

#Labour in Irish History


<!-- // 
 function footNote(link) {
 openpopup = window.open(link,"openpopup","width=512,height=128,left=256,top=256,resizable=no,scrollbars=1,menubar=1,statusbar=0,toolbar=0");
}
// -->



#### Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition


### Background details and bibliographic information


Labour in Irish History
=======================


Author: James Connolly
----------------------


### File Description

Electronic edition compiled by Dara Mac Domhnaill

Funded by University College Cork. and  
Professor Marianne McDonald via the CURIA Project. 2. Second draft.Proof corrections by Donnchadh Ó Corráin

Extent of text: 54470 words#### Publication


CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College Cork.  
College Road, Cork, Ireland—http://www.ucc.ie/celt

 (1996) (2010) Distributed by CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.  
Text ID Number: E900002-001Availability [RESTRICTED] 
Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of

academic research and teaching only.


#### Sources


**Editions**2. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History, Irish Workers

Republic (in monthly instalments).
3. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel November 1910).
4. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel 1914). 216pp.
5. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel 1917). 216pp.
6. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (New York: Donnelly 1919). 137pp.
7. James Connolly, Labour in Ireland (Dublin: Maunsell & Roberts 1922), contains Labour in Irish History. 346pp.
8. James Connolly, Labour in Ireland (Dublin: Maunsel 1926),

contains Labour in Irish History.
9. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Irish Transport & General Workers' Union 1934). 216pp.
10. James Connolly, Labour in Ireland (Dublin: Three Candles 1940),

contains Labour in Irish History.
11. James Connolly, Labour in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Transport & General Workers' Union 1944). Contains Labour in Irish History. 346pp.
12. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History, ed. Desmond Ryan,

with an introduction by William McMullen (Dublin: Three Candles 1951).
13. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: New Books Publications 1956; reprinted 1967, 1971, 1973, 1983). 135pp.
14. James Connolly, Labour in Ireland (Dublin: C. Ó Lochlainn 1971). Contains Labour in Irish History. 264pp.
15. James Connolly Labour in Irish history (London: Bookmarks

1987). 168pp.
16. James Connolly, Collected Works (Dublin: New Books

Publications 1987), i 17-184.
**Translations**2. Rabochi Klass v Historia Irland (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1968), with an introduction by Artemy D. Kolpakov. Extracts from that introduction are published in English translation in James Connolly, Collected Works (Dublin: New Books Publications 1987), i 508-11.
**Sources, comment on the text, and secondary literature**2. Kieran Allen, The politics of James Connolly (London: Pluto Press 1990). 206pp.
3. William K. Anderson, James Connolly and the Irish left (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1994). 200pp.
4. A bibliography of Irish labour history, Saothar: journal of the Irish Labour History Society 5 (1979). Contains also a Bibliography of works on Irish history published in the USSR and a Bibliography: James Larkin.
5. Connolly: the Polish aspects: a review of James Connolly's political and spiritual affinity with Józef Pilsudski, leader of the Polish Socialist Party, organiser of the Polish legions and founder of the Polish state (Belfast: Athol 1985). 167pp.
6. François Bédarida, Le socialisme et la nation: James Connolly et l'Irlande (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières 1965. 31pp.
7. Helen Clark, Sing a rebel song: the story of James Connolly, born Edinburgh 1868, executed Dublin 1916 (Edinburgh: City of Edinburgh District Council 1989). 55pp.
8. Communist Party of Ireland, Breaking the chains: selected writings of James Connolly on women (Belfast: Unity Press for the Northern Area Women's Committee 1981). 38pp.
9. James Connolly and W. Walker, The Connolly-Walker controversy on socialist unity in Ireland (Dublin 1911, repr. Cork: Cork Workers Club 1986).
10. Fifty years of Liberty Hall (Dublin: Three Candles 1959).
11. James Connolly, Yellow unions in Ireland and other articles (Belfast: Connolly Bookshop 1968).
12. Sean Cronin, Young Connolly (Dublin: Repsol 1978, 2nd. ed. 1983.
13. Noelle Davis, Connolly of Ireland patriot and socialist

(Carnarvon: Swyddfa'r Caernerfon 1946).
14. Joseph Deasy, James Connolly: his life and teachings (Dublin: New Books 1966). 14pp.
15. Ruth Dudley Edwards, James Connolly (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1981). 151pp.
16. Peter Berresford Ellis, James Connolly: selected writings edited with an introduction by P. Berresford Ellis (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973).
17. Roger Faligot: James Connolly et le mouvement révolutionnaire irlandais (Paris: F. Maspero 1978). 333pp.
18. Richard Michael Fox, James Connolly: the forerunner (Tralee: Kerryman Ltd. 1946). 250pp.
19. Donnacha Ní Gabhann, The reality of Connolly: 1868-1916 ([Dublin?]: Portlight Press Project 1993). 36pp.
20. C. Desmond Greaves, The life and times of James Connolly (London:

Lawrence & Wishart 1961). Also Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers 1976.
21. Andy Johnston, James Larraggy, Edward McWilliams, Connolly: a Marxist

analysis (Dublin: Irish Workers Group 1990).
22. Brian Kelly, James Connolly and the fight for an Irish Workers' Republic (Cleveland, OH: Hera Press 1982). 23pp.
23. Patrick Anthony Lake, James Connolly: the development of his political ideology (unpubl. Thesis 1984).
24. Samuel Levenson, James Connolly: a biography (London: Brian & O'Keeffe 1973).
25. Robert Lynd, James Connolly: an appreciation, to James Connolly,

Collected works (2 vols Dublin: New Books Publications 1987), i, 495-507 (first published October 1916).
26. Proinsias Mac an Bheatha, James Connolly and the Worker's Republic (Dublin: Foilseacháin Náisiúta Teo. 1978). 90pp.
27. Lambert McKenna and Thomas J. Morrissey, The social teachings of James Connolly, by Lambert McKenna, ed Thomas J. Morrissey (Dublin: Veritas Dublin 1991).
28. Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, What Connolly said: James Connolly's writings (Dublin: New Island Books 1994). 94pp.
29. Derry Kelleher, Quotations from James Connolly: an anthology in three parts ([Drogheda]: Vanguard Publications 1972). 2 vols.
30. Lambert McKenna, The social teachings of James Connolly (Dublin: Catholic Truth Society 1920).
31. Peter McKevitt, James Connolly (Dublin: Catholic Truth Society 1969). 15pp.
32. Priscilla Metscher, Republicanism and socialism in Ireland:

a study of the relationship of politics and ideology from the United Irishmen to James Connolly, Bremer Beiträge zur Literatur- und

Ideologiegeschichte 2 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang 1986).
33. Austen Morgan, James Connolly: a political biography (Manchester: Manchester U.P. 1988). 244pp.
34. John F. Murphy, Implications of the Irish past: the socialist ideology of James Connolly from an historical perspective (Unpublished MA thesis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte 1983).
35. Michael O'Riordan, General introduction, to James Connolly,

Collected works (2 vols Dublin: New Books Publications 1987), i,

pages ix-xvii.
36. Cathal O'Shannon, Introduction, to James Connolly, Collected works (2 vols Dublin: New Books Publications 1987), i, 11-16.
37. Bernard Ransom, Connolly's Marxism (London: Pluto Press 1980).
38. Carl Reeve and Ann Barton Reeve, James Connolly and the United States: the road to the 1916 Irish rebellion (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press 1978). 307pp.
39. Desmond Ryan, James Connolly: his life, work & writings (Dublin: Talbot Press 1924).
40. Desmond Ryan, Socialism and nationalism: a selection from the writings of James Connolly (Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles 1948). 211pp.
41. Desmond Ryan, James Connolly, in J. W. Boyle (ed), Leaders and workers

(Cork: Mercier Press 1960, repr. 1978).
42. Frederick Ryan, Socialism, democracy and the Church ([Dublin]: Labour History Workshop 1984). With reviews of Connolly's 'Labour in Irish History' and Jaures' 'Studies in socialism'. 69p.
43. G. Schüller, James Connolly and Irish freedom: a marxist analysis (Cork: Cork Workers Club 1974, reprint of a work first published Chicago 1926). 30pp.
44. E. Strauss, Irish nationalism and British democracy (Westport CT: Greenwood 1975).
**Edition used in the digital edition**2. **Desmond Ryan**, Labour in Irish History in Collected Works, Ed. Desmond Ryan. volume 1 (1987) page 17–184

### Encoding


#### Project Description


CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts


#### Sampling Declaration


Editorial introduction and other preliminary materials not by Connolly

have been omitted. The text respresents the printed text, but obvious

errors have been corrected and marked as corrected.


#### Editorial Declaration


##### Correction


Text has been thoroughly checked, proof-read and parsed using

SGMLcheck.


##### Normalization


The electronic text represents the printed text.


##### Quotation


Reported speech and very short quotations are rendered q;

longer quotations are marked qt; lengthy passages from other

authors are embedded as texts.


##### Hyphenation


The practice of the printed text. Soft hyphens are silently removed.

Where a hyphenated words crosses a page boundary the word is completed before marking the page boundary.


##### Segmentation


div0=the whole work; div1=the present tract. Metrical lines and stanzas are

marked and numbered.


##### Interpretation


Only structural mark-up. Names of persons (given names), and places are

not tagged. Terms for cultural and social roles are not tagged. Titles of

books and newspapers are tagged as title. Dates are tagged either as date or date ranges as dateRange.


#### Canonical References


This text uses the DIV1 element to represent the Chapter. ### Profile Description


Created: By James Connolly, in the United States.

 Date range: 1903–1910.#### Use of language


##### Language: [EN] The text is in English, apart from a few words.


##### Language: [FR] A few words in titles and conventional expressions are in French.


##### Language: [DE] Two words in a title are in German.


##### Language: [IT] Two words are in Italian.


##### Language: [GA] Three words in a citation are in Irish.


##### Language: [LA] A few words in conventional expressions are in Latin.


### Revision History


* (2010-04-23) Beatrix Färber (ed.)

* Conversion script run; header updated; new wordcount made; file parsed.
* (2008-08-29) Beatrix Färber (ed.)

* File validated; keywords added.
* (2007-12-10) Beatrix Färber (ed.)

* Typos corrected, new SGML and HTML versions created.
* (2005-08-25) Julianne Nyhan (ed.)

* Normalised language codes and edited langUsage for XML conversion
* (2005-08-04T14:32:12+0100) Peter Flynn (ed.)

* Converted to XML
* (1997-09-15) Margaret Lantry (ed.)

* Header modified; file parsed using SGMLS.
* (1997-08-21) Margaret Lantry (ed.)

* Header re-structured and bibliography amplified; dates tagged; text normalized using SGMLNORM and parsing using NSGMLS.
* (1996-05-29) Mavis Cournane (ed.)

* Text parsed using SGMLS.
* (1996-05-29) Donnchadh Ó Corráin (ed.)

* Header constructed, structural mark-up checked and revised.
* (1996-05-24) Dara Mac Domhnaill (ed.)

* Text proofed, edited and structural mark-up entered.
* (1995-1996) Emer Quill and Dara Mac Domhnaill (ed.)

* Data capture by scanning.




---


#### Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition: E900002-001


### Labour in Irish History: Author: James Connolly




---

p.17


### Foreword


In her great work, The Making of Ireland and

its Undoing, the only contribution to Irish history we know of

which conforms to the methods of modern historical science, the

authoress, Mrs. Stopford Green, dealing with the effect upon Ireland

of the dispersion of the Irish race in the time of Henry VIII and

Elizabeth, and the consequent destruction of Gaelic culture, and

rupture with Gaelic tradition and law, says that the Irishmen educated

in schools abroad abandoned or knew nothing of the lore of ancient

Erin, and had no sympathy with the spirit of the Brehon Code, nor with

the social order of which it was the juridical expression. She says

they ‘urged the theory, *so antagonistic to the

immemorial law of Ireland*, that only from the polluted sinks of

heretics could come the idea that the people might elect a ruler, and

confer supreme authority on whomsoever pleased them’. In other

words the new Irish, educated in foreign standards, had adopted as

their own the feudal-capitalist system of which England was the

exponent in Ireland, and urged it upon the Gaelic Irish. As the

dispersion of the clans, consummated by Cromwell, finally completed

the ruin of Gaelic Ireland, all the higher education of Irishmen

thenceforward ran in this foreign groove, and was coloured with this

foreign colouring.


In other words, the Gaelic culture of the Irish chieftainry was

rudely broken off in the seventeenth century, and the continental

Schools of European despots implanted in its place in the minds of the

Irish students, and sent them back to Ireland to preach a fanatical

belief in royal and feudal prerogatives, as foreign to the genius of

the Gael as was the English ruler to Irish soil. What a light this

sheds upon Irish history of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and

nineteenth centuries! And what a commentary


---

p.18




it is upon the real origin of that so-called ‘Irish veneration for the aristocracy,’ of which

the bourgeois charlatans of Irish literature write so eloquently! That

veneration is seen to be as much of an exotic, as much of an

importation, as the aristocratic caste it venerated. Both were


> 1. [*gap: ellipse*]  
> foul foreign blossoms
>   
> Blown hither to poison our plains.
> 





But so deeply has this insidious lie about the aristocratic

tendencies of the Irish taken root in Irish thought, that it will take

a long time to eradicate it from the minds of the people, or to make

the Irish realise that the whole concept of orthodox Irish history for

the last 200 years was a betrayal and abandonment of the best

traditions of the Irish race. Yet such is undoubtedly the case. Let us

examine this a little more closely!


Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so

it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral

level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its

inspiration. If we would understand the national literature of a

people, we must study their social and political status, keeping in

mind the fact that their writers were a product thereof, and that the

children of their brains were conceived and brought forth in certain

historical conditions. Ireland, at the same time as she lost her

ancient social system, also lost her language as the vehicle of

thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this twofold

loss, the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from

a prolonged arrested development. During the closing years of the

seventeenth century, all the eighteenth, and the greater part of the

nineteenth, the Irish people were the lowest helots in Europe,

socially and politically. The Irish peasant, reduced from the position

of a free clansman owning his tribeland and controlling its

administration in common with his fellows, was a mere tenant-at-will

subject to eviction, dishonour and outrage at the


---

p.19




hands of an irresponsible private proprietor. Politically

he was non-existent, legally he held no rights, intellectually he sank

under the weight of his social abasement, and surrendered to the

downward drag of his poverty. He had been conquered, and he suffered

all the terrible consequences of defeat at the hands of a ruling class

and nation who have always acted upon the old Roman maxim of ‘Woe to

the vanquished’.


To add to his humiliation, those of his name and race who had

contrived to escape the general ruin, and sent their children to be

educated in foreign schools, discovered, with the return of those ‘wild geese’ to their native habitat, that they

who had sailed for France, Italy or Spain, filled with hatred of the

English Crown and of the English landlord garrison in Ireland,

returned as mere Catholic adherents of a pretender to the English

throne, using all the prestige of their foreign schooling, to

discredit the Gaelic ideas of equality and democracy, and instead,

instilling into the minds of the growing generation feudal ideas of

the divine right of kings to rule, and of subjects to unquestioningly

obey. The Irish students in the universities of the Continent were the

first products of a scheme which the Papacy still pursues with its

accustomed skill and persistence—a persistence which recks

little of the passing of centuries—a scheme which looks upon

Catholic Ireland simply as a tool to be used for the spiritual re-conquest of England to Catholicity. In the eighteenth century this

scheme did its deadliest work in Ireland. It failed ridiculously to

cause a single Irish worker in town or country to strike a blow for

the Stuart cause in the years of the Scottish Rebellions in 1715 and

1745, but it prevented them from striking any blows for their own

cause, or from taking advantage of the civil feuds of their enemies.

It did more. It killed Gaelic Ireland; an Irish-speaking Catholic was

of no value as a missionary of Catholicism in England, and an Irish

peasant who treasured the tongue of his fathers might also have some

reverence for the principles of the social polity and civilisation


---

p.20




under which his forefathers had lived and prospered for

unnumbered years. And such principles were even more distasteful to

French, Spanish or Papal patrons of Irish schools of learning on the

Continent than they were to English monarchs. Thus the poor Irish were

not only pariahs in the social system of their day, but they were also

precluded from hoping for a revival of intellectual life through the

achievements of their children. Their children were taught to despise

the language and traditions of their fathers.


It was at or during this period, when the Irish peasant had been

crushed to the very lowest point, when the most he could hope for was

to be pitied as animals are pitied; it was during this period Irish

literature in English was born. Such Irish literature was not written

for Irishmen as a real Irish literature would be, it was written by

Irishmen, about Irishmen, but for English or Anglo-Irish

consumption.


Hence the Irishman in English literature may be said to have been

born with an apology in his mouth. His creators knew nothing of the

free and independent Irishman of Gaelic Ireland, but they did know the

conquered, robbed, slave-driven, brutalised, demoralised Irishman, the

product of generations of landlord and capitalist rule, and him they

seized upon, held up to the gaze of the world, and asked the nations

to accept as the true Irish type.


If he crouched before a representative of royalty with an *abject* submission born of a

hundred years of political outlawry and training in foreign ideas, his

abasement was pointed to proudly as an instance of the ‘ancient Celtic fidelity to hereditary monarchs;’

if, with the memory of perennial famines, evictions, jails, hangings,

and tenancy-at-will beclouding his brain, he humbled himself before

the upper-class, or attached himself like a dog to their personal

fortunes, his sycophancy was cited as a manifestation of ‘ancient Irish veneration for the aristocracy,’

and if long-continued insecurity of life begat in


---

p.21




him a fierce desire for the ownership of a piece of land to

safe-guard his loved ones in a system where land was life, this new-born land-hunger was triumphantly trumpeted forth as a proof of the

‘Irish attachment to the principle of private

property.’ Be it understood we are not talking now of the English

slanderers of the Irishman, but of his Irish apologists. The English

slanderer never did as much harm as did these self-constituted

delineators of Irish characteristics. The English slanderer lowered

Irishmen in the eyes of the world, but his Irish middle-class teachers

and writers lowered him in his own eyes by extolling as an Irish

virtue every sycophantic vice begotten of generations of slavery.

Accordingly, as an Irishman, peasant, labourer, or artisan, banded

himself with his fellows to strike back at their oppressors in defence

of their right to live in the land of their fathers, the ‘respectable’ classes, who had imbibed the foreign

ideas publicly deplored his act, and unctuously ascribed it to the ‘evil effects of English misgovernment upon the Irish

character;’ but when an occasional Irishman, abandoning all the

traditions of his race, climbed up upon the backs of his fellows to

wealth or position, his career was held up as a sample of what

Irishmen could do under congenial or favourable circumstances. The

seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, indeed, the Via

Dolorosa of the Irish race. In them the Irish Gael sank out of sight,

and in his place the middle-class politicians, capitalists and

ecclesiastics laboured to produce a hybrid Irishman, assimilating a

foreign social system, a foreign speech, and a foreign character. In

the effort to assimilate the first two the Irish were unhappily too

successful, so successful that to-day the majority of the Irish do not

know that their fathers ever knew another system of ownership, and the

Irish Irelanders are painfully grappling with their mother tongue with

the hesitating accent of a foreigner. Fortunately the Irish character

has proven too difficult to press into respectable foreign moulds, and

the


---

p.22




recoil of that character from the deadly embrace of

capitalist English conventionalism, as it has already led to a

revaluation of the speech of the Gael, will in all probability also

lead to a re-study and appreciation of the social system under which

the Gael reached the highest point of civilisation and culture in

Europe.


In the re-conversion of Ireland to the Gaelic principle of common

ownership by a people of their sources of food and maintenance, the

worst obstacles to overcome will be the opposition of the men and

women who have imbibed their ideas of Irish character and history from

Anglo-Irish literature. That literature, as we have explained, was

born in the worst agonies of the slavery of our race; it bears all the

birth-marks of such origin upon it, but irony of ironies, these birthmarks of slavery are hailed by our teachers as ‘the native characteristics of the Celt’.


One of these slave birth-marks is a belief in the capitalist system

of society; the Irishman frees himself from such a mark of slavery

when he realises the truth that the capitalist system is the most

foreign thing in Ireland.


Hence we have had in Ireland for over 250 years the remarkable

phenomenon of Irishmen of the upper and middle classes urging upon the

Irish toilers, as a sacred national and religious duty, the necessity

of maintaining a social order against which their Gaelic forefathers

had struggled, despite prison cells, famine, and the sword, for over

400 years. Reversing the procedure of the Normans settled in Ireland,

who were said to have become ‘more Irish than the

Irish’, the Irish propertied classes became more English than the

English, and so have continued to our day.


Hence we believe that this book, attempting to depict the attitude

of the dispossessed masses of the Irish people in the great crisis of

modern Irish history, may justly be looked upon as part of the

literature of the Gaelic revival. As the Gaelic


---

p.23




language, scorned by the possessing classes, sought and

found its last fortress in the hearts and homes of the ‘lower orders’, to re-issue from thence in our own

time to what the writer believes to be a greater and more enduring

place in civilisation than of old, so in the words of Thomas Francis

Meagher, the same ‘wretched cabins have been the holy shrines in

which the traditions and the hopes of Ireland have been treasured and

transmitted’.


The apostate patriotism of the Irish capitalist class, arising as

it does upon the rupture with Gaelic tradition, will, of course,

reject this conception, and saturated with foreignism themselves, they

will continue to hurl the epithet of ‘foreign

ideas’ against the militant Irish democracy. But the present

Celtic revival in Ireland, leading as it must to a reconsideration and

more analytical study of the laws and social structure of Ireland

before the English Invasion, amongst its other good results, will have

this one also, that it will confirm and establish the truth of this

conception. Hitherto the study of the social structure of Ireland in

the past has been marred by one great fault. For a description and

interpretation of Irish social life and customs the student depended

entirely upon the description and interpretation of men who were

entirely lacking in knowledge of, and insight into, the facts and

spirit of the things they attempted to describe. Imbued with the

conception of feudalistic or capitalistic social order, the writers

perpetually strove to explain Irish institutions in terms of an order

of things to which those institutions were entirely alien. Irish

titles, indicative of the function in society performed by their

bearers, the writers explained by what they supposed were analogous

titles in the feudal order of England, forgetful of the fact that as

the one form of society was the antithesis of the other, and not its

counterpart, the one set of titles could not possibly convey the same

meaning as the other, much less be a translation.


Much the same mistake was made in America by the early


---

p.24




Spanish conquistadores in attempting to describe the social

and political systems of Mexico and Peru, with much the same results

of introducing almost endless confusion into every attempt to

comprehend life as it actually existed in those countries before the

conquest. The Spanish writers could not mentally raise themselves out

of the social structure of continental Europe, and hence their weird

and wonderful tales of despotic Peruvian and Mexican ‘Emperors’ and ‘Nobles’

where really existed the elaborately organised family system of a

people not yet fully evolved into the political state. Not until the

publication of Morgan's monumental work on Ancient Society, was the key to

the study of American native civilisation really found and placed in

the hands of the student. The same key will yet unlock the doors which

guard the secrets of our native Celtic civilisation, and make them

possible of fuller comprehension for the multitude.


Meanwhile we desire to place before our readers the two

propositions upon which this book is founded—propositions which

we believe embody alike the fruits of the experience of the past, and

the matured thought of the present, upon the points under

consideration.


First, that in the evolution of civilisation the progress of the

fight for national liberty of any subject nation must, perforce, keep

pace with the progress of the struggle for liberty of the most subject

class in that nation, and that the shifting of economic and political

forces which accompanies the development of the system of capitalist

society leads inevitably to the increasing conservatism of the

non-working-class element, and to the revolutionary vigour and power of

the working class.


Second, that the result of the long drawn out struggle of Ireland

has been, so far, that the old chieftainry has disappeared, or,

through its degenerate descendants, has made terms with iniquity, and

become part and parcel of the supporters of the established order; the

middle class, growing up in the midst of


---

p.25




the national struggle, and at one time, as in 1798, through

the stress of the economic rivalry of England almost forced into the

position of revolutionary leaders against the political despotism of

their industrial competitors, have now also bowed the knee to Baal,

and have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments

binding them to English capitalism as against every sentimental or

historic attachment drawing them toward Irish patriotism; only the

Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the

fight for freedom in Ireland.


To that unconquered Irish working class this book is dedicated by

one of their number


JAMES CONNOLLY.


---

p.26


Labour In Irish History
-----------------------


### Chapter I


The Lessons Of History

*What is History but a fable agreed upon.’’*

—*Napoleon I*.


It is in itself a significant commentary upon the subordinate place

allotted to labour in Irish politics that a writer should think it

necessary to explain his purpose before setting out to detail for the

benefit of his readers the position of the Irish workers in the past,

and the lessons to be derived from a study of that position in guiding

the movement of the working class today. Were history what it ought to

be, an accurate literary reflex of the times with which it professes

to deal, the pages of history would be almost entirely engrossed with

a recital of the wrongs and struggles of the labouring people,

constituting, as they have ever done, the vast mass of mankind. But

history, in general treats the working class as the manipulator of

politics treats the working man—that is to say, with contempt

when he remained passive, and with derision, hatred and

misrepresentation whenever he dares evince a desire to throw off the

yoke of political or social servitude. Ireland is no exception to the

rule. Irish history has ever been written by the master class—in

the interests of the master class.


Whenever the social question cropped up in modern Irish history,

whenever the question of labour and its wrongs figured in the writings

or speeches of our modern Irish politicians, it was simply that they

might be used as weapons in the warfare against a political adversary,

and not at all because the person so using them was personally

convinced that the subjection of labour was in itself a wrong.




---

p.27


This book is intended primarily to prove that

contention. To prove it by a reference to the

evidence—documentary and otherwise—adduced, illustrating

the state of the Irish working class in the past, the almost total

indifference of our Irish politicians to the sufferings of the mass of

the people, and the true inwardness of many of the political

agitations which have occupied the field in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. Special attention is given to the period

preceding the Union and evidence brought forward relative to the state

of Ireland before and during the continuance of Grattan's Parliament;

to the condition of the working people in the town and country, and

the attitude towards labour taken up by politicians of all sides,

whether patriot or ministerialist. In other words, we propose to do

what in us lies to repair the deliberate neglect of the social

question by our historians; and to prepare the way in order that other

and abler pens than our own may demonstrate to the reading public the

manner in which economic conditions have controlled and dominated our

Irish history.


But as a preliminary to this essay on our part it becomes necessary

to recapitulate her some of the salient facts of history we have

elsewhere insisted upon as essential to a thorough grasp of the ‘Irish Question.’


Politically, Ireland has been under the control of England for the

past 700 years, during the greater part of which time the country has

been the scene of constant wars against her rule upon the part of the

native Irish. Until the year 1649, these wars were complicated by the

fact the fact that they were directed against both the political and

*social* order recognised by the English invader.

