gas and shell-splinters, and Ireland being as the result of long oppression a poor nation, the completion of Land Purchase will require a nation absolutely unencumbered by any other demands on its wealth than the demand of its own problems.

That is to say, before any building can proceed its foundation must be assured, the foundation being the same as preceded the building in the old State. That building, it will be remembered, was not possible, and the State could not be said to have begun, till there was a central authority strong enough to make the parts out of earlier, more independent units, and frame them into a national whole. That central authority will again be necessary; and in asking the question, of what sort shall it be, it will be well to suppose nothing but to begin from the beginnings.

Never in the history of the Irish Nation (if we except the Parliament of 1689, which was framed on earlier models drawn from other than Irish sources) has any body ever sat at all similar to a modern Parliament. In the old Irish State the elected monarch convened great councils charged with special functions and duties. There was a council of brehons, a council of administrative rulers, a council of historians, or public recorders, and a council of poets—all of them public officials, with their parts to play in their various stateships Each council decided in its own affairs, and where necessary, for instance as between rulers and brehons, or brehons and recorders, the monarch wrought harmony between their decisions for the smooth working of the State. But that is not to say that, if the Nation had been left free to develop and augment its own polity, something in the nature of an assembly drawn from popular sources would not have been found necessary to assist or displace the monarch and his personal council. Had it been possible to create such an assembly early a central stability would have existed, drawn from all the parts of the State and therefore holding all the parts together, that would have provided the State with just that central authority that it needed. However that be, parliaments, or assemblies of popular representatives, have become an essential part of the modern mind, as providers and correctives of a central government. They have proved to be corrupt servers of special interests; but that is because they have been too much trusted without supplementing them with councils each representing its own interest, as the monarch in the Irish State supplemented his executive authority with councils each having power, subject to the national unity of administration, over its special concerns.

No student of the recent action of parliaments is at all likely to be weighed to the earth by his overpowering admiration for them as effective instruments for the will of peoples. They are, it is true, the displacement of one kind of arbitrary power by another kind of arbitrary power. They are, in the form in which we best know them, the substitution of a king and his chosen advisers by a government and an assembly of popular representatives to which it is responsible. Accepting that substitution as the central authority by which a State may be created, is it possible to carry into the change the spirit of the old State? The answer to that question is that the spirit of the old State not only may be so conveyed, but that it actually corrects, in great measure, the modern weakness of parliaments, by bringing them into closer relation with the differing and special interests of the Nation. The translation of the old State, that now lives in the intuitions and expectations of the Nation, into the modern conditions that are now part of the Nation's surface-thinking, corrects the weakness of modern ideas while providing just the kind of centralisation that the old State lacked.

The essential part of the working of the old State was clearly the convocation of its great councils. While these met at regular periods the State continued its central function, and existed as a whole. When they were discontinued, as they sometimes were, the State fell into disarray, and existed only in its parts. Now in modern times, as it so happens, Irishmen meeting in their own concerns and acting at their own initiative created just such another council, The work of the Recess Committee resulted in the formation of the Department of Agriculture, the working of which was intended to lie at the instance and in the power of a Council of Farmers elected through the country to manage their own concerns. Perhaps no better instance could be given of the tragic futility of trying to work the conceptions of one Polity through the conditions of its alien rival. For the President of the Council became Minister of an alien bureaucratic government. He took his orders from that government, even though every farmer in Ireland was outraged by the effect of those orders. He took his salary from that government, and existed at the will of that government, with the result that the Council that was supposed to express and control the interest of farming in Ireland was itself controlled by the interests of farmers in somebody else's country, and so was brought to a nullity. Moreover, while the farmers met in council to study their exclusive interests their President openly expressed his intention to study the interests of traders, even when the two interests were opposed to one another; and as the Council of Farmers had no means of enforcing its will, and no court to which, to appeal, it fell into decay, and by neglect came in the end to be largely an echo of its President's will.

