associations. Here we should find the weaving of rugs, there the
manufacture of toys, elsewhere the women would be engaged in
embroidery or lace-making, and, perhaps, everywhere we might get a
revival of the old local industry of weaving homespuns. We are
dreaming of nothing impossible, nothing which has not been done
somewhere already, nothing which we could not do here in Ireland.
True, it cannot be done all at once, but if we get the idea clearly
in our minds of the building up of a rural civilization in Ireland,
we can labor at it with the grand persistence of medieval burghers
in their little towns, where one generation laid down the foundations
of a great cathedral, and saw only in hope and faith the gorgeous
glooms over altar and sanctuary, and the blaze and flame of stained
glass, where apostles, prophets, and angelic presences were pictured
in fire: and the next generation raised high the walls, and only
the third generation saw the realization of what their grandsires
had dreamed. We in Ireland should not live only from day to day,
for the day only, like the beasts in the field, but should think
of where all this long cavalcade of the Gael is tending, and how
and in what manner their tents will be pitched in the evening of
their generation. A national purpose is the most unconquerable
and victorious of all things on earth. It can raise up Babylons
from the sands of the desert, and make imperial civilizations spring
from out a score of huts, and after it has wrought its will it can
leave monuments that seem as everlasting a portion of nature as
the rocks. The Pyramids and the Sphinx in the sands of Egypt have
seemed to humanity for centuries as much a portion of nature as
Erigal, or Benbulben, or Slieve Gullion have seemed a portion of
nature to our eyes in Ireland.

We must have some purpose or plan in building up an Irish