great civilizations from the dawn of history. A nation is
but a host of men united by some God-begotten mood, some hope of liberty
or dream of power or beauty or justice or brotherhood, and until that
master idea is manifested to us there is no shining star to guide the
ship of our destinies.

Our civilization must depend on the quality of thought engendered in
the national being. We have to do for Ireland--though we hope with
less arrogance--what the long and illustrious line of German thinkers,
scientists, poets, philosophers, and historians did for Germany, or what
the poets and artists of Greece did for the Athenians: and that is, to
create national ideals, which will dominate the policy of statesmen,
the actions of citizens, the universities, the social organizations, the
administration of State departments, and unite in one spirit urban and
rural life. Unless this is done Ireland will be like Portugal, or any
of the corrupt little penny-dreadful nationalities which so continually
disturb the peace of the world with internal revolutions and external
brawlings, and we shall only have achieved the mechanism of nationality,
but the spirit will have eluded us.

What I have written hereafter on the national being, my thoughts on an
Irish polity, are not to be taken as an attempt to deal with more than
a few essentials. I offer it to my countrymen, to start thought
and discussion upon the principles which should prevail in an Irish
civilization. If to readers in other countries the thought appears
primitive or elementary, I would like them to remember that we are at
the beginning of our activity as a nation, and we have yet to settle
fundamentals. Races hoary with political wisdom may look with disdain on
the attempts at political thinking by a new self-governing nationality,
or the theories of civilization discussed about the cradle of an infant
State. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character of its
thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist in
developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earth
together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistinguished. This
book only begins a meditation in which, I hope, nobler imaginations and
finer intellects than mine will join hereafter, and help to raise the
soul of Ireland nigher to the ideal and its body nigher to its soul.

II.

The building up of a civilization is at once the noblest and the most
practical o