It may surprise many readers to learn that up to the date above-mentioned the basis of society in Ireland except within the Pale (a

small strip of territory around the Capital city, Dublin), rested upon

communal or tribal ownership of land. The Irish chief, although

recognised in the courts of France, Spain, and Rome, as the peer of

the reigning princes


---

p.28




of Europe, in reality held his position upon the sufferance

of his people, and as an administrator of the tribal affairs of his

people, while the land or territory of the clan was entirely removed

from his private jurisdiction. In the parts of Ireland where for 400

years after the first conquest (so-called) the English governors could

not penetrate except at the head of a powerful army, the social order

which prevailed in England—feudalism—was unknown, and as

this comprised the greater portion of the country, it gradually came

to be understood that the war against the foreign oppressor was also a

war against private property in land. But with the forcible break up

of the clan system in 1649, the social aspect of the Irish struggle

sank out of sight, its place being usurped by the mere political

expressions of the fight for freedom. Such an event was, of course,

inevitable in any case. Communal ownership of land would undoubtedly

have given way to the privately owned system of capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland had remained an independent country, but

coming as it did in obedience to the pressure of armed force from

without, instead of by the operation of economic forces within, the

change has been bitterly and justly resented by the vast mass of the

Irish people, many of whom still mix with their dreams of liberty

longings for a return to the ancient system of land tenure—now

organically impossible. The dispersion of the clans, of course, put an

end to the leadership of the chiefs, and in consequence, the Irish

aristocracy *being all of foreign or traitor

origin*, Irish patriotic movements fell entirely into the hands of

the middle class, and became, for the most part, simply idealised

expressions of middle-class interest.


Hence the spokesmen of the middle class, in the Press and on the

platform, have consistently sought the emasculation of the Irish

National movement, the distortion of Irish history, and, above all,

the denial of all relation between the social rights of the Irish

toilers and the political rights of the Irish nation. It


---

p.29




was hoped and intended by this means to create what is

termed ‘a real National movement’—i.e. a movement in which each class would recognise

the rights of other classes and laying aside their contentions, would

unite in a national struggle against the common enemy—England.

Needless to say, the only class deceived by such phrases was the

workingclass. When questions of ‘class’

interests are eliminated from public controversy a victory is thereby

gained for the possessing, conservative class, whose only hope of

security lies in such elimination. Like a fraudulent trustee, the

bourgeois dreads nothing so much as an impartial and rigid inquiry

into the validity of his title deeds. Hence the bourgeois press and

politicians incessantly strive to inflame the working-class mind to

fever heat upon questions outside the range of their own class

interests. War, religion, race, language, political reform,

patriotism—apart from whatever intrinsic merits they may

possess—all serve in the hands of the possessing class as

counter-irritants, whose function it is to avert the catastrophe of

social revolution by engendering heat in such parts of the body

politic as are the farthest removed from the seat of economic enquiry,

and consequently of class consciousness on the part of the

proletariat. The bourgeois Irishman has long been an adept at such

manoeuvring, and has, it must be confessed, found in his working-class

countrymen exceedingly pliable material. During the last hundred years

every generation in Ireland has witnessed an attempted rebellion

against English rule. Every such conspiracy or rebellion has drawn the

majority of its adherents from the lower orders in town and country;

yet, under the inspiration of a few middle class doctrinaires, the

social question has been rigorously excluded from the field of action

to be covered by the rebellion if successful; in hopes that by such

exclusion it would be possible to conciliate the upper classes and

enlist them in the struggle for freedom. The result has in nearly

every case been the same. The workers,


---

p.30




though furnishing the greatest proportion of recruits to

the ranks of the revolutionists, and consequently of victims to the

prison and the scaffold, could not be imbued

en masse with the revolutionary fire necessary to seriously imperil a dominion rooted for 700 years in the heart of their country. They were all anxious enough for freedom, but realising the enormous odds against them, and being explicitly told by their leaders that they *must not expect any change in their condition of social

subjection, even if successful*, they as a body shrank from the

contest, and left only the purest-minded and most chivalrous of their

class to face the odds and glut the vengeance of the tyrant—a

warning to those in all countries who neglect the vital truth that

successful revolutions are not the product of our brains, but of ripe

material conditions.


The upper class also turned a contemptuously deaf ear to the

charming of the bourgeois patriot. They (the upper class) naturally

clung to their property, landed and otherwise; under the protecting

power of England they felt themselves secure in the possession

thereof, but were by no means assured as to the fate which might

befall it in a successful revolutionary uprising. The landlord class,

therefore remained resolutely loyal to England, and while the middle-class poets and romanticists were enthusing on the hope of a ‘union

of class and creeds’, the aristocracy were pursuing their private

interests against their tenants with a relentlessness which threatened

to depopulate the country, and led even an English Conservative

newspaper, the London Times, to

declare that ‘the name of an Irish landlord stinks in the nostrils

of Christendom’.


It is well to remember, as a warning against similar foolishness in

future, that the generation of Irish landlords which had listened to

the eloquent pleadings of Thomas Davis was the same as that which in

the Famine years ‘exercised its rights with a rod of iron and

renounced its duties with a front of brass’.


The lower middle class gave to the National cause in the past


---

p.31




many unselfish patriots, but, on the whole, while willing

and ready enough to please their humble fellow country-men, and to

compound with their own conscience by shouting louder than all others

their untiring devotion to the cause of freedom, they, as a class,

unceasingly strove to divert the public mind upon the lines of

constitutional agitation for such reforms as might remove irritating

and unnecessary officialism, while leaving untouched the basis of

national and economic subjection. This policy enabled them to

masquerade as patriots before the unthinking multitude, and at the

same time lent greater force to their words when as ‘patriot leaders’ they cried down any serious

revolutionary movement that might demand from them greater proofs of

sincerity than could be furnished by the strength of their lungs, or

greater sacrifices than would be suitable to their exchequer. '48 and

'67, the Young Ireland and the Fenian Movements, furnish the classic

illustrations of this policy on the part of the Irish middle

class.


Such, then, is our view of Irish politics and Irish history.

Subsequent chapters will place before our readers the facts upon which

such a view is based.




---

p.32


Chapter II


The Jacobites And The Irish People
-----------------------------------------------


*If there was a time when it behoved men in public

stations to be explicit, if ever there was a time when *those scourges of the human race called politicians*

should lay aside their duplicity and finesse, it is the present

moment. Be assured that the people of this country will no longer bear

that their welfare should be the sport of a few family factions; be

assured they are convinced their true interest consists in putting

down men of self creation, who have no object in view but that of

aggrandising themselves and their families at the expense of the

public, and in setting up men who shall represent the nation, who

shall be accountable to the nation, and who shall do the business of

the nation.’’*

—*Arthur O'Connor in

Irish House of Commons*,May 4,

1795.


Modern Irish History, properly understood, may be said to start

with the close of the Williamite Wars in the year 1691. All the

political life of Ireland during the next 200 years draws its

colouring from, and can only be understood in the light of that

conflict between King James of England and William, Prince of Orange.

Our Irish politics, even to this day and generation, have been and are

largely determined by the light in which the different sections of the

Irish people regarded the prolonged conflict which closed with the

surrender of Sarsfield and the garrison of Limerick to the investing

forces of the Williamite party. Yet never, in all the history of

Ireland, has there been a war in which the people of Ireland had less

reason to be interested either on one side or the other. It is

unfortunately beyond all question that the Irish Catholics of that

time did fight for King James like lions. It is beyond all question

that the Irish Catholics shed their blood like water, and wasted their

wealth like dirt, in an


---

p.33




effort to retain King James upon the throne. But it is

equally beyond all question that the whole struggle was no earthly

concern of theirs; that King James was one of the most worthless

representatives of a worthless race that ever sat upon a throne; that

the ‘pious glorious and immortal’ William was a mere adventurer

fighting for his own hand, and his army recruited from the impecunious

swordsmen of Europe who cared as little for Protestantism as they did

for human life; and that neither army had the slightest claim to be

considered as a patriot army combating for the freedom of the Irish

race. So far from the paeans of praise lavished upon Sarsfield and the

Jacobite army being justified, it is questionable whether a more

enlightened or patriotic age than our own will not condemn them as

little better than traitors for their action in seducing the Irish

people from their allegiance to the cause of their country's freedom,

to plunge them into a war on behalf of a foreign tyrant—a tyrant

who, even in the midst of their struggles on his behalf, opposed the

Dublin Parliament in its efforts to annul the supremacy of the English

Parliament. The war between William and James offered a splendid

opportunity to the subject people of Ireland to make a bid for freedom

while the forces of their oppressors were rent in a civil war. The

opportunity was cast aside, and the subject people took sides on

behalf of the opposing factions of their enemies. The reason is not

hard to find. The Catholic gentlemen and nobles who had the leadership

of the people of Ireland at the time were, one and all, men who

possessed considerable property in the country, property to which they

had, notwithstanding their Catholicity, *no more

right or title than the merest Cromwellian or Williamite

adventurer*. The lands they held were lands which in former times

belonged to the Irish people—in other words, they were tribelands. As such, the peasantry—then reduced to the position of

mere tenants-at-will—were the rightful owners of the soil,

whilst the Jacobite chivalry of King James were either


---

p.34




the descendants of men who had obtained their property in

some former confiscation as the spoils of conquest; of men who had

taken sides with the oppressor against their own countrymen and were

allowed to retain their property as the fruits of treason; or finally,

of men who had consented to seek from the English Government a grant

giving them a personal title to the lands of their clansmen. For such

a combination no really national action could be expected, and from

first to last of their public proceedings they acted as an English

faction, and as an English faction only. In whatever point they might

disagree with the Williamites, they were at least in perfect accord

with them on one point—viz., that the Irish people should be a

subject people; and it will be readily understood that even had the

war ended in the complete defeat of William and the triumph of James,

the lot of the Irish, whether as tillers of the soil or as a nation,

would not have been substantially improved. The undeniable patriotism

of the rank and file does not alter the truthfulness of this analysis

of the situation. They saw only the new enemy from England, the old

English enemy settled in Ireland they were generously, but foolishly,

ready to credit with all the virtues and attributes of patriotic

Irishmen.


To further illustrate our point regarding the character of the

Jacobite leaders in Ireland we might adduce the result of the great

land settlement of Ireland in 1675. Eleven million acres had been

surveyed at the time, of which four million acres were in the

possession of Protestant settlers as the result of previous

confiscations.


Lands so held were never disturbed, but the remainder were

distributed as follows:






|  | ACRES |
| --- | --- |
| To soldiers who had served in the Irish

Wars | 2,367,715 |
| To 49 officers | 497,001 |
| To adventurers (who had lent

money) | 707,321 |
| To provisors (to whom land had been

promised) | 477,873 |
| p.35 |
| To Duke of Ormond and Colonel

Butler | 257,518 |
| To Duke of York | 169,436 |
| To Protestant

Bishops | 31,526 |






The lands left to the Catholics were distributed among the Catholic

gentlemen as follows:






|  | ACRES |
| --- | --- |
| To those who were declared ‘innocent’ that is to say,

those who fought for freedom,but had sided with the

Government | 1,176,750 |
| To provisors (land

promised) | 497,001 |
| Nominees in possession | 68,260 |
| Restitutions | 55,396 |
| To those transferred to Connaught, under James

I | 541,330 |






It will be thus seen that with the exception of the lands held in

Connacht, all the lands held by the Catholic gentry throughout Ireland

were lands gained in the manner we have before described—as

spoils of conquest or the fruits of treachery. Even in that province

the lands of the gentry were held under a feudal tenure from the

English Crown, and therefore their owners had entered into a direct

agreement with the invader to set aside the rights of the clan

community in favour of their own personal claims. Here then was the

real reason for the refusal of the Irish leaders of that time to raise

the standard of the Irish nation instead of the banner of an English

faction. They fought, not for freedom for Ireland, nor for the

restitution of their rights to the Irish people, but rather to secure

that the class who then enjoyed the privilege of robbing the Irish

people should not be compelled to give way in their turn to a fresh

horde of land thieves. Much has been made of their attempt to repeal

Poyning's Law
> [Footnote: Poyning's Law made the Dublin
> 
> Parliament subordinate to the Parliament in London.]
> 
> 

 and in

other ways to


---

p.36




give greater legislative force to the resolutions of the

Dublin Parliament, as if such acts were a proof of their sincere

desire to free the country, and not merely to make certain their own

tenure of power. But such claims, on the part of some writers, are

only another proof of the difficulty of comprehending historical

occurrences without having some central principle to guide and direct

the task.


For the benefit of our readers we may here set forth the Socialist

key to the pages of history, in order that it may be the more readily

understood why in the past the governing classes have ever and always

aimed at the conquest of political power as the guarantee for their

economic domination—or, to put it more plainly, for the social

subjection of the masses—and why the freedom of the workers,

even in a political sense, must be incomplete and insecure until they

wrest from the governing classes the possession of the land and

instruments of wealth production. This proposition, or key to history,

as set forth by Karl Marx, the greatest of modern thinkers and first

of scientific Socialist, is as follows:—


> 
> That in every historical epoch the prevailing method of economic
> 
> production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily
> 
> following from it, forms the basis upon which alone can be explained
> 
> the political and intellectual history of that epoch.
> 
> 
> 




In Ireland at the time of the Williamite war the ‘prevailing

method of economic production and exchange’ was the feudal method,

based upon the private ownership of lands stolen from the Irish

people, and all the political struggles of the period were built upon

the material interests of one set of usurpers who wished to retain,

and another set who wished to obtain, the mastery of those

lands—in other words, the application of such a key as the above

to the problem furnished by the Jacobite Parliament of King James, at

once explains the reason of the so called patriotic efforts of the

Catholic gentry. Their


---

p.37




efforts were directed to the conservation of their own

rights of property, as against the right of the English Parliament to

interfere with or regulate such rights. The so-called Patriot

Parliament was in reality, like every other Parliament that ever sat

in Dublin, merely a collection of land thieves and their lackeys;

their patriotism consisted in an effort to retain for themselves the

lands of the native peasantry; the English influence against which

they protested was the influence of their fellow thieves in England,

hungry for a share of the spoil; and Sarsfield and his followers did

not become patriots because of their fight against King William's

government any more than an Irish Whig out of his office becomes a

patriot because of his hatred to the Tories who are in. The forces

which battled beneath the walls of Derry or Limerick were not the

forces of England and Ireland, but the forces of two English political

parties fighting for the possession of the powers of government; and

the leaders of the Irish Wild Geese on the battle field of Europe were

not shedding their blood because of their fidelity to Ireland, as our

historians pretend to believe, but because they had attached

themselves to the defeated side in English politics. This fact was

fully illustrated by the action of the old Franco-Irish at the time of

the French Revolution. They in a body volunteered into the English

army to help to put down the new French Republic, and as a result

Europe witnessed the spectacle of the new republican Irish exiles

fighting for the French Revolution, and the sons of the old

aristocratic Irish exiles fighting under the banner of England to put

down that Revolution. It is time we learned to appreciate and value

the truth upon such matters, and to brush from our eyes the cobwebs

woven across them by our ignorant or unscrupulous history-writing

politicians.


