inevitable beauty.

IX.

Often with sadness I hear people speak of industrial development in
Ireland, for I feel they contemplate no different system than that which
fills workers with despair in countries where it is more successfully
applied. All these energetic people are conspiring to build factories
and mills and to fill them with human labor, and they believe the more
they do this the better it will be for Ireland. They talk of Ireland
as if it was only admirable as a quantity rather than a quality. They
express delight at swelling statistics and increased trade, but where
do we hear any reflection on the quality of life engendered by this
industrial development? Our civilization is to differ in no way from any
other. No new ideal of life is suggested to differentiate us. We are to
go on exploiting human labor. Our working classes are to increase and
multiply and earn profits for an employing class, as labor has one from
time immemorial in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Rome, and in London
today. But a choice yet remains to us, because the character of our
civilization is not yet fixed. It is mainly germinal. It fills the
spirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path,
without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and more
beautiful life. Every now and then, when the world was still vast and
full of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor,
and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities and
over unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer and
ampler than that they had known. Is the old daring gone? Are there
not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all
adventures--the building up of a civilization--so that the human might
reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and
solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to
love; and when it is free and acts by its own will it is most united
with all other life. Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motion
about the heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as its
adorers. But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has the
dividing quality of the prism, which resolves pure light into distinct
rays; and so on earth we get the principle of freedom and the virtue of
solidarity as separated ideals continually at warfare with each other,
and the reconcilement on earth of these p