The son of the artisan, if he cares to read, may become almost as fully master of the wisdom of Plato or Aristotle as if he had been at a university. Emerson will speak to him of his divinity; Whitman, drunken with the sun, will chant to him of his inheritance of the earth. He is elevated by the poets and instructed by the economists. But there are not thrones enough for all who are made wise in our social order, and failing even to serve in the social heaven these men will spread revolt and reign in the social hell. They are becoming too many for higher places to be found for them in the national economy. They are increasing to a multitude which must be considered, and the framers of a national polity must devise a life for them where their new-found dignity of spirit will not be abased. Men no more will be content under rulers of industry they do not elect themselves than they were under political rulers claiming their obedience in the name of God. They will not for long labor in industries where they have no power to fix the conditions of their employment, as they were not content with a political system which allowed them no power to control legislation. Ireland must begin its imaginative reconstruction of a civilization by first considering that type which, in the earlier civilizations of the world, has been slave, serf, or servile, working either on land or at industry, and must construct with reference to it. These workers must be the central figures, and how their material, intellectual, and spiritual needs are met must be the test of value of the social order we evolve. IV. In Ireland we begin naturally our consideration of this problem with the folk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal--the linking up of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since the destruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factor in rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other and from the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action; and that was so until the movement for the organization of agriculture was initiated by Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in that patriotic association, the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Though its actual achievement is great; though it may be said to be the pivot round which Ireland has begun to swing back to its traditional and natural communism in work, we still have over the larger part of Ireland conditions prevailing which tend to isolate the individual from the community.