I would not mind people fighting in a passion to get rid of all
that barred some lordly scheme of life, but quarrels over political
bones from which there is little or nothing wholesome to be picked
only disgust. People tell me that the countryside must always be
stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only
townspeople had immortal souls, and it was only in the city that
the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had any unobscured
glow. The countryside in Ireland could blossom into as much beauty
as the hillsides in mediaeval Italy if we could but get rid of our
self-mistrust. We have all that any race ever had to inspire them,
the heavens overhead, the earth underneath, and the breath of life
in our nostrils. I would like to exile the man who would set limits
to what we can do, who would take the crown and sceptre from the
human will and say, marking out some petty enterprise as the limit--
"Thus far can we go and no farther, and here shall our life be stayed."
Therefore I hate to hear of stagnant societies who think because they
have made butter well that they have crowned their parochial
generation with a halo of glory, and can rest content with the
fame of it all, listening to the whirr of the steam separators and
pouching in peace of mind the extra penny a gallon for their milk.
And I dislike the little groups who meet a couple of times a year
and call themselves co-operators because they have got their
fertilizers more cheaply, and have done nothing else. Why, the
village gombeen man has done more than that! He has at least
brought most of the necessaries of life there by his activities;
and I say if we co-operators do not aim at doing more than the
Irish Scribes and Pharisees we shall have little to be proud of.
A poet, interpreting the words of Christ to His followers, who had
scorned the followers of the old order, made Him say: