but for economic purposes which affect him in the course of his daily
occupations. This organization of the most numerous section of the
Irish democracy into co-operative associations, as it develops and
embraces the majority, will tend to make the nation one and indivisible
and conscious of its unity. The individual, however meagre his natural
endowment of altruism, will be led to think of his community as himself;
because his income, his social pleasures even, depend on the success of
the local and national organizations with which he is connected. The
small farmers of former times pursued a petty business of barter and
haggle, fighting for their own hand against half the world about them.
The farmers of the new generation will grow up in a social order, where
all the transactions which narrowed their fathers' hearts will be
communal and national enterprises. How much that will mean in a change
of national character we can hardly realize, we who were born in an
Ireland where petty individualism was rampant, and where every child had
it borne in upon him that it had to fight its own corner in the world,
where the whole atmosphere about it tended to the hardening of the
personality.

We may hope and believe that this transformation of the social order
will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation,
identifying national with personal interests. For those who believe
there is a divine seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they may
hope will promote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in the
past, in favorable airs, has made beauty or grandeur or spirituality the
characteristics of ancient civilizations in Greece, in Egypt, and in
India. No one can work for his race without the hope that the highest,
or more than the highest, humanity has reached will be within reach of
his race also. We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting
the rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the