decaying country towns are seized on with avidity and exhibited on
the stage in every kind of decay and human futility and meanness.
Well, it is good to be chastened in spirit, but it is a thousand
times better to be invigorated in spirit. To be positive is always
better than to be negative. These writers understand and sympathize
with Ireland more through their lower nature than their higher nature.
Judging by the things people write in Ireland, and by what they go
to see performed on the stage, it is more pleasing to them to see
enacted characters they know are meaner than themselves than to see
characters which they know are nobler than themselves.

All this is helping on our national pessimism and self-mistrust. It
helps to fix these features permanently in our national character,
which were excusable enough as temporary moods after defeat. The
younger generation should hear nothing about failures. It should
not be hypnotized into self-contempt. Our energies in Ireland are
sapped by a cynical self-mistrust which is spread everywhere through
society. It is natural enough that the elder generation, who were
promised so many millenniums, but who actually saw four million
people deducted from the population, should be cynical. But it
is not right they should give only to the younger generation the
heritage of their disappointments without any heritage of hope.
From early childhood parents and friends are hypnotizing the child
into beliefs and unbeliefs, and too often they are exiling all
nobility out of life, all confidence, all trust, all hope; they
are insinuating a mean self-seeking, a self-mistrust, a vulgar
spirit which laughs at every high ideal, until at last the hypnotized
child is blinded to the presence of any beauty or nobility in life.
No country can ever hope to rise beyond a vulgar mediocrity where
there is not unbounded confidence in what its humanity can do. The