s we have little to fall back on. Few of our notorieties could
be trusted to think out any economic or social problem thoroughly
and efficiently. They have been engaged in passionate attempts at the
readjustment of the superficies of things. What we require more than
men of action at present are scholars, economists, scientists, thinkers,
educationalists, and litterateurs, who will populate the desert depths
of national consciousness with real thought and turn the void into a
fullness. We have few reserves of intellectual life to draw upon when
we come to the mighty labor of nation-building. It will be indignantly
denied, but I think it is true to say that the vast majority of people
in Ireland do not know the difference between good and bad thinking,
between the essential depths and the shallows in humanity. How could
people, who never read anything but the newspapers, have any genuine
knowledge of any subject on earth or much imagination of anything
beautiful in the heavens?

What too many people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feelings. It
is enough to them to vent like or dislike, inherited prejudices or
passions, and they think when they have expressed feeling they have
given utterance to thought. The nature of our political controversies
provoked passion, and passion has become dominant in our politics.
Passion truly is a power in humanity, but it should never enter into
national policy. It is a dangerous element in human life, though it is
an essential part of our strangely compounded nature. But in national
life it is the most dangerous of all guides. There are springs of power
in ourselves which in passion we draw on and are amazed at their depth
and intensity, yet we do not make these the master light of our being,
but rather those divine laws which we have apprehended and brooded upon,
and which shine with clear and steady light in our souls. As creatures
rise in the scale of being the dominant factor in life changes. In
vegetation it may be appetite; instinct in bird and beast for man a life
at once passionate and intellectual; but the greater beings, the stars
and planets, must wheel in the heavens under the guidance of inexorable
and inflexible law. Now the State is higher in the scale of being
than the individual, and it should be dominated solely by moral and
intellectual principles. These are not the outcome of passion or
prejudice, but of arduous thought. National ideals must be built up
with the s