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 of all enterprises, in which human faculties are exalted to
their highest, and beauties and majesties are manifested in multitude as