On the other hand, it is just as necessary to remember that King

William, when he had finally subdued his enemies in Ireland, showed by

his actions that he and his followers were


---

p.38




animated throughout by the same class feeling and

considerations as their opponents. When the war was over William

confiscated a million and a half acres, and distributed them among the

aristocratic plunderers who followed him, as follows:—


He gave Lord Bentinck, 135,300 acres; Lord Albemarle, 103,603; Lord

Coningsby, 59,667; Lord Romney, 49,517; Lord Galway, 36,142; Lord

Athlone, 26,840; Lord Rochford, 49,512; Dr. Leslie, 16,000; Mr. F.

Keighley, 12,000; Lord Mountjoy, 12,000; Sir T. Prendergast, 7,083;

Colonel Hamilton, 5,886 acres.


These are a few of the men whose descendants some presumably sane

Irishmen imagine will be converted into ‘nationalists’ by

preaching ‘a union of classes’.


It must not be forgotten, also, if only as proof of his religious

sincerity, that King William bestowed 95,000 acres, plundered from the

Irish people, upon his paramour, Elizabeth Villiers, Countess of

Orkney. But the virtuous Irish Parliament interfered, took back the

land, and distributed it amongst their immediate friends, the Irish

Loyalist adventurers.




---

p.39


Chapter III


Peasant Rebellions
--------------------------------


*To permit a small class, whether alien or native, to

obtain a monopoly of the land is an intolerable injustice; its

continued enforcement is neither more nor less a robbery of the hard

and laborious earnings of the poor.’’*

— Irish People. (Organ of the Fenian

Brotherhood) July 30,

1864..


In the preceding chapter we pointed out that the Williamite war in

Ireland, from Derry to Limerick, was primarily a war for mastery over

the Irish people, and that all questions of national or industrial

freedom were ignored by the leaders on both sides as being presumably

what their modern prototypes would style ‘beyond the pale of

practical politics’.


When the nation had once more settled down to the pursuits of

peace, and all fear of a Catholic or Jacobite rising had departed from

the minds of even the most timorous squireen, the unfortunate tenantry

of Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant, were enlightened upon how

little difference the war had made to their position as a subject

class. The Catholic who had been so foolish as to adhere to the army

of James could not, in the nature of things, expect much consideration

from his conquerors—and he received none—but he had the

consolation of seeing that the rank and file of his Protestant enemies

were treated little, if at all, better than himself. When the hungry

horde of adventurers who had brought companies to the service of

William had glutted themselves with the plunder for which they had

crossed the Channel, they showed no more disposition to remember the

claims of the common soldier—by the aid of whose sword they had

climbed to power—than do our present rulers when they consign to

the workhouse the shattered


---

p.40




frames of the poor fools who, with murder and pillage, have

won for their masters empire in India or Africa.


Before long the Protestant and Catholic tenants were suffering one

common oppression. The question of political supremacy having been

finally decided, the yoke of economic slavery was now laid unsparingly

upon the backs of the labouring people. All religious sects suffered

equally from this cause. The Penal Laws then in operation against the

Catholics did indeed make the life of the propertied Catholics more

insecure than would otherwise have been the case; but to the vast mass

of the population the misery and hardship entailed by the working out

of economic laws were fraught with infinitely more suffering than it

was at any time within the power of the Penal Laws to inflict. As a

matter of fact, the effect of the latter code in impoverishing

wealthly Catholics has been much overrated. The class interests, which

at all times unite the propertied section of the community, operated,

to a large extent, to render impossible the application of the power

of persecution to its full legal limits. Rich Catholics were quietly

tolerated, and generally received from the rich Protestants an amount

of respect and forbearance which the latter would not at any time

extend to their Protestant tenantry or work-people. So far was this

true that, like the Jew, some Catholics became notorious as

moneylenders, and in the year 1763 a bill was introduced into the

Irish House of Commons to give greater facilities to Protestants

wishing to borrow money from Catholics. The bill proposed to enable

Catholics to become mortgagees of the landed estates in order that

Protestants wishing to borrow money could give a mortgage upon their

lands as security to the Catholic leader. The bill was defeated, but

its introduction serves to show how little the Penal Laws had operated

to prevent the accumulation of wealth by the Catholic propertied

classes.


But the social system thus firmly rooted in the soil of Ireland


---

p.41




—and accepted as righteous by the ruling class

irrespective of religion—was a greater enemy to the prosperity

and happiness of the people than any legislation religious bigotry

could devise. Modern Irish politicians, inspired either by a blissful

unconsciousness of the facts of history, or else sublimely indifferent

to its teachings, are in the habit of tracing the misery of Ireland to

the Legislative Union as its source, but the slightest possible

acquaintance with ante-Union literature will reveal a record of

famine, oppression, and injustice, due to economic causes, unsurpassed

at any other stage of modern Irish history. Thus Dean Swift, writing

in 1729, in that masterpiece of sarcasm entitled A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children

of the Poor People in Ireland from becoming a Burden on their Parents

or Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Public,

was so moved by the spectacle of poverty and wretchedness that,

although having no love for the people, for whom, indeed, he had no

better name than ‘the savage old Irish’, he produced the most

vehement and bitter indictment of the society of his day, and the most

striking picture of hopeless despair, that literature has yet

revealed. Here is in effect his Proposal:


> 
> ‘‘It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great
> 
> town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads,
> 
> and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by
> 
> three, four, or six children all in rags, and importuning every
> 
> passenger for an alms. . .. I, do, therefore, offer it
> 
> to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand
> 
> children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for
> 
> breed. . .
> 
> that the remaining hundred thousand may at a
> 
> year old be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune
> 
> through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck
> 
> plentifully in the last month so as to render them plump and fat for a
> 
> good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for
> 
> friends, and when the family
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.42
> 
> 
> 
> 
> dines alone the fore or hind quarters will make a
> 
> reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be
> 
> very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter [*gap: ellipse*]I have already computed the charge of nursing a
> 
> beggar's child (in which list I reckon *all
> 
> cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths of the farmers*), to be
> 
> about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no
> 
> gentleman would refuse to give ten shillings for the carcase of a
> 
> good, fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of
> 
> excellent, nutritious meat.’’
> 
> 




Sarcasm, truly, but how terrible must have been the misery which

made even such sarcasm permissible! Great as it undoubtedly was, it

was surpassed twelve years later in the famine of 1740, when no less a

number than 400,000 are estimated to have perished of hunger or of the

diseases which follow in the wake of hunger. This may seem an

exaggeration, but the statement is amply borne out by contemporary

evidence. Thus Bishop Berkeley, of the Anglican Church, writing to Mr.

Thomas Prior, of Dublin, in 1741, mentions that ‘The other day I

heard one from the county of Limerick say that whole villages were

entirely dispeopled. About two months since I heard Sir Richard Cox

say that five hundred were dead in the parish, though in a country, I

believe, not very populous’. And a pamphlet entitled The Groans of Ireland, published

in 1741 asserts ‘The universal scarcity was followed by fluxes and

malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts, so that

whole villages were laid waste’.


This famine, be it remarked, like all modern famine, was solely

attributable to economic causes; the poor of all religions and

politics were equally sufferers; the rich of all religions and

politics were equally exempt. It is also noteworthy, as illustrating

the manner in which the hireling scribes of the propertied classes

have written history, while a voluminous literature has arisen round

the Penal Laws—a subject of merely


---

p.43




posthumous interest—a matter of such overwhelming

importance, both historically and practically, as the predisposing

causes of Irish famine can, as yet, claim no notice except scanty and

unavoidable references in national history.


The country had not recovered from the direful effects of this

famine when a further economic development once more plunged the

inhabitants into blackest despair. Disease having attacked and

destroyed great quantities of cattle in England, the aristocratic

rulers of that country—fearful lest the ensuing high price of

meat should lead to a demand for higher wages on the part of the

working class in England—removed the embargo off Irish cattle,

meat, butter and cheese at the English ports, thus partly establishing

free trade in those articles between the two countries. The immediate

result was that all such provisions brought such a price in England

that tillage farming in Ireland became unprofitable by comparison, and

every effort was accordingly made to transform arable lands into

sheep-walks or grazing lands. The landlord class commenced evicting

their tenants; breaking up small farms, and even seizing upon village

common lands and pasture grounds all over the country with the most

disastrous results to the labouring people and cottiers generally.

Where a hundred families had reaped as sustenance from their small

farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a

dozen sheperds now occupied their places. Immediately their sprung up

throughout Ireland numbers of secret societies in which the

dispossessed people strove by lawless acts and violent methods to

restrain the greed of their masters, and to enforce their own right to

life. They met in large bodies, generally at midnight, and proceed to

tear down enclosures; to hough cattle; to dig up and so render useless

the pasture lands; to burn the houses of the sheperds; and in short,

to terrorise their social rulers into abandoning the policy of grazing

in favour of tillage, and to give more employment to the labourers and


---

p.44




more security to the cottier. These secret organisations

assumed different names and frequently adopted different methods, and

it is now impossible to tell whether they possessed any coherent

organisation or not. Throughout the South they were called Whiteboys,

from the practice of wearing white shirts over their clothes when on

their nocturnal expeditions. About the year 1762 they posted their

notices on conspicuous places in the country districts—notably,

Cork, Waterford, Limerick, and Tipperary—threatening vengeance

against such persons as had incurred their displeasure as graziers,

evicting landlords, etc.


These proclamations were signed by an imaginary female, sometimes

called the ‘Sive Oultagh’ sometimes ‘Queen Sive’, sometimes they were in the name of ‘Queen Sive and Her Subjects’. Government warred upon these poor wretches in

the most vindictive manner: hanging, shooting, transporting without

mercy; raiding villages at dead of night for suspected Whiteboys, and

dragging the poor creatures before magistrates who never condescended

to hear any evidence in favour of the prisoners, but condemned them to

whatever punishments their vindictive class spirit or impaired

digestion might prompt.


The spirit of the ruling class against those poor slaves in revolt

may be judged by two incidents exemplifying how Catholic and

Protestant proprietors united to fortify injustice and preserve their

privileges, even at a time when we have been led to believe that the

Penal Laws formed an insuperable barrier against such Union. In the

year 1762 the Government offered the sum of £100 for the capture

of the first five Whiteboy Chiefs. The Protestant inhabitants of the

city of Cork offered in addition £300 for the Chief, and

£50 for each of his first five accomplices arrested. Immediately

the wealthy Catholics of the same city added to the above sums a

promise of £200 for the chief and £40 for each of his

first five subordinates. This was at a time when an English governor,

Lord Chesterfield,


---

p.45




declared that if the military had killed half as many

landlords as they did Whiteboys they would have contributed more

effectually to restore quiet, a remark which conveys some slight idea

of the carnage made among the peasantry. Yet, Flood, the great

Protestant ‘patriot,’ he of whom Davis

sings—


> 1. Bless Harry Flood, who nobly stood
>   
> By us through gloomy years.
> 





in the Irish House of Commons of 1763 fiercely denounced the

Government for not killing enough of the Whiteboys. He had called it

‘clemency’.




---

p.46


Chapter IV


Social Revolts And Political Kites And Crows
---------------------------------------------------------


*When the aristocracy come forward the people fall

backward; when the people come forward the aristocracy, fearful of

being left behind, insinuate themselves into our ranks and rise into

timid leaders of treacherous auxiliaries.’’*

— Secret Manifesto of Projectors of United Irish

Society. , 1791.


In the North of Ireland the secret organisations of the peasantry

were known variously as Oakboys and the Hearts of Steel or Steelboys.

The former directed their efforts mainly against the system of

compulsory road repairing, by which they were required to contribute

their unpaid labour for the upkeep of the county roads; a system,

needless to say, offering every opportunity to the county gentry to

secure labour gratuitously for the embellishment of their estates and

private roads on the pretext of serving public ends. The Oakboy

organisation was particularly strong in the counties of Monaghan,

Armagh, and Tyrone. In a pamphlet published about the year 1762, an

account is given of a ‘rising’ of the peasantry in the first-named county and of the heroic exploits of the officer in command of

the troops engaged in suppressing said rising, in a manner which

irresistibly recalls the present accounts in the English newspapers of

the punitive expeditions of the British army against the

‘marauding’ hill tribes of India or Dacoits of Burmah. The work

is entitled True and Faithful Account of the Late

Insurrections in the North, with a narrative Colonel Coote's Campaign

amongst the Oakboys in County Monaghan, etc. The historian tells


---

p.47




how, on hearing of the ‘rising’, the brave British

officer set off with his men to the town of Castleblayney; how on his

way thither he passed numerous bodies of the peasantry proceeding in

the same direction, each with an oak bough or twig stuck in his hat as

a sign of his treasonable sympathies; how on entering Castleblayney he

warned the people to disperse, and only received defiant replies, and

even hostile manifestations; how he then took refuge in the Market

House and prepared to defend it if need be; and how, after occupying

that stronghold all night, he found the next morning the rebels had

withdrawn from the town. Next, there is an account of the same valiant

General's entry into the town of Ballybay. Here he found all the

houses shut against him, each house proudly displaying an oak bough in

its windows and all the people seemingly prepared to resist to the

uttermost. Apparently determined to make an example, and so to strike

terror, the valiant soldier and his men proceeded to arrest the

ringleader, and, after a severe struggle, did succeed in breaking into

some one of the cabins of the poor people, and arresting some person,

who was accordingly hauled off to the town of Monaghan, there to be

dealt with according to the forms of the law from which every

consideration of justice was rigorously excluded. In the town of

Clones, we are informed, the people withstood the Royal forces in the

market place, but were, of course defeated. The Monaghan Oakboys were

then driven across the borders of their own county into Armagh, where

they made a last stand, but were attacked and defeated in a ‘pitched

battle’, the severity of which may be gauged from the fact that no

casualties were reported on the side of the troops.


