Other critics may say I would destroy the variety of civilization by the
inflexible application of a single idea. Well, I realize that the net
which is spread for Leviathan will not capture all the creatures of the
deep; and the complexity of human nature is such that it is impossible
to imagine a policy, however fitting in certain spheres of human
activity, which could be applied to the whole of life. What I think we
should aim at is making the co-operative idea fundamental in Irish life.
But to say fundamental is not to say absolute. Always there will be
enter rising persons--men of creative minds--who will break away from
the mass and who will insist, perhaps rightly, on an autocratic control
of the enterprises they found, which were made possible alone by their
genius, and which would not succeed unless every worker in the
enterprise was malleable by their will. It is unlikely that State
action will cease, or that any Government we may have will not respond
to the appeal of the people to do this, that, or the other for them
which they are too indolent to do for themselves, or which by the nature
of things only governments can undertake. For a principle to be
fundamental in a country does not mean that it must be absolute. I hope
society in Ireland will be organized that the idea of democratic control
of its economic life will so pervade Irish thought that it will be in
the body politic what the spinal column is to the body--the pillar on
which it rests, the strongest single factor in the body. Another
illustration may make still clearer my meaning. In a red sunsetting the
glow is so powerful that green hills, white houses, and blue waters,
touched by its light, assume a ruddy color, partly a local color, and
partly a reflected light from the sun. Now in the same way, what is
most powerful in society multiplies images and shadows of itself, and
produces harmonies with itself which are yet not identities. It is by a
predominating idea that nations achieve the practical unity of their
citizens, and national progress becomes possible. In the future