Now that the hammer of Thor is wrecking our civilizations, is destroying the body of European nationalities, the spirit is freer to reshape the world nearer to the heart's desire. Necessity will drive us along with the rest to recast our social order and to fix our ideals. Necessity and our own hearts should lead us to a brotherhood in industry. It should be horrible to us the thought of the greedy profiteer, the pursuit of wealth for oneself rather than the union of forces for the good of all and the creation of a brotherly society. The efforts of individuals to amass for themselves great personal wealth should be regarded as ignoble by society, and as contrary to the national spirit, as it is indeed contrary to all divine teaching. Our ideal should be economic harmony and intellectual diversity. We should regard as alien to the national spirit all who would make us think in flocks, and discipline us to an unintellectual commonalty of belief. The life of the soul is a personal adventure, a quest for the way and the truth and the life. It may be we shall find the ancient ways to be the true ways, but if we are led to the truth blindfolded and without personal effort, we are like those whom the Scripture condemns for entering into Paradise, not by the straight gate, but over the wall, like thieves and robbers. If we seek it for ourselves and come to it, we shall be true initiates and masters in the guild. No people seem to have greater natural intelligence than the Irish. No people have been so unfortunately cursed with organizations which led them to abnegate personal thought, and Ireland is an intellectual desert where people read nothing and think nothing; where not fifty in a hundred thousand could discern the quality of thought in the Politics of Aristotle or the Republic of Plato as being in any way deeper than a leading article in one of their daily papers. And we, whose external life is so mean, whose ignorance of literature is so great, are yet flattered by the suggestion that we have treasures of spiritual and intellectual life which should not be debased by external influences, and so it comes about that good literature is a thing unpurchasable except in some half-dozen of the larger towns. Any system which would suppress the aristocratic, fearless, independent intellect should be regarded as contrary to the Irish genius and inimical to the national being. XVI.