But the general feeling of the people was so pronouncedly against

the system of compulsory and unpaid labour on the roads the Government

subsequently abolished the practice, and instituted a road rate

providing for payment for such


---

p.48




necessary labour by a tax upon owners and occupiers of

property in the district. Needless to say, the poor peasants who were

suffering martyrdom in prison for their efforts to remedy what the

Government had by such remedial legislation admitted to be an

injustice, were left to rot in their cells—the usual fate of

pioneers of reform.


The Steelboys were a more formidable organisation, and had their

strongholds in the counties of Down and Amtrim. They were for the most

part Presbyterian or other dissenters from the Established Church,

and, like the Whiteboys, aimed at the abolition or reduction of tithes

and the restriction of the system of consolidating farms for grazing

purposes. They frequently appeared in arms, and moved with a certain

degree of discipline, coming together from widely separated parts in

obedience, apparently, to the orders of a common centre. In the year

1722 six of their number were arrested and lodged in the town jail of

Belfast. Their associates immediately mustered in thousands, and in

the open day marched upon that city, made themselves masters thereof,

stormed the jail, and released their comrades. This daring action

excited consternation in the ranks of the governing classes, troops

were despatched to the spot, and every precaution taken to secure the

arrest of the leaders. Out of the numerous prisoners made, a batch

were selected for trial, but whether as a result of intimidation or

because of their sympathy with the prisoners it is difficult to tell,

the jury in Belfast refused to convict, and when the trial was changed

to Dublin, the Government was equally unfortunate. The refusal of the

juries to convict, was probably, in a large measure due to the

unpopularity of the Act then just introduced to enable the Government

to put persons accused of agrarian offences on trial in a different

county to their own. When this Act was repealed the convictions and

executions went on as merrily as before. Many a peasant's corpse swung

on the gibbet, and many a promising life was doomed to blight


---

p.49




and decay in the foul confines of the prison hell, to glut

the vengeance of the dominant classes. Arthur Young, in his Tour of Ireland, thus describes the

state of matters against which those poor peasants revolted.


A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a

servant, labourer, or cottier dares to refuse to execute   
[*gap: ellipse*]  
. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness

he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect

security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift

a hand in his own defence   
[*gap: ellipse*]  
. Landlords of

consequence have assured me that many of their cottiers would think

themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to

the bed of their master—a mark of slavery which proves the

oppression under which people must live’’

.


It will be observed by the attentive student that the ‘patriots’ who occupied the public stage in

Ireland during the period we have been dealing with never once raised

their voices in protest against such social injustice. Like their

imitators to-day, they regarded the misery of the Irish people as a

convenient handle for political agitation; and, like their imitators

to-day, they were ever ready to outvie even the Government in their

denunciation of all those who, more earnest than themselves, sought to

find a radical cure for such misery.


Of the trio of patriots—Swift, Molyneux and Lucas—it

may be noted that their fight was simply a repetition of the fight

waged by Sarsfield and his followers in their day—a change of

persons and of stage costume truly, but no change of character; a

battle between the kites and the crows.


They found themselves members of a privileged class, living upon

the plunder of the Irish people; but early perceived, to their dismay,

that they could not maintain their position as a privileged class

without the aid of the English Army; and in return for supplying that

army the English ruling class were determined to have the lion's share

of the plunder. The Irish


---

p.50




Parliament was essentially an English institution; nothing

like it existed before the Norman Conquest. In that respect it was on

the same footing as landlordism, capitalism, and their natural-born

child—pauperism. England sent a swarm of adventurers to conquer

Ireland; having partly succeeded, these adventurers established a

Parliament to settle disputes among themselves, to contrive measures

for robbing the natives, and to prevent their fellow-tyrants who had

stayed in England, from claiming the spoil. But in course of time the

section of land-thieves resident in England did claim a right to

supervise the doings of the adventurers in Ireland, and consequently

to control their Parliament. Hence arose Poyning's Law, and the

subordination of Dublin Parliament to London Parliament. Finding this

subordinate position of the Parliament enabled the English ruling

class to strip the Irish workers of the fruits of their toil, the more

far-seeing of the privileged class in Ireland became alarmed lest the

stripping process should go too far, and leave nothing for them to

fatten upon.


At once they became patriots, anxious that Ireland—which, in

their phraseology, meant the ruling class in Ireland—should be

free from the control of the Parliament of England. Their pamphlets,

speeches, and all public pronouncements were devoted to telling the

world how much nicer, equitable, and altogether more delectable it

would be for the Irish people to be robbed in the interests of a

native-born aristocracy than to witness the painful spectacle of that

aristocracy being compelled to divide the plunder with its English

rival. Perhaps Swift, Molyneux, or Lucas did not confess even to

themselves that such was the basis of their political creed. The human

race has at all times shown a proneness to gloss over its basest

actions with a multitude of specious pretences, and to cover even its

iniquities with the glamour of a false sentimentality. But we are not

dealing with appearances but realities, and, in justice to ourselves,

we must expose the flimsy sophistry


---

p.51




which strives to impart to a sordid, self-seeking struggle

the appearance of a patriotic movement. In opposition to the movements

of the people, the patriot politicians and Government alike were an

undivided mass.


In their fight against the tithes the Munster peasantry, in 1786,

issued a remarkable document, which we here reprint as an illustration

of the thought of the people of the provinces of that time. This

document was copied into many papers at the time, and was also

reprinted as a pamphlet in October of that year.



> 
> To obviate the bad impression made by the calumnies of our enemies,
> 
> we beg leave to submit to you our claim for the protection of a humane
> 
> gentry and humbly solicit yours, if said claim shall appear to you
> 
> founded in justice and good policy.
> 
> 
> In every age, country, and religion the priesthood are allowed to
> 
> have been artful, usurping, and tenacious of their ill-acquired
> 
> prerogatives. Often have their jarring interests and opinions deluged
> 
> with Christian blood this long-devoted isle.
> 
> 
> Some thirty years ago our unhappy fathers—galled beyond human
> 
> sufferance—like a captive lion vainly struggling in the toils,
> 
> strove violently to snap their bonds asunder, but instead rivetted
> 
> them more tight. Exhausted by the bloody struggle, the poor of this
> 
> province submitted to their oppression, and fattened with their vitals
> 
> each decimating leech.
> 
> 
> The luxurious parson drowned in the riot of his table the bitter
> 
> groans of those wretches that his proctor fleeced, and the poor
> 
> remnant of the proctor's rapine was sure to be gleaned by the
> 
> rapacious priest; but it was blasphemy to complain of him; Heaven, we
> 
> thought, would wing its lightning to blast the wretch who grudged the
> 
> Holy Father's share. Thus
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.52
> 
> 
> 
> 
> plundered by either clergy, we had reason to wish for our
> 
> simple Druids again.
> 
> 
> At last, however, it pleased pitying Heaven to dispel the murky
> 
> cloud of bigotry that hovered over us so long. Liberality shot her
> 
> cheering rays, and enlightened the peasant's hovel as well as the
> 
> splendid hall. O'Leary told us, plain as friar could, that a God of a
> 
> universal love would not confine His salvation to one sect alone, and
> 
> that the subject's election was the best title to the crown.
> 
> 
> Thus improved in our religion and our politics [*gap: ellipse*] we resolve to evince on every occasion the change in
> 
> our sentiments and hope to succeed in our sincere attempts. We
> 
> examined the double causes of our grievances, and debated long how to
> 
> get them removed, until at length our resolves terminated in this
> 
> general peaceful remonstrance.
> 
> 
> Humanity, justice, and policy enforce our request. Whilst the tithe
> 
> farmer enjoys the fruit of our labours, agriculture must decrease, and
> 
> while the griping priest insists on more for the bridegroom than he is
> 
> worth, population must be retarded.
> 
> 
> Let the legislature befriend us now, and we are theirs forever. Our
> 
> sincerity in the warmth of our attachment when once professed was
> 
> never questioned, and we are bold to say no such imputation will ever
> 
> fall on the Munster peasantry.
> 
> 
> At a very numerous and peaceable meeting of the delegates of the
> 
> Munster peasantry, held on Thursday, the 1st
> 
> day of July, 1786, the following resolutions were unanimously
> 
> agreed to, viz.:—
> 
> 
> Resolved—That we will continue to oppose our oppressors by
> 
> the most justifiable means in our power, either until they are glutted
> 
> with our blood or until humanity raises her angry voice in the
> 
> councils of the nation to protect the toiling peasant and lighten his
> 
> burden.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.53
> 
> 
> Resolved—That the fickleness of the multitude
> 
> makes it necessary for all and each of us to swear not to pay
> 
> voluntarily priest or parson more than as follows:—
> 
> 
> Potatoes, first crop, 6*s*. per acre; do.,
> 
> second crop, 4*s*.; wheat, 4*s*.; barley, 4*s*.; oats, 3*s*.; meadowing, 2*s*. 8*d*.; marriage, 5*s*.; baptism,
> 
> 1*s*. 6*d*.; each family
> 
> confession, 2*s*.; Parish Priest's Sun. Mass,
> 
> 1*s*.; any other, 1*s*.
> 
> Extreme Unction, 1*s*.
> 
> 
> Signed by order,
> 
> WILLIAM O' DRISCOL,
> 
> General to the Munster Peasantry.






---

p.54


Chapter V


Grattan's Parliament
--------------------------------


*Dynasties and thrones are not half so important as

workshops, farms and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties and

thrones, and even provisional governments, are good for anything

exactly in proportion as they secure fair play, justice and freedom to

those who labour.’’*

—*John Mitchell*, 1848.


We now come to the period of the Volunteers. In this year, 1778,

the people of Belfast, alarmed by rumours of intended descents of

French privateers, sent to the Irish Secretary of State at Dublin

Castle asking for a military force to protect their town. But the

English Army had long been drafted off to the United States—then

rebel American colonies of England—and Ireland was practically

denuded of troops. Dublin Castle answered Belfast in the famous letter

which stated that the only force available for the North would be ‘a

troop or two of horse, or part of a company of invalids’.


On receipt of this news the people began arming themselves and

publicly organising Volunteer corps throughout the country. In a short

time Ireland possessed an army of some 80,000 citizen soldiers,

equipped with all the appurtenances of war; drilled, organised, and in

every way equal to any force at the command of a regular Government.

All the expenses of the embodiment of this Volunteer army were paid by

subscriptions of private individuals. As soon as the first alarm of

foreign invasion had passed, the Volunteers turned their attention to

home affairs and began formulating certain demands for

reform—demands which the Government was not strong enough to

resist. Eventually, after a few years' agitation on the Volunteer

side, met by intrigue on the part of the Government, the ‘patriot’


---

p.55




party, led by Grattan and Flood, and supported by the moral

(?) pressure of a Volunteer review outside the walls of the Parliament

House, succeeded in obtaining from the legislature a temporary

abandonment of the claim set up by the English Parliament to force

laws upon the assembly at College Green. This and the concession of

Free Trade (enabling Irish merchants to trade on equal terms with

their English rivals ) inaugurated what is known in Irish History as

Grattan's Parliament. At the present day our political agitators never

tire of telling us with the most painful iteration that the period

covered by Grattan's Parliament was a period of unexampled prosperity

for Ireland, and that, therefore, we may expect a renewal of this same

happy state with a return of our ‘native

legislature’ as they somewhat facetiously style that abortive

product of political intrigue—Home Rule.


We might, if we choose, make a point against our political

historians by pointing out that prosperity such as they speak of is

purely capitalistic prosperity—that is to say, prosperity gauged

merely by the *volume* of wealth produced, and

entirely ignoring the manner in which the wealth is distributed

amongst the workers who produce it. Thus in a previous chapter we

quoted a manifesto issued by the Munster Peasantry in 1786 in

which—four years after Grattan's Parliament had been

established—they called upon the legislature to help them, and

resolved if such help was not forthcoming—and it was not

forthcoming—to ‘resist our oppressors until they are glutted

with our blood’, an expression which would seem to indicate that

the ‘prosperity’ of Grattan's Parliament had not

penetrated far into Munster. In the year 1794 a pamphlet published at

7 Capel Street, Dublin, stated that the average wage of a day labourer

in the County Meath reached only 6d. per day in Summer, and 4d. per

day in Winter; and in the pages of the Dublin Journal, a ministerial organ, and the Dublin Evening Post, a supporter of

Grattan's Party, for the month of April, 1796,


---

p.56




there is to be found an advertisement of a charity sermon

to be preached in the Parish Chapel, Meath Street, Dublin, in which

advertisement there occurs the statement that in *three streets* of the Parish of St. Catherine's

‘no less than 2,000 souls had been found in a starving

condition’. Evidently ‘prosperity’ had not

much meaning to the people of St. Catherine's.


But this is not the ground we mean at present to take up. We will

rather admit, for the purpose of our argument, that the Home Rule

capitalistic definition of ‘prosperity’ is the

correct one, and that Ireland was prosperous under Grattan's

Parliament, but we must emphatically deny that such prosperity was in

any but an infinitesimal degree produced by Parliament. Here again the

Socialist philosophy of history provides the key to the

problem—points to the economic development as the true solution.

