The Gaelic State in the past & future : $b or, "The crown of a nation"Figgis, Darrell
History
The Gaelic State in the past & future : $b or, "The crown of a nation"
Figgis, Darrell
Ireland -- Politics and government; Irish question
The first difficulty is to find the natural area within which the
life of a community would be comprised. Here, manifestly, the past
would supply a very helpful answer, if it could be found. The area
comprised by the old stateships would naturally finally be decreed
by their internal needs and their external play and interplay upon
one another--that is to say, partly by certain obvious geographical
necessities and partly by economic conditions. Rivers, lakes, mountain
ranges and the sea would impose natural boundaries; and equal
accessibility to both mountain pasture and tillage, or alternatively
different stateships taking up different kinds of life, would suggest
other boundaries. These things can in many cases be traced in the
boundaries of the old stateships where they are discoverable--as in
many cases they are. Clearly since then the life of the people has
changed in many ways, and the statesman thinking of modern conditions
would find other boundaries naturally suggested to him. The transition
from the modern artificial limits of local life to the proper
communities, or fellowships, of the future would not be easy. Yet if
certain boundaries, drawn from a comparison of the old stateships with
the new requirements, were decreed, subsequent experience would soon
suggest a revision of working areas where these were found necessary.
At the present time these areas in many cases have already been found
in great measure by the co-operative societies that have created
petty stateships of their own. Such societies have been grouped round
an economic idea that, embodying as it does the sense of unity and
fellowship about which the new communities would be grouped, would
probably be adopted in some form by the stateships of the future;
but that would be for themselves to decide by debate in assembly.
And when it is remembered that some of these societies have already
undertaken from the power used for their factories to supply light to
neighbouring townships it is obvious that a larger relation for the
life of a stateship is at once indicated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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