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
City Corporations are already such stateships, though with a more
compact life. As such they would remain; and the different nature of
their life would require corresponding changes in their constitution.
They would necessarily have to keep the same control that they now
possess. For instance, they now bear the responsibility for their own
streets and roadways; and so it would remain; for their roads are
not arteries of the country, intersecting many stateships, but only
arteries of themselves intersecting themselves. So, in most matters
corporations, having already become stateships, would remain as they
now are. The only change they would require to bring them into line
with their fellow stateships would be that their councils would need
to be enlarged. In most cases this enlargement would not need to be
considerable, for it is extremely probable that in the course of time
the country stateships would outrival the city stateships in wealth,
responsibility and the size of their respective corporate undertakings.
Thus alone can the life of the country maintain its own against the
life of the cities.
This corporate wealth and responsibility of the country stateships
would be the greater, and they would better preserve their social and
economic unity, if they decided to use the wealth of the whole for the
equal advantage of each of their members, regarding themselves, as
the old stateships apparently did in the fifteenth century, as great
trading units for export. That is to say, their members would not, if
they constituted themselves in this form, trade upon one another in an
uneconomical and wasteful warfare; they would create great communal
stores under the control of their assemblies, they would purchase
all their materials, domestic, farming and industrial, at the lowest
possible cost by the purchasing power of the whole stateship, and
they would bend all their efforts, together with the other stateships
under the Council of Trade, to capturing the markets of the world for
their produce. Competition, instead of being a destructive element
within the State, would become a fighting quality of the State itself
in its rivalry with other States, every man’s effort within the Nation
being bent to this end. The technical education of the schools, in
the application of the highest science to the Nation’s business,
would be drafted to this end under the control of the State and the
administration of the stateships.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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