The sudden advance of trade in the period in question was almost

solely due to the introduction of mechanical power, and the consequent

cheapening of manufactured goods. It was the era of the Industrial

Revolution when the domestic industries we had inherited from the

Middle Ages were finally replaced by the factory system of modern

times. The warping frame, invented by Arkwright in 1769; the spinning

jenny, patented by Hargreaves in 1770; Crampton's mechanical mule,

introduced in 1779; and the application in 1778 of the steam-engine to

blast-furnaces, all combined to cheapen the cost of production, and so

to lower the price of goods in the various industries affected. This

brought into the field fresh hosts of customers, and so gave an

immense impetus to trade in general in Great Britain as well as in

Ireland. Between 1782 and 1804 the cotton trade more than trebled its

total output; between 1783 and 1796 the linen trade increased nearly

threefold; in the eight years between 1788 and 1796 the iron trade

doubled in volume. The latter trade did not long survive this burst of

prosperity. The invention of smelting by coal instead


---

p.57




of wood in 1750, and the application of steam to blast-furnaces, already spoken of, placed the Irish manufacturer at an

enormous disadvantage in dealing with his English rival, but in the

halycon days of brisk trade—between 1780 and 1800—this was

not very acutely felt. But, when trade once more assumed its normal

aspect of keen competition, Irish manufacturers, without a native coal

supply, and almost entirely dependent on imported English coal, found

it impossible to compete with their trade rivals in the sister country

who, with abundant supplies of coal at their own door, found it very

easy, before the days of railways, to undersell and ruin the

unfortunate Irish. The same fate, and for the same reason, befell the

other important Irish trades. The period marked politically by

Grattan's Parliament was a period of commercial inflation due to the

introduction of mechanical improvements into the staple industries of

the country. As long as such machinery was worked by hand, Ireland

could hold her place on the markets, but with this application of

steam to the service of industry, which began on a small scale in

1785, and the introduction of the power-loom, which first came into

general use about 1813, the immense natural advantage of an indigenous

coal supply finally settled the contest in favour of English

manufacturers.


A native Parliament might have hindered the subsequent decay, as an

alien Parliament may have hastened it; but in either case, under

capitalistic conditions, the process itself was as inevitable as the

economic evolution of which it was one of the most significant signs.

How little Parliament had to do with it may be gauged by comparing the

positions of Ireland and Scotland. In the year 1799, Mr. Foster in the

Irish Parliament stated that the production of linen was twice as

great in Ireland as in Scotland. The actual figures given were for the

year 1796—23,000,000 yards for Scotland as against 46,705,319

for Ireland. This discrepancy in favour of Ireland he attributed to

the native Parliament. But by the year 1830, according to


---

p.58




McCulloch's Commercial Dictionary, the one port of Dundee

in Scotland exported more linen than all Ireland. Both countries had

been deprived of self-government. Why had Scottish manufacture

advanced whilst that of Ireland had decayed? Because Scotland

possessed a native coal supply, and every facility for industrial

pursuits which Ireland lacked.


The ‘prosperity’ of Ireland under Grattan's

Parliament was almost as little due to that Parliament as the dust

caused by the revolutions of the coach-wheel was due to the presence

of the fly who, sitting on the coach, viewed the dust, and fancied

himself the author thereof. And, therefore, true prosperity cannot be

brought to Ireland except by measures somewhat more drastic than that

Parliament ever imagined.




---

p.59


Chapter VI


Capitalist Betrayal Of The Irish Volunteers
--------------------------------------------------------


*> 1. ‘‘Remember still, through good and ill,
>   
> How vain were prayers and tears.
>   
> How vain were words till flashed the swords
>   
> Of the Irish Volunteers.’’
> 

—*Thomas Davis*.*
The theory that the fleeting ‘prosperity’

of Ireland in the time we refer to was caused by the Parliament of

Grattan is only useful to its propagators as a prop to their argument

that the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland destroyed

the trade of the latter country, and that, therefore, the repeal of

that Union placed all manufactures on a paying basis. The fact that

the Union placed all Irish manufactures upon an absolutely equal basis

legally with the manufactures of England is usually ignored, or,

worse, still, is so perverted in its statement as to leave the

impression that the reverse is the case. In fact many thousands of our

countrymen still believe that English laws prohibit mining in Ireland

after certain minerals, and the manufacture of certain articles.


A moment's reflection should remove such an idea. An English

capitalist will cheerfully invest his money in Timbuctoo or China, or

Russia, or anywhere that he thinks he can secure a profit, even though

it may be in the territory of his mortal enemy. He does not invest his

money in order to give employment to his workers, but to make a

profit, and hence it would be foolish to expect that he would allow

his Parliament to make laws prohibiting him from opening mines or

factories in Ireland to make a profit out of the Irish workers. And

there are not, and have not been since the Union, any such laws.





---

p.60


If a student desires to continue the study of this

remarkable controversy in Irish history, and to compare this

Parliamentarian theory of Irish industrial decline with that we have

just advanced—the Socialist theory outlined in our previous

chapter—he has an easy and effective course to pursue in order

to bring this matter to the test. Let him single out the most

prominent exponents of Parliamentarianism and propound the following

question:


Please explain the process by which the removal of Parliament from

Dublin to London—a removal absolutely unaccompanied by any

legislative interference with Irish industry—prevented the Irish

capitalistic class from continuing to produce goods for the Irish

market?


He will get no logical answer to his question—no answer that

any reputable thinker on economic questions would accept for one

moment. He will instead undoubtedly be treated to a long enumeration

of the number of tradesmen and labourers employed at manufacturers in

Ireland before the Union, and the number employed at some specific

period, 20 or 30 years afterwards. This was the method adopted by

Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, in his first great speech in which he

began his Repeal agitation, and has been slavishly copied and

popularised by all his imitators since. *But neither

O'Connell nor any of his imitators have ever yet attempted to analyse

and explain the process by which those industries were destroyed*.

The nearest approach to such an explanation ever essayed is the

statement that the Union led to absentee landlordism and the

withdrawal of the custom of these absentees from Irish manufacturers.

Such an explanation is simply no explanation at all. It is worse than

childish. Who would seriously contend that the loss of a few thousand

aristocratic clients killed, for instance, the leather industry, once

so flourishing in Ireland and now scarcely existent. The district in

the city of Dublin which lies between Thomas Street and the South

Circular Road was once a busy hive of men 


---

p.61


 engaging in the

tanning of leather and all its allied trades. Now that trade has

almost entirely disappeared from this district. Were the members of

Irish Parliament and the Irish landlords the only wearers of shoes in

Ireland?—the only persons for whose use leather was tanned and

manufactured? If not, how did their emigration to England make it

impossible for the Irish manufacturer to produce shoes or harness for

the millions of people still left in the country after the Union? The

same remark applies to the weavers, once so flourishing a body in the

same district, to the woollen trade, to the fishing trade, and so down

along the line. The people of Ireland still wanted all these

necessaries of life after the Union just as much as before, yet the

superficial historian tells us that the Irish manufacturer was unable

to cater to their demand, and went out of business accordingly. Well,

we Irish are credited with being gifted with a strong sense of humour,

but one is almost inclined to doubt it in the face of gravity with

which the Parliamentary theory has been accepted by the masses of the

Irish people.


It surely is an amusing theory when we consider that it implies

that the Irish manufacturers were so heartbroken, grieving over losing

the trade of a few thousand rack-renting landlords, that they could

not continue to make a profit by supplying the wants of the millions

of Irish people at their doors. The English and the Scotch, the French

and the Belgian manufacturers, miners, merchants, and fishermen could

and did wax fat prosperous by supplying the wants of the Irish

commonalty, but the Irish manufacturer could not. He had to shut up

shop and go to the poorhouse because my Lord Rackrent of Castle

Rackrent, and his immediate personal following, had moved to

London.


If our Parliamentarian historians had not been the most superficial

of all recorders of history; if their shallowness had not been so

phenomenal that there is no equal to it to be found


---

p.62




except in the bigotry and stupidity of their loyalist

rivals, they might easily have formulated from the same set of facts

another theory equally useful to their cause, and more in consonance

with the truth. That other theory may be stated thus:—


That the Act of Union was made possible because Irish manufacture

was weak, and, consequently, Ireland had not an energetic capitalist

class with sufficient public spirit and influence to prevent the

Union.


Industrial decline having set in, the Irish capitalist class was

not able to combat the influence of the corruption fund of the English

Government, or to create and lead a party strong enough to arrest the

demoralisation of Irish public life. This we are certain is the proper

statement of the case. Not that the loss of the Parliament destroyed

Irish manufacture, but that the decline of Irish manufacture, due to

causes already outlined, made possible the destruction of the Irish

Parliament. Had a strong enterprising and successful Irish capitalist

class been in existence in Ireland, a Parliamentary reform investing

the Irish masses with the suffrage would have been won under the guns

of the Volunteers without a drop of blood being shed; and with a

Parliament elected under such conditions the Act of Union would have

been impossible. But the Irish capitalist class used the Volunteers to

force commercial reforms from the English Government and then, headed

by Henry Grattan, forsook and denounced the Volunteers when that body

sought, by reforming the representative system, to make it more

responsive to the will of the people, and thus to secure in peace what

they had won by the threat of violence. An Ireland controlled by

popular suffrage would undoubtedly have sought to save Irish industry,

while it was yet time, by a stringent system of protection which would

have imposed upon imported goods a tax heavy enough to neutralise the

advantages accruing to the foreigner from his coal supply, and such a

system might have averted that decline of Irish industry which, as we

have already stated,


---

p.63




was otherwise inevitable. But the only hope of realising

that Ireland lay then in the armed force of the Volunteers; and as the

capitalist class did not feel themselves strong enough as a class to

hold the ship of state against the aristocracy on the one hand and the

people on the other, they felt impelled to choose the only

alternative—viz., to elect to throw in their lot with one or

other of the contending parties. They chose to put their trust in the

aristocracy, abandoned the populace, and as a result were deserted by

the class whom they had trusted, and went down into bankruptcy and

slavery with the class they had betrayed.


A brief glance at the record of the Volunteer movement will

illustrate the far-reaching treachery with which the capitalist class

of Ireland emulated their aristocratic compatriots who




> 1. [*gap: ellipse*]  
> sold for place or gold,
>   
> Their country and their God.
> 





but, unlike them, contrived to avoid the odium their acts

deserved.


At the inception of this movement Ireland was under the Penal Laws.

Against the Roman Catholic, statutes unequalled in ferocity were still

upon the statute books. Those laws, although ostensibly designed to

convert Catholics to the Protestant Faith, were in reality chiefly

aimed at the conversion of Catholic-owned property into Protestant-owned property. The son of a Catholic property-holder could dispossess

his own father and take possession of his property simply by making

affidavit that he, the son, had accepted the Protestant religion.

Thenceforth the father would be by law a pensioner upon the son's

bounty. The wife of a Catholic could deprive her husband of all

control over his property by simply becoming a Protestant. A Catholic

could not own a horse worth more than £5. If he did, any

Protestant could take his horse from him in the light of day and give

him £5 in full payment of all rights in the horse. On the head

of a Catholic schoolmaster or


---

p.64




a Catholic priest the same price was put as on the head of

a wolf. Catholics were eligible to no public office, and were debarred

from most of the professions.


In fact the Catholic religion was an illegal institution. Yet it

grew and flourished, and incidentally it may be observed it secured a

hold upon the affections and in the hearts of the Irish people as

rapidly as it lost the same hold in France and Italy, where the

Catholic religion was a dominant state institution—a fact worth

noting by those Catholics who are clamouring for the endowment of

Catholic institutions out of public funds.


It must be remembered by the student, however, that the Penal Laws,

although still upon the statue book, had been largely inoperative

before the closing quarter of the eighteenth century. This was not due

to any clemency on the part of the English Government, but was the

result of the dislike of those laws felt by the majority of

intelligent Irish Protestants. The latter simply refused to take

advantage of them even to their personal aggrandisement, and there are

very few cases on actual record where the property of Catholics was

wrested from them by their Protestant neighbours as a result of the

Penal Laws in the generations following the close of the Williamite

war. These laws were in fact too horrible to be enforced, and in this

matter public opinion was far ahead of legislative enactment. All

historians agree upon this point.


Class lines, on the other hand, were far more strictly drawn than

religious lines, as they always were in Ireland since the break up of

the clan system, and as they are to this day. We have the words of

such an eminent authority as Archbishop Whatley in this connection,

which coming, as they do, from the pen of a supporter of the British

Government and of the Protestant Establishment, are doubly valuable as

witness to the fact that Irish politics and divisions turn primarily

around questions of property and only nominally around questions of

religion. He says:


Many instances have come to my knowledge of the most furious

Orangemen stripping their estates of a Protestant tenantry who had

been there for generations and letting their land to Roman

Catholics  
[*gap: ellipse*]  
at an advance of a shilling an

acre.’’


These Protestants so evicted, be it remembered, were the men and

women whose fathers had saved Ireland for King William and

Protestantism, as against King James and Catholicity, and the

evictions here recorded were the rewards of their father's victory and

their own fidelity. In addition to this class line on the economic

field the political representation of the country was the exclusive

property of the upper class.


A majority of the members of the Irish Parliament sat as the

nominees of certain members of the aristocracy who owned the estates

on which they ‘represented’ were situated.

Such boroughs were called ‘Pocket Boroughs’

from the fact that they were as much under the control of the landed

aristocrat as if he carried them in his pocket. In addition to this,

throughout the entire island the power of electing members of

Parliament was the exclusive possession of a privileged few. The great

mass of the Catholic and Protestant population were voteless.


This was the situation when the Volunteer movement arose. There

were thus three great political grievances before the Irish public.

The English Parliament had prohibited Irish trade with Europe and

America except through an English port, thus crippling the development

of Irish capitalism; representation in the House of Commons in Dublin

was denied alike to Protestant and Catholic workers, and to all save a

limited few Protestant capitalists, and the nominees of the

aristocracy; and finally all Catholics were suffering under religious

disabilities. As soon as the Volunteers (all of whom were Protestants)

had arms in their hands they began to agitate for the removal of all

these grievances.


On the first all were


---

p.66




unanimous, and accordingly when they paraded the streets of

Dublin on the day of the assembling of Parliament, they hung upon the

mouths of their cannon placards bearing the significant words:

FREE TRADE OR ELSE—

and the implied threat from a united people in arms won their case.

