In the second, the interest of the individual in the
community is only sentimental, and as there is no organization the
community lets its units slip away or disappear without comment or
action. We had true rural communities in ancient Ireland, though the
organization was rather military than economic. But the members of a
clan had common interests. They owned the land in common. It was a
common interest to preserve it intact. It was to their interest to have
a numerous membership of the clan, because it made it less liable to
attack. Men were drawn by the social order out of merely personal
interests into a larger life. In their organizations they were
unconsciously groping, as all human organizations are, towards the final
solidarity of humanity--the federation of the world.
Well, these old rural communities disappeared. The greater
organizations of nation or empire regarded the smaller communities
jealously in the past, and broke them up and gathered all the strings of
power into capital cities. The result was a growth of the State, with a
local decay of civic, patriotic, or public feeling, ending in
bureaucracies and State departments, where paid officials, devoid of
intimacy with local needs, replaced the services naturally and
voluntarily rendered in an earlier period.
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