The National Being by George William Russell

No policy can succeed if it be not in accord with national character. If I have misjudged that, what is written here is vain. It may be asked, can any one abstract from the chaos which is Irish history a prevailing mood or tendency recurring again and again, and assert these are fundamental? It is difficult to define national character, even in long-established States whose history lies open to the world; but it is most difficult in Ireland, which for centuries has not acted by its own will from its own centre, where national activity was mainly by way of protest against external domination, or a readjustment of itself to external power. We can no more deduce the political character of the Irish from the history of the past seven hundred years than we can estimate the quality of genius in an artist whom we have only seen when grappling with a burglar. The political character of a people emerges only when they are shaping in freedom their own civilization.

To get a clue in Ireland we must slip by those seven centuries of struggle and study national origins, as the lexicographer, to get the exact meaning of a word, traces it to its derivation. The greatest value our early history and literature has for us is the value of a clue to character, to be returned to again and again in the maze of our infinitely more complicated life and era.