Free Trade was granted. And at that moment an Irish Republic could

have been won as surely as Free Trade. But when the rank and file of

the Volunteers proceeded to outline their demands for the removal of

their remaining political grievances—to demand popular

representation in Parliament—all their leaders deserted. They

had elected aristocrats, glib-tongued lawyers and professional

patriots to be their officers, and all higher ranks betrayed them in

their in hour of need. After the granting of Free Trade a Volunteer

convention was summoned to meet in Dublin to consider the question of

popular representation in Parliament. Lord Charlemont, the commander-in-chief of the body, repudiated the convention; his example was

followed by all the lesser fry of the aristocratic officers, and

finally when it did meet, Henry Grattan, whose political and personal

fortunes the Volunteers had made, denounced them in Parliament as

‘an armed rabble’.


The convention, after some fruitless debate, adjourned in

confusion, and on a subsequent attempt to convene another Convention

the meeting was prohibited by Government proclamation and the signers

of the call for the assembly were arrested and heavily fined. The

Government, having made peace in America, with the granting of

American independence, had been able to mass troops in Ireland and

prepare to try conclusions with the Volunteers. Its refusal to

consider the demand for popular representation was its gage of battle,

and the proclamation of the last attempt at a Convention was the sign

of its victory. The Volunteers had, in fact,


---

p.67




surrendered without a blow. The responsibility for this

shameful surrender rests entirely upon the Irish capitalist class. Had

they stood by the reformers, the defection of the aristocracy would

have mattered little, indeed it is certain that the radical element

must have foreseen and had been prepared for that defection. But the

act of the merchants in throwing in their lot with the aristocracy

could not have been foreseen; it was too shameful an act to be

anticipated by any but its perpetrators. It must not be imagined,

moreover, that these reactionary elements made no attempt to hide

their treason to the cause of freedom.


On the contrary, they were most painstaking in keeping up the

appearance of popular sympathies and in endeavouring to divert public

attention along other lines than those on which the real issues were

staked. There is a delicious passage in the Life of Henry Grattan, edited by

his son, describing the manner in which the Government obtained

possession of the arms of the various corps of Dublin Volunteers,

which presents in itself a picture in microcosm of very many epochs of

Irish history and illustrates the salient characteristics of the

classes and the part they play in Irish public life.


Dublin is Ireland in miniature; nay, Dublin is Ireland in

concentrated essence. All that makes Ireland great or miserable,

magnificent or squalid, ideally revolutionary or hopelessly

reactionary, grandly unselfish or vilely treacherous, is stronger and

more pronounced in Dublin than elsewhere in Ireland. Thus the part

played by Dublin in any National crisis is sure to be simply a

metropolitan setting for the role played by the same passions

throughout the Irish provinces. Hence the value of the following

unconscious contribution to the study of Irish history from the pen of

the son of Henry Grattan.


In Dublin there were three divisions of

Volunteers—corresponding to the three popular divisions of the

‘patriotic’ forces. There was the Liberty

Corps, recruited exclusively from the working class; the Merchants

Corps, composed of


---

p.68




the capitalist class, and the Lawyers Corps, the members of

the legal fraternity. Henry Grattan, Jr., telling of the action of the

Government after the passage of the Arms and

Gunpowder Bill requiring the Volunteers to give up their arms to

the authorities for safe keeping, says the Government ‘seized the

artillery of the Liberty Corps, made a private arrangement by which it

got possession of that belonging to the Merchant Corps; they induced

the lawyers to give up theirs, first making a public procession before

they were surrendered’.


In other words and plainer language, the Government had to use

force to seize the arms of the working men, but the capitalists gave

up theirs secretly as the result of a private bargain, the terms of

which we are not made acquainted with; and the lawyers took theirs

through the streets of Dublin in a public parade to maintain the

prestige of the legal fraternity in the eyes of the credulous Dublin

workers, and then, whilst their throats were still husky from publicly

cheering the ‘guns of the Volunteers’, privately handed those

guns over to the enemies of the people.


The working men fought, the capitalists sold out, and the lawyers

bluffed.


Then, as ever in Ireland, the fate of the country depended upon the

issue of the struggle between the forces of aristocracy and the forces

of democracy. The working class in town and the peasantry in the

country were enthusiastic over the success of the revolutionary forces

in America and France, and were burning with a desire to emulate their

deeds in Ireland. But the Irish capitalist class dreaded the people

more than they feared the British Government; and in the crisis of

their country's fate their influence and counsels were withdrawn from

the popular side. Whilst this battle was being fought out with such

fatal results to the cause of freedom, there was going on elsewhere in

Ireland a more spectacular battle over a mock issue. And as is the

wont of things in Ireland this sham battle engrosses the


---

p.69




greatest amount of attention in Irish history. We have

already alluded to the Henry Flood who made himself conspicuous in the

Irish Parliament by out-Heroding Herod in his denunciation of the

Government for failing to hang enough peasants to satisfy him. Mr.

Henry Grattan we have also introduced to our readers. These two men

were the Parliamentary leaders of the ‘patriot

party’ in the House of Commons—the ‘rival Harries’, as the Dublin crowd sarcastically

described them. When the threat of the Volunteers compelled the

English authorities to formally renounce all its rights to make laws

binding the Irish parliament, these two patriots quarrelled, and, we

are seriously informed by the grave historians and learned historians,

the subject of their quarrel divided all Ireland. In telling of what

that subject was we hope our readers will not accuse us of fooling; we

are not, although the temptation is almost irresistible. We are

soberly stating the historical facts. The grave and learned historians

tell us that Grattan and Flood quarrelled because Flood insisted that

England should be required to promise that it would never again

interfere to make laws governing the Irish Parliament, and Grattan

insisted that it would be an insult to the honour of England to

require any such promise.


As we have said, the grave and learned historians declare that all

Ireland took sides in this quarrel, even such a hater of England as

John Mitchell in his History of Ireland seemingly believes this to be the case. Yet we

absolutely refuse to give any credence to the story. We are firmly

convinced that while Grattan and Flood were splitting the air with

declamations upon this subject, if an enquirer had gone down into any

Irish harvest field and asked the first reaper he met his opinion of

the matter, the said reaper would have touched the heart of the

question without losing a single swing of his hook. He would have said

truly:—


 ‘An' sure, what does it matter what England promises?


---

p.70




Won't she break her promise, anyway as soon as it suits

her, and she is able to?’


It is difficult to believe that either Grattan or Flood could have

seriously thought that any promise would bind England, a country which

even then was notorious all over the world for broken faith and

dishonoured treaties. Today the recital of facts of this famous

controversy looks like a poor attempt at humour, but in view of the

tragic setting of the controversy we must say that it bears the same

relation to humour that a joke would in a torture chamber. Grattan and

Flood in this case were but two skilful actors indulging in oratorical

horse-play at the death-bed of the murdered hopes of a people. Were

any other argument, outside of the absurdity of the legal

hairsplitting on both sides, needed to prove how little such a sham

battle really interested the great mass of the people the record of

the two leaders would suffice. Mr. Flood was not only known to be an

enemy of the oppressed peasantry and a hater of the

Catholics—that is to say, of the great mass of the inhabitants

of Ireland—but he had also spoken and voted in the Irish

Parliament in favour of a motion to pay the expenses of an army of

10,000 British soldiers to be sent to put down the Revolution in

America, and Mr. Grattan on his part had accepted a donation of

£50,000 from the Government for his ‘patriotic’ services, and afterwards, in excess of

gratitude for this timely aid, repaid the Government by betraying and

denouncing the Volunteers.


On the other great questions of the day they were each occupying an

equivocal position, playing fast and loose. For instance:—


Mr. Flood believed in Democracy—amongst Protestants, but

opposed religious freedom.


Mr. Grattan believed in religious freedom—amongst property

owners, but opposed all extension of the suffrage to the working

class.




---

p.71


Mr.Flood would have given the suffrage to all

Protestants, rich or poor, and denied it to all Catholics, rich or

poor.


Mr. Grattan would have given the vote to every man who owned

property, irrespective of religion, and he opposed its extension to

any propertyless man. In the Irish House of Commons he bitterly

denounced the United Irishmen, of whom we will treat later, for

proposing universal suffrage, which he declared would ruin the country

and destroy all order.


It will be seen that Mr. Grattan was the ideal capitalist

statesman; his spirit was the spirit of the bourgeoisie incarnate. He

cared more for the interests of property than for human rights or for

the supremacy of any religion.


His early bent in that direction is seen in a letter he sent to his

friend, a Mr. Broome, dated November 3,

1767, and reproduced by his son in his edition of the life and

speeches of his father. The letter shows the eminently respectable,

anti-revolutionary, religious Mr. Henry Grattan to have been at heart,

a free thinker, free-lover, and epicurean philosopher, who had early

understood the wisdom of not allowing these opinions to be known to

the common multitude whom he aspired to govern. We extract:—


You and I, in this as in most other things, perfectly agree; we

think marriage is an artificial, not a natural, institution, and

imagine women too frail a bark for so long and tempestuous a voyage as

that of life   
[*gap: ellipse*]  
. I have become an epicurean

philosopher; consider this world as our ne plus ultra, and happiness as our great

object in it   
[*gap: ellipse*]  
. Such a subject is too extensive

and too dangerous for a letter; in our privacy we shall dwell upon it

more copiously’’

.
This, be it noted, is perhaps not the Grattan of the poet Moore's

rhapsody, but it is the real Grattan.


Small wonder that the Dublin mob stoned this Grattan on his return

from England, on one occasion, after attending parliament in London.

His rhetoric and heroics did not deceive


---

p.72




them, even if they did bewitch the historians. His dramatic

rising from a sick bed to appear before the purchased traitors who

sold their votes to carry the Union, in order to appeal to them not to

fulfil their bargain, makes indeed a fine tableau for romantic

historians to dwell upon, but it was a poor compensation to the common

people for the Volunteers insulted and betrayed, and the cause of

popular suffrage opposed and misrepresented.


A further and, to our mind, conclusive proof of the manner in which

the ‘Parliament of '82’ was regarded by the

real Nationalists and progressive thinkers of Ireland is to be found

in the extract below from the famous pamphlet written by Theobald

Wolfe Tone and published September, 1791, entitled An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. It is interesting to recall that this biting

characterisation of the ‘glorious revolution of

1782’ from the pen of the most far-seeing Irishman of his day, has

been so little to the liking of our historians and journalists that it

was rigidly boycotted by them all until the present writer reprinted

it in 1897, in Dublin, in a series of '98

Readings containing also many other forgotten and

inconvenient documents of the same period. Since then it has several

times been republished exactly as we rereprinted the extract, but to

judge by the manner in which some of our friends still declare they

‘stand upon the constitution of '82’ it has been published in

vain for some people.




> 
> - (Extract from the famous pamphlet, An
> 
> Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland,. published September, 1791.).
> 
> 
> 
> I have said that we have no National Government. Before the year
> 
> 1782 it was not pretended that we had, and it is at least a curious,
> 
> if not a useful, speculation to examine how we
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.73
> 
> 
> 
> 
> stand in that regard now. And I have little dread of being
> 
> confuted, when I assert that all we got by what we are pleased to
> 
> dignify with the name of Revolution was simply the means of doing good
> 
> according to law, without recurring to the great rule of nature, which
> 
> is above all positive Statutes; whether we have done good or not, why
> 
> we have omitted to do good is a serious question. The pride of the
> 
> nation, the vanity of individuals concerned, the moderation of some
> 
> honest men, the corruption of knaves, I know may be alarmed when I
> 
> assert that the revolution of 1782 was the most bungling, imperfect
> 
> business that ever threw ridicule on a lofty epithet, by assuming it
> 
> unworthily. It is not pleasant to any Irishman to make such a
> 
> concession, but it cannot be helped if truth will have it so. It is
> 
> much better to delude ourselves or be gulled by our enemies with
> 
> praises which we do not deserve, or imaginary blessings which we do
> 
> not enjoy.
> 
> 
> I leave to the admirers of that era to vent flowing declamations on
> 
> its theoretical advantages, and its visionary glories; it is a fine
> 
> subject, and peculiarly flattering to my countrymen, many of whom were
> 
> actors, and almost all spectators of it. Be mine the unpleasing task
> 
> to strip it of its plumage and its tinsel, and show the naked figure.
> 
> The operation will be severe, but if properly attended to may give us
> 
> a strong and striking lesson of caution and of wisdom.
> 
> 
> The Revolution of 1782 was a Revolution which enabled Irishmen to
> 
> sell at a much higher price their honour, their integrity, and the
> 
> interests of their country; it was a Revolution which, while at one
> 
> stroke it doubled the value of every borough-monger in the kingdom,
> 
> left three-fourths of our countrymen slaves as it found them, and the
> 
> government of Ireland in the base and wicked and contemptible hands
> 
> who had spent their lives in degrading and plundering her; nay, some
> 
> of whom had given their last vote decidedly, though
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.74
> 
> 
> 
> 
> hopelessly, against this, our famous Revolution. Who of the
> 
> veteran enemies of the country lost his place or his pension? Who was
> 
> called forth to station or office from the ranks of opposition? Not
> 
> one. The power remained in the hands of our enemies, again to be
> 
> exerted for our ruin, with this difference, that formerly we had our
> 
> distress, our injuries, and our insults gratis at the hands of
> 
> England; but now we pay very dearly to receive the same with
> 
> aggravation, through the hands of Irishmen—yet this we boast of
> 
> and call a Revolution!
> 
> 
> 




And so we close this chapter on the Volunteers—a chapter of

great opportunities lost, of popular confidence betrayed. A few

extracts from some verses written at the time in Dublin serve as an

epitome of the times, even if they do seem a little bitter.