Yet, though the Department of Agriculture is an eloquent example of how things ought not to be done, it does in fact contain a striking idea, evolved by. consultation of Irishmen on Irish soil, that carries the conception of the old Irish State. If an Irish Assembly, or Parliament, were surrounded by a number of such councils, representing each of the special interests or concerns of the Nation, the elder State would be translated into modern conditions and transfigure those conditions by drawing the arbitrary and purely theoretical business of parliaments into a definite relation to the life of a nation. Instead of the monarch and his court would appear a government and the representative assembly from which it is drawn and to which it is responsible. Instead of three or four special councils representing the comparatively simple texture of the life in the first millenium would appear a number of such special councils representing the proportionately greater complexity of the life of to-day. And just as in the old State each council held authority in its own concerns leaving to the monarch the co-ordination of the whole, so the modern councils would each rule their own affairs subject to the control of the assembly of the Nation.

There would thus be two different kinds of representation gathered together. There would be the direct representation of the Nation, and there would be the representation of the special interests the union and pattern of which create the national life. Both would meet in the Government.

The councils would include every sort of interest, but they would not be of equal size or of the same formation. Both size and formation would correspond to the internal requirements of each interest, or concern. Those representing Farming and Labour, for instance, would necessarily be large, not only because of the size of the interests they would represent, but also because the nature of those interests would demand a wide expression of opinion. Those representing Law, Capital and Education would be smaller, because of the narrower and more special nature of their interests. Those representing the Army and Naval Defence would not only be smaller yet, but would necessarily be formed in other ways. Each council would be formed by the direct vote of all those in the country engaged in that branch of work. The Council of Local Administration would naturally consist of the elected heads of stateships, and would thus exactly correspond to the Council of Rulers in the old State. But the Council of the Army, Naval Defence and the Police would either consist of heads of departments, by promotion or appointment, or partly of such heads and partly of men chosen by the direct vote of officers and rank and file. The details, for the moment, are immaterial. They would require closer attention at the moment of creation. The main matter is that each council would control its own affairs by the direct representation of all the people in the country engaged in its practical conduct. And these special interests would meet the direct representation of the Nation by Assembly in the Government of the day.

The Government would, by necessity, depending as it would on the will of the Assembly, be found from and always be responsible to that Assembly. That is to say, the largest party, or combination of parties, just as in the present clumsy theory of government, would create the Government of the day. But the Ministers of Government would be presidents of various councils, and would reflect their desire. Instead of evolving theories from consultation with the permanent officials of departments, as happens in England and most other countries, they would be directly in touch with the interests over whose destinies they preside, and their attention would, be occupied with the immediate practical questions raised from time to time. If some scheme suggested itself to them as desirable they would first have to win the consent and approval of their respective councils before coming to the Assembly with them; and when they came, they would come not only as Ministers of the Government but as spokesmen of their councils. Thus the clumsiness and constant injustice of majority government would continually be refined by contact with living issues. Within the body of the existing law each special interest would be the arbiter of its own affairs. When fresh legislation became necessary by changed conditions, or through other causes, its council would discuss it, formulate it, and be responsible through its president for the initiative of bringing it before the Assembly of the Nation.

A system such as this, as has been said, would bring into joint operation two kinds of representation: the representation of special interests and the representation of the whole people. Clearly they would require a solvent and a corrective. New legislation might be initiated by a council and be considerably altered by the Assembly. This would naturally only be the case in extreme cases, for the will of such councils would naturally have a far higher authority than the sole will of one man in consultation with permanent officials. Yet the contingency would have to be provided for. For the council might reject the amended form of its wish, as it would have the right to do. Or the Assembly might reject the suggestion altogether, or compel its withdrawal, with the result that the initiative might be repeated. Very properly the final decision would rest with the Assembly, for it would be responsible not to special interests, but to the whole Nation. Yet the councils would equally require some further court to which to appeal on the argument that no Assembly at all times and in all cases represents a nation's will, however frequently it be elected. They would therefore demand some court in which they themselves had a direct voice.

