The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity

A good many years ago you grafted a slip of poetry on your economic tree. I do not know if you expected a hybrid. This essay may not be economics in your sense of the word. It c...

The people in theocratic States like Egypt or Chaldea, ruled in the name of gods, saw rising out of the plains in which they lived an architecture so mysterious and awe-inspirin...

Our great nations and widespread empires arose in a haphazard fashion out of city States and scattered tribal communities. The fusion of these into larger entities, which could...

One might like to endow the village school with a chemical laboratory, another might want to decorate the village hall with reproductions of famous pictures, another might sugge...

Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they grow more urbanized. What could be mo...

Our farmers are already free. The problem with them is not now concerned with freedom, but how they may be brought into a solidarity with each other and the nation. To make our...

It will appear to the idealist who has contemplated the heavens more closely than the earth that the policy I advocate is one which only tardily could be put into operation, and...

The machinery of government ought never to be complicated, and ought to be easily understood by the citizens. In Ireland, where we have at present no thought of foreign policy,...

Almost all the great European states have fortified their national being by militarism. Everything almost in their development has been subordinated to the necessities of nation...

I have not in all this written anything about the relations of Ireland with other countries, or even with our neighbors, in whose political household we have lived for so many c...

I beseech audience from the churches for these thoughts on our Irish polity, and would recall to them their early history, how when the fiery spirit of their Lord first manifest...