self-confident American will make a great civilization yet, because
he believes with all his heart and soul in the future of his country
and in the powers of the American people. What Whitman called
their "barbaric yawp" may yet turn into the lordliest speech and
thought, but without self-confidence a race will go no whither. If
Irish people do not believe they can equal or surpass the stature
of any humanity which has been upon the globe, then they had better
all emigrate and become servants to some superior race, and leave
Ireland to new settlers who may come here with the same high hopes
as the Pilgrim Fathers had when they went to America.

We must go on imagining better than the best we know. Even in
their ruins now, Greece and Italy seem noble and beautiful with
broken pillars and temples made in their day of glory. But before
ever there was a white marble temple shining on a hill it shone
with a more brilliant beauty in the mind of some artist who designed
it. Do many people know how that marvelous Greek civilization spread
along the shores of the Mediterranean? Little nations owning hardly
more land than would make up an Irish barony sent out colony after
colony. The seed of beautiful life they sowed grew and blossomed
out into great cities and half-divine civilizations. Italy had a
later blossoming of beauty in the Middle Ages, and travelers today
go into little Italian towns and find them filled with masterpieces
of painting and architecture and sculpture, witnesses of a time
when nations no larger than an Irish county rolled their thoughts
up to Heaven and miked their imagination with the angels. Can we
be contented in Ireland with the mean streets of our country towns
and the sordid heaps of our villages dominated in their economics
by the vendors of alcohol, and inspired as to their ideals by the
vendors of political animosities?