This could be created by a Senate half as large as the Assembly. A third of the Senate could be created by large electoral areas, say the provinces, voting by proportional representation. By that method men would be chosen who commanded general respect but did not wear a party colour or control a local following pronounced enough to win favour at the hustings, and who, on the other hand, could not be said to represent any special interest. But two-thirds of the Senate would be chosen in equal proportions by the various councils acting as electoral colleges. Electoral colleges, that act simply and only as electoral colleges, as in America, have generally proved to be failures. They dilute the popular will to no particular purpose, and lend themselves to intrigue. But the councils would not be primarily elected as electoral colleges. They would be elected to control and direct their own special interests. Only in a secondary capacity would they act as electoral colleges. Nor would their appointments to the Senate have the right to sit both in the Councils and in the Senate. Men or women chosen for the Senate by the various councils would sit and act only in the Senate.

Legislation initiated in the Assembly would proceed automatically to the Senate, before which body, if a council felt aggrieved, its case would be argued by its representatives. If Assembly and Senate agreed no further could be said in the matter. If they disagreed, after a given length of time (during which time the subject of dispute would be laid aside) both Assembly and Senate would sit, debate and vote on the matter as one body, and the decision so taken would be final during the life of that Assembly.

It is claimed that a system such as this reflects the spirit of the old Irish State as translated into modern conditions, answering at one time the instincts that have persisted in the Nation and the surface-thinking it has since acquired. It gives no undue obeisance to the modern invention of parliaments, but draws the Government created by an Assembly of Representatives into definite relation with the interests it is supposed to study while making those interests the deciders of their own affairs within the limits of national agreement. It could not help but reflect the instincts and thoughts of the Nation. Being brought so closely into touch with its life it would at once react to the changes of that life. Yet the stability and central function of government would be assured. The utmost liberty would be given to the parts while ensuring the central action of the whole, as the limbs of the body have an independent liberty while obeying the rhythm created and disciplined by the mind.

Certain parts of government belong so essentially to the business of the whole that they would not come under the review of any special council. The Minister, or Ministers, in charge of these would be responsible to none but the Nation, for they would directly concern the Nation as a whole and not in any one of its parts. The chief of these of course is finance. The only council which the Minister of Finance could consult or advise would be the Assembly of Representatives, as drawn directly, well or ill, from the people's choice. All direct money arrangements, such as taxes, the creation of debt or credit, the purchase of properties or monoplies, and so forth, would lie in his care, would arise at his initiative and would be solved by the Assembly. The Senate could claim the right to debate any such measure, and to suggest alterations, but whether the Assembly accepted or rejected these alterations would lie at its own discretion.

There would be other matters of the same nature. The creation of new forms or units of government, for example, or changes in the constitution, where rendered necessary by changing conditions, or any matter outside the range of the councils, or transcending their capacity, or any new legislation at the initiative of one council that would demand some independent measure to bring it into co-ordination with the working of some other council, would all be of this kind, and would lie at the initiative of the Chief Minister of State, who would be responsible for the State to its elected President and would be chosen by him to create the Ministry.

Such business would naturally be more frequent at the beginning of the working of the State than when it was in complete movement. For example, the first work of the State would inevitably be the re-creation of its local government in order to bring it into conformity with practical necessities on the lines of the stateships of the old State. Nothing more unwieldy and uneconomical than the present system, or lack of system, could very well have been devised. It is a patchwork quilt of foreign ideas, that express no realities in Ireland, that are alternately the theme of the mirth and the tears, but always the derision, of Irishmen, and that even in the country of their invention have not proved to be a conspicuous success. Urban Councils, District Councils, Poor Law Guardians, Town Commissioners and County Councils all have their independent lives without being fitted in as parts of a co-related whole. Seen in contrast with the compactness and completeness of the old stateships nothing could seem more haphazard and accidental. So long as they exist, as they now do, it will be impossible to speak of an Irish State, for a State does not exist only by reason of the larger, more central forms of government, but in the degree in which those larger forms are drawn into relation with smaller and local units of government. They neither correspond to any efficiency in the State nor to any efficiency in relation to their own needs. They divide up a given area into a number of separate and even opposed units, whereas the life of that area is generally itself a unit, however variously its activities may be expressed. A small township and the country lying about it, for example, can only artificially be broken up into two units, one the town and the other the country, for their life is woven of one piece. Even the industries of the towns depend on the country lying round about. Any weakening of the whole weakens each one of its parts, and the whole is weakened by being broken into irresponsible parts. For the life of the whole exists as a community not as a patchwork.

