Nor would the life of culture be neglected. The stateship so constituted would employ, for example, its own chemist, not only for its technical work, but for lectures. So would it also employ its own historian and its own body of musicians. For when men are relieved from the necessity of competition among themselves, and realise the dignity of a life fellowship, they realise also the other dignities and beauties of life. The finer flowers of life cannot bloom over a soil choked by mutual rapacity, but when the soil is cleared by a cleaner and more economical order those flowers, being a purer output of the spirit of man, would find their natural life possible again. The old stateships are the best indication of this. Men were neither more nor less naturally corrupt then than they are now. Yet they were proud of their poets; they esteemed the possession of a poet whose fame was wide to be a high honour; poets coming from other stateships were received with distinction and hospitality; and when in the Contention of the Bards in the seventeenth century poets all over the country conducted a controversy, it was not only they who rivalled one another, but the stateships whom they represented who were pitted against one another. That was when the stranger was warring through the land, and if such a condition did not still the Nation’s culture, how much purer would be the opportunity if a State order created a condition of life in which the human desire for rivalry became the asset of a community instead of the destruction of a community? It is the first function of a State to create such an order; but in the case of Ireland that order lies ready to her hand in her past Statehood that only requires to be adapted to the needs and necessities of her new life. VIII. APPROACHING PROBLEMS. The purpose of this little book has been to examine the working of the old Irish State, to show how that State was affected by the attempt at military conquest, to see how, when that conquest succeeded in overthrowing the form of the State and uprooting it out of the soil, its memory persisted in the instincts and expectations of the Nation, and made all the uprisings of the Nation malleable to its ancient will, and finally to see how far those instincts could be translated into the new conditions and experiences of the national life in a re-birth of the old State. It is no part of its business to examine the problems that will beset the future State of Ireland. It has a sufficiently hardy task to carry out, however inefficiently, its declared purpose without undertaking expeditions not proper to that purpose. Yet certain problems lie within the automatic function of such a State, and some of these may be briefly indicated.