The National Being by George William Russell

In Ireland we must of necessity give special thought to the needs of the countryman, because our main industry is agriculture. We have few big cities. Our great cities are almost all outside our own borders. They are across the Atlantic. The surplus population of the countryside do not go to our own towns but emigrate. The exodus does not enrich Limerick or Galway, but New York. The absorption of life in great cities is really the danger which most threatens the modern State with a decadence of its humanity. In the United States, even in Canada, hardly has the pioneer made a home in the wilderness when his sons and his daughters are allured by the distant gleam of cities beyond the plains. In England the countryside has almost ceased to be the mother of men -- at least a fruitful mother. We are face to face in Ireland with this problem, with no crowded and towering cities to disguise the emptiness of the fields. It is not a problem which lends itself to legislative solution.

Whether there be fair rents or no rents at all, the child of the peasant, yearning for a fuller life, goes where life is at its fullest. We all desire life, and that we might have it more abundantly, -- the peasant as much as the mystic thirsting for infinite being, -- and in rural Ireland the needs of life have been neglected.