Moreover, the present councils are neither large enough nor small enough for efficiency. A very small council would create great rivalry in its election and would cause a fierce light to beat on all its actions. Under such circumstances corruption would be difficult. But a council of this sort would not be representative of the life it governed. A large council, on the other hand, would have its own kind of efficiency, and would be representative of all the life it expressed. It would naturally have to create its officers of government, from whom it could withdraw the power it gave when they ceased to express its will. Expressing itself by way of debate it would create an interest in local government, and a feeling of general responsibility, that cannot now be said to exist. The subjects debated in the local Assembly would be discussed by the hearthside; the life of the people would be quickened; and they would not reserve all their thought for the larger national questions, but would expend it also on their immediate local interests. Thus again corruption would be made difficult. A field would be offered for the discussion of new ideas of local government, local improvement or trade economy and efficiency, whereas at the present moment local councils are sealed chambers that by their construction can never admit fresh air and are the natural breeding places for corruption. It is easy, and just, to censure corruption in these local bodies, but it is yet more necessary to see that their constitution simply invites corruption, just as it invites their capture by one or two interests that rule them to the exclusion of all other interests. Not only because they purport to represent unreal and arbitrarily distinguished parts of a life that is a fellowship (without even doing that much well), but also because of their very form and constitution, such bodies have reduced the local life of Ireland to a tangle of conflicting and corrupt interests.

These two criticisms suggest an obvious remedy. The first need is to restore the life of the community, in a fellowship of town and country, urban and rural, within a given area. The second need is to let that community express its life, and assume control of all its local affairs, in a legislative assembly of not less than fifty and not more than a hundred. The satisfaction of these two needs suggests difficulties that are incidental to each of them in turn as new enterprises in statesmanship. Fortunately, as we are following a historical continuity in the life of a Nation, answers are suggested to both of these difficulties out of the old State, and only require adaptation and re-framing to make them suit modern conditions.

The first difficulty is to find the natural area within which the life of a community would be comprised. Here, manifestly, the past would supply a very helpful answer, if it could be found. The area comprised by the old stateships would naturally finally be decreed by their internal needs and their external play and interplay upon one another—that is to say, partly by certain obvious geographical necessities and partly by economic conditions. Rivers, lakes, mountain ranges and the sea would impose natural boundaries; and equal accessibility to both mountain pasture and tillage, or alternatively different stateships taking up different kinds of life, would suggest other boundaries. These things can in many cases be traced in the boundaries of the old stateships where they are discoverable as in many cases they are. Clearly since then the life of the people has changed in many ways, and the statesman thinking of modern conditions would find other boundaries naturally suggested to him. The transition from the modern artificial limits of local life to the proper communities, or fellowships, of the future would not be easy. Yet if certain boundaries, drawn from a comparison of the old stateships with the new requirements, were decreed, subsequent experience would soon suggest a revision of working areas where these were found necessary. At the present time these areas in many cases have already been found in great measure by the co-operative societies that have created petty stateships of their own. Such societies have been grouped round an economic idea that, embodying as it does the sense of unity and fellowship about which the new communities would be grouped, would probably be adopted in some form by the stateships of the future; but that would be for themselves to decide by debate in assembly. And when it is remembered that some of these societies have already undertaken from the power used for their factories to supply light to neighbouring townships it is obvious that a larger relation for the life of a stateship is at once indicated.

Clearly the past is equally full of suggestion in answering the second difficulty. To ask, what officers would the assemblies of the new stateships create for the conduct of its government, is at once to think of the past. In the degree in which the life of these stateships became more various its officers, or ministers, would become more numerous, while if it remained simple they would be few. The first would be the President of the Assembly, who would take his place in the Council of Local Administration. The stateship would take control of its own internal litigation under its own law officer, and the lawyers beneath him would not merely be advocates in criminal actions, but would serve as arbitrators in actions for tort. It would have its own Finance Minister, its own Minister of Public Health, and if necessary its own ministers of trade and agriculture, for local life in these questions will not remain as stagnant as it is now, especially in the wider areas that the stateships would include. Such ministers would hold their power from the Assembly, and could work with committees appointed by the Assembly. Offices, such as that of the recorder, the surveyor, the doctors and the nurses would be filled by public examination, but the actions of those who filled them would come under the departments of government under the constant review of the Assembly, which could terminate appointments at its will.

