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.
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