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