Stateships such as these would be the recognised units of the State. That is to say, they would be political units, and would thus be the constituencies for the return of one or more members, according to population, to the Assembly of the Nation. From them that Assembly would be constituted, just as the Councils would each be constituted by the vote of all those in the Nation engaged in its own branch of the national life. They would also be economic units, both for raising and expending its own local taxation and for meeting the levies of the State. Some of those levies would be for moneys now chargeable at the discretion of local bodies. Any wise State will at once take within its own control all the main arteries of communication through the country, such as railways, canals and roads. It could re-imburse itself for the maintenance of some or all of these by levies on the Stateships through which they pass; and the amount of these levies could come under the review of the Council of Local Administration before being passed to the decision of the Assembly of the Nation.

City Corporations are already such Stateships, though with a more compact life. As such they would remain; and the different nature of their life would require corresponding changes in their constitution. They would necessarily have to keep the same control that they now possess. For instance, they now bear the responsibility for their own streets and roadways; and so it would remain; for their roads are not arteries of the country, intersecting many Stateships, but only arteries of themselves intersecting themselves. So, in most matters corporations, having already become stateships, would remain as they now are. The only change they would require to bring them into line with their fellow stateships would be that their councils would need to be enlarged. In most cases this enlargement would not need to be considerable, for it is extremely probable that in the course of time the country stateships would outrival the city stateships in wealth, responsibility and the size of their respective corporate undertakings. Thus alone can the life of the country maintain its own against the life of the cities.

This corporate wealth and responsibility of the country stateships would be the greater, and they would better preserve their social and economic unity, if they decided to use the wealth of the whole for the equal advantage of each of their members, regarding themselves, as the old stateships apparently did in the fifteenth century, as great trading units for export. That is to say, their members would not, if they constituted themselves in this form, trade upon one another in an uneconomical and wasteful warfare; they would create great communal stores under the control of their assemblies, they would purchase all their materials, domestic, farming and industrial, at the lowest possible cost by the purchasing power of the whole stateship, and they would bend all their efforts, together with the other stateships under the Council of Trade, to capturing the markets of the world for their produce. Competition, instead of being a destructive element within the State, would become a fighting quality of the State itself in its rivalry with other States, every man's effort within the Nation being bent to this end. The technical education of the schools, in the application of the highest science to the Nation's business, would be drafted to this end under the control of the State and the administration of the stateships.

Nor would the life of culture be neglected. The stateship so constituted would employ, for example, its own chemist, not only for its technical work, but for lectures. So would it also employ its own historian and its own body of musicians. For when men are relieved from the necessity of competition among themselves, and realise the dignity of a life fellowship, they realise also the other dignities end beauties of life. The finer flowers of life cannot bloom over a soil choked by mutual rapacity, but when the soil is cleared by a cleaner and more economical order those flowers, being a purer output of the spirit of man, would find their natural life possible again. The old stateships are the best indication of this. Men were neither more nor less naturally corrupt then than they are now. Yet they were proud of their poets; they esteemed the possession of a poet whose fame was wide to be a high honour; poets coming from other stateships were received with distinction and hospitality; and when in the Contention of the Bards in the seventeenth century poets all over the country conducted a controversy, it was not only they who rivalled one another, but the stateships whom they represented who were pitted against one another. That was when the stranger was warring through the land, and if such a condition did not still the Nation's culture, how much purer would be the opportunity if a State order created a condition of life in which the human desire for rivalry became the asset of a community instead of the destruction of a community? It is the first function of a State to create such an order; but in the case of Ireland that order lies ready to her hand in her past Statehood that only requires to be adapted to the needs and necessities of her new life.