s vouchsafed to individuals,
but never to nations, who progress by an orderly evolution in society.
Though the heart in us cries out continually, "Oh, hurry, hurry to the
Golden Age," though we think of revolutions, we know that the patient
marshalling of human forces is wisdom. We have to devise ways and means
and light every step clearly before the nation will leave its footing
in some safe if unattractive locality to plant itself elsewhere. The
individual may be reckless. The race never can be so, for it carries too
great a burden and too high destinies, and it is only when the gods
wish to destroy or chastise a race that they first make it mad. Not by
revolutions can humanity be perfected. I might quote from an old oracle,
"The gods are never so turned away from man as when he ascends to them
by disorderly methods." Our spirits may live in the Golden Age, but our
bodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path and
the staff struck carefully into the darkness before us to see that the
path beyond is not a morass, and the light not a will o' the wisp.

Other critics may say I would destroy the variety of civilization by the
inflexible application of a single idea. Well, I realize that the net
which is spread for Leviathan will not capture all the creatures of the
deep; and the complexity of human nature is such that it is impossible
to imagine a policy, however fitting in certain spheres of human
activity, which could be applied to the whole of life. What I think we
should aim at is making the co-operative idea fundamental in Irish life.
But to say fundamental is not to say absolute. Always there will be
enter rising persons--men of creative minds--who will break away from
the mass and who will insist, perhaps rightly, on an autocratic control
of the enterprises they found, which were made possible alone by
their genius, and which would not succeed unless every worker in the
enterprise was malleable by their will. It is unlikely that State action
will cease, or that any Government we may have will not respond to the
appeal of the people to do this, that, or the other for them which they
are too indolent to do for themselves, or which by the nature of things
only governments can undertake. For a principle to be fundamental in
a country does not mean that it must be absolute. I hope society in
Ireland will be organized that the idea of democratic control of its
economic life will so pervade Irish though