In his next tract "The Spiritual Nation" Pearse analyzed the national teaching of Thomas Davis, who was to him the embodiment of the idea of the spiritual side of nationality. Davis was a Separatist (Pearse puts this, by quotation from his writings, beyond reasonable doubt) but he laid stress more upon the spiritual than upon the material side of Irish independence. He saw in nationality "the sum of the facts, spiritual and intellectual, which mark off one nation from another," the language, the folklore, the literature, the music, the art, the social customs. "The insistence on the spiritual fact of nationality is Davis's distinctive contribution to political thought in Ireland, but it is not the whole of Davis." To secure spiritual independence, material freedom is necessary, and such freedom can only be found in political independence. One rhetorical paragraph of Davis's makes his attitude clear. "Now, Englishmen, listen to us. Though you were to-morrow to give us the best tenures on earth--though you were to equalise Presbyterian, Catholic and Episcopalian--though you were to give us the amplest representation in your Senate--though you were to restore our absentees, disencumber us of your debt, and redress every one of our fiscal wrongs--and though, in addition to all this, you plundered the treasuries of the world to lay gold at our feet and exhausted the resources of your genius to do us worship and honour--still we tell you--we tell you in the name of liberty and country--we tell you in the name of enthusiastic hearts, thoughtful souls and fearless spirits--we tell you by the past, the present and the future, we would spurn your gifts if the condition were that Ireland should remain a province. We tell you and all whom it may concern, come what may--bribery or deceit, justice, policy or war--we tell you, in the name of Ireland, that Ireland shall be a nation."