> 1. Who aroused the people?
>   
> The rival Harries rose
>   
> And pulled each other's nose.
>   
> And said they aroused the people.
> 2. What did the Volunteers?
>   
> They mustered and paraded
>   
> Until their laurels faded.
>   
> This did the Volunteers.
> 3. How died the Volunteers?
>   
> The death that's fit for slaves.
>   
> They slunk into their graves.
>   
> Thus died the Volunteers.
> 






---

p.75


Chapter VII


The United Irishmen
---------------------------------


*Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men

of property will not help us they must fall ; we will free ourselves

by the aid of that large and respectable class of the

community—the men of no property.’’—*Theobald Wolfe Tone*.*
Contemporaneously with the betrayal and fall of the Volunteers,

Ireland witnessed the rise and progress of the Society of United

Irishmen. This organisation was at first an open, peaceful

association, seeking to utilise the ordinary means of political

agitation in order to spread its propaganda among the masses and so

prepare them for the accomplishment of its greater end—viz., the

realisation in Ireland of a republic on the lines of that established

in France at the Revolution. Afterwards, unable to maintain its public

character in face of the severe persecution by the British Government

of anything savouring in the least of a democratic nature, the

organisation assumed the veil and methods of secrecy, and in that form

attained to such proportions as enabled it to enter into negotiations

with the Revolutionary Directory of France on the basis of an equal

treaty making national power. As the result of this secret treaty

between Revolutionary France and Revolutionary Ireland against the

common enemy, aristocratic England, various fleets and armies were

dispatched from the Continent to assist the Irish Republicans, but all

of those expeditions were disastrous in their outcome. The first,

under the command of Grouchy and Hoche, was dispersed by a storm, some

of the ships being compelled to return to France for repairs, and when

the remainder, including the greater part of the army, reached Bantry

Bay, on the Irish coast, the French commander exhibited


---

p.76




to the full all that hesitation, indecision and lack of

initiative which he afterwards was to show with equally fatal results

to Napoleon on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. Finally, despite the

desperate protests of the Irish Revolutionists on board, he weighed

anchor and returned to France without striking a blow or landing a

corporal's guard. Had he been a man equal to the occasion and landed

his expedition, Ireland would almost undoubtedly have been separated

from England and become mistress of her own national destinies.


Another expedition, fitted out by the Dutch Republic in alliance

with France, was detained by contrary winds in the harbour until the

British fleet had time to come upon the scene, and then the Dutch

commander chivalrously but foolishly accepted the British challenge to

fight, and, contending under unequal and adverse conditions, was

defeated.


An unauthorised but gallant attempt was made under another French

officer, General Humbert, and this actually landed in Ireland,

proclaimed the Irish Republic at Killala, in Connacht, armed large

numbers of the United Irishmen amongst the inhabitants, and in

conjunction with these latter fought and utterly routed a much

superior British force at Castlebar, and penetrated far into the

country before it was surrounded and compelled to surrender to a force

more than ten times its own in number. The numbers of the French

expedition in this case were insufficient for the purposes of making a

stand long enough to permit of the people reaching it and being armed

and organised efficiently, and hence its failure. But had Humbert,

possessed the number commanded by Grouchy, or Grouchy possessed the

dash and daring of Humbert, the Irish Republic would have been born,

for weal or woe, in 1798. It is a somewhat hackneyed observation, but

so true that it compels repetition, that the elements did more for

England than her armies. Indeed, whether in conflict with the French

expeditionary force of Humbert, with the Presbyterians and Catholics

of the


---

p.77




United Irish Army under General Munro in the North, or with

the insurgent forces of Wicklow, Wexford, Kildare and Dublin, the

British army can scarcely be said to have any time justified its

reputation, let alone covered itself with glory. All the glory was,

indeed, on the other side, as was also most of the humanity, and all

of the zeal for human freedom. The people were wretchedly armed,

totally undrilled, and compelled to act without any systematic plan of

campaign, because of the sudden arrest and imprisonment of their

leaders. Yet they fought and defeated the British troops on a score of

battlefields, despite the fact that the latter were thoroughly

disciplined, splendidly armed, and directed like a huge machine, from

one common centre. To suppress the insurrection in the counties of

Wicklow and Wexford alone required all the efforts of 30,000 soldiers;

had the plans of the United Irishmen for a concerted uprising all over

the island on a given date not failed, the task of coping with the

Republican forces would have been too great for the Government to

achieve. As it was, the lack of means of communication prevalent in

those days made it possible for the insurrection in any one district

to be almost fought and lost before news of its course had penetrated

into other parts of the country.


While the forces of republicanism and of despotism were thus

contending for supremacy upon the land, the victory was being in

reality decided for the latter by its superiority upon the sea. The

successes of the British fleet alone made it possible to keep the

shores of England free of invading enemies, and to enable Pitt, the

English Prime Minister, to subsidise and maintain the armies of the

allied despots of Europe in their conflict with the forces of freedom

and progress throughout the Continent. In the face of this undoubted

fact, it is somewhat humiliating to be compelled to record that the

overwhelming majority of those serving upon that fleet were Irishmen.

But, unlike those serving in the British army, the sailors and marines

of the navy


---

p.78




were there against their own will. During the coercive

proceedings of the British Government in Ireland, in their attempt to

compel the revolutionary movement to explode prematurely, the

authorities suspended the Habeas Corpus Act (the guarantee of ordinary

legal procedure) and instituted Martial Law and Free Quarters for the

Military. Under the latter system the soldiery were forced as boarders

upon the civilian population, each family being compelled to provide

food and lodging for a certain number. For all attempts at resistance,

or all protests arising out of the licentious conduct of the brutal

soldiery, or all incautious expressions overheard by them during their

unwelcome residence in the houses of the people, the authorities had

one great sovereign remedy—viz., the transportation on board the

British fleet.


Thousands of young men were seized all over the island and marched

in chains to the various harbours, from thence taken on board the

English men of war ships, and there compelled to fight for the

Government that had broken up their homes, ruined their lives and

desolated their country. Whenever any district was suspected of

treasonable sympathies it was first put under Martial Law, then every

promising young man was seized and thrown into prison on suspicion and

without trial, and then those who were not executed or flogged to the

point of death were marched on board the fleet. All over Ireland, but

especially in Ulster and Leinster during the closing years of the 18th

and the opening of the 19th century, the newspapers and private

letters of the time are full of records of such proceedings, telling

of the vast numbers everywhere sent on board the fleet as a result of

the wholesale dragooning of the people. Great numbers of these were

United Irishmen, sworn to an effort to overthrow the despotism under

which the people of Ireland suffered, and as a result of their

presence on board, every British ship soon became a nest of

conspirators. The ‘Jack Tars of Old England’

were conspiring to destroy


---

p.79




the British Empire, and any one at all acquainted with the

facts relative to their treatment by their superiors and the

authorities cannot wonder at their acts. The subject is not loved by

the jingo historians of the English governing classes, and is

consequently usually complacently lied about, but, as a cold matter of

fact ‘the wooden walls of England’, so beloved of the poets of

that country, were in reality veritable floating hells to the poor

sailors and marines.


Flogging for the most trivial offences was inflicted, upon the

unsupported word of the most petty officer; the quarters in which the

men were compelled to sleep and eat below decks were of the vilest and

most unsanitary conditions; the food was of the filthiest, and every

man had to pay tribute to a greedy quarter master in order to escape

actual starvation, and the whole official life of the ship, from the

captain down to the youngest midshipman, was based upon the wealth and

rank and breathed hatred and contempt for anything belonging to the

lower classes. Mutinies and attempts at mutiny were consequently of

constant occurrence, and, therefore, the forcibly impressed United

Irishmen found a fertile field for their operations. In the Government

records of naval court-martials at that time, the charge of

‘administering the secret oath of the United Irishmen’ is one of

the commonest against the accused, and the number of men shot and

transported beyond seas for this offence is simply enormous. English

and Scottish sailors were freely sworn into the ranks of the

conspirators, and the numbers of those disaffected grew to such an

extent that on one occasion—the mutiny of the Nore—the

sailors were able to revolt, depose their officers, and take command

of the fleet. The wisest heads amongst them, the original United

Irishmen, proposed to sail the ships into a French port and turn them

over to the French Government, and for a time they had great hopes of

accomplishing this purpose, but finally they were compelled to accede

to a proposal to attempt to win over the sailors on


---

p.80




some other ships in the port of London before sailing to

France. This they did, and even threatened to bombard the city; but

the delay had enabled the Government to rally its loyal ships, and

also enabled the ‘loyal’ slaves still on board

the revolting ships to play upon the ‘patriotic’ feelings of the waverers among the

British mutineers by representing to them the probability of their

being confined in French prisons instead of welcomed as allies. In the

end the admiral and officers, by promising a ‘redress of their just

grievances’ succeeded in winning over a sufficient number on each

ship to paralyse any chance of resistance, and the mutiny was

quenched. The usual tale of shootings, floggings, and transportations

followed, but the conditions of life on board ship were long in being

altered for the better. It may be wondered that the men forcibly

impressed, and the conspirators against a tyrannical Government could

fight for that Government as did those unfortunates under Nelson, but

it must be borne in mind that once on board a war vessel and that

vessel brought into action with an enemy in the open sea, there was no

possibility of escape or even of co-operation with the enemy; the

necessity of self-preservation compelled the rebellious United

Irishmen or the discontented mutineers to fight as loyally for the

ship as did the soulless slaves amongst whom they found themselves.

And being better men, with more manhood they undoubtedly fought

better.


In concluding this brief summary of this aspect of that great

democratic upheaval we desire to quote from the Press, the organ of the United Irishmen, published in Dublin, the following short news item of the period, which we trust will be found highly illustrative of the times in question, as well as a confirmation of the points we have set forth

above:—


---

p.81



> 
> Near Castle Ward, a northern hamlet, a father and son had their
> 
> heads roasted on their own fire to extort a confession of concealed
> 
> arms. The cause was that the lock of a gun was found in an old box
> 
> belonging to the wife of the elder man. It is a fact that the above
> 
> old couple had two sons serving on board the British fleet, one under
> 
> Lord Bridgport, the other under Lord St. Vincent.’’
> 
> 







---

p.82


Chapter VIII


United Irishmen As Democrats And Internationalists
-----------------------------------------------------------------


*> 1. ‘‘Och, Paddies, my hearties, have done wid your parties,
>   
> Let min of all creeds and professions agree,
>   
> If Orange and Green, min, no longer were seen, min,
>   
> Och, naboclis, how aisy ould Ireland we'd free.’’
> 

—*Jamie Hope*,

1798.*
As we have pointed out elsewhere (‘Erin's Hope,

the End and the Means’) native Irish civilisation disappeared, for

all practical purposes, with the defeat of the Insurrection of 1641

and the break-up of the Kilkenny Confederation. This great

Insurrection marked the last appearance of the Irish clan system,

founded upon common property and a democratic social organisation, as

a rival to the politico-social order of capitalist feudalism founded

upon the political despotism of the proprietors, and the political and

the social slavery of the actual producers. In the course of this

Insurrection the Anglo-Irish noblemen, who held Irish tribelands as

their private property under the English feudal system, did indeed

throw in their lot with the native Irish tribesmen, but the union was

never a cordial one, and their presence in the councils of the

insurgents was at all times a fruitful source of dissension, treachery

and incapacity. Professing to fight for Catholicity, they, in reality,

sought only to preserve their right to the lands they held as the

result of previous confiscations, from the very men, or the immediate

ancestors of the men, by whose side they were fighting. They feared

confiscation from the new generation of Englishmen if the insurrection

was defeated, and they feared confiscation at


---

p.83




the hands of the insurgent clansmen if the insurrection was

successful.


In the vacillation and treachery arising out of this state of mind

can be found the only explanation for the defeat of this magnificent

movement of the Irish clans, a movement which had attained to such

proportions that it held sway over and made laws for the greater part

of Ireland, issued its own coinage, had its own fleet, and issued

letters of marque to foreign privateers, made treaties with foreign

nations, and levied taxes for the support of its several armies

fighting under its flag. The fact that it had enrolled under its

banner the representatives of two different social systems contained

the germs of its undoing. Had it been all feudal it would have

succeeded in creating an independent Ireland, albeit with a serf

population like that of England at the time; had it been all composed

of the ancient septs it would have crushed the English power and

erected a really free Ireland, but as it was but a hybrid, composed of

both, it had all the faults of both and the strength of neither, and

hence went down in disaster. With its destruction, and the following

massacres, expropriations and dispersion of the native Irish, the

Irish clans disappear finally from history.


Out of these circumstances certain conditions arose, well worthy of

the study of every student who would understand modern Irish

history.


One condition which thus arose was, that the disappearance of the

clan as a rallying point for rebellions and possible base of freedom

made it impossible thereafter to localise an insurrectionary effort,

or to give it a smaller or more circumscribed aim than that of the

Irish Nation. When, before the iron hand of Cromwell, the Irish clans

went down into the tomb of a common subjection, the only possible

reappearance of the Irish idea henceforth lay through the gateway of a

National resurrection. And from that day forward, the idea of common

property was destined to recede into the background as an


---

p.84




avowed principle of action, whilst the energies of the

nation were engaged in a slow and painful process of assimilating the

social system of the conqueror; of absorbing the principles of that

political society based upon ownership, which had replaced the

Irish clan society based upon a common kingship.


Another condition ensuing upon the total disappearance of the Irish

Social Order was the growth and accentuation of class distinctions

amongst the conquerors. The indubitable fact that from that day

forward the ownership of what industries remained in Ireland was left

in the hands of the Protestant element, is not to be explained as

sophistical anti-Irish historians have striven to explain it, by

asserting that it arose from the greater enterprise of Protestants as

against Catholics; in reality it was due to the state of social and

political outlawry in which the Catholics were henceforth placed by

the law of the land. According to the English Constitution as

interpreted for the benefit of Ireland, the Irish Catholics were not

presumed to exist, and hence the practical impossibility of industrial

enterprise being in their hands, or initiated by them. Thus, as the

landed property of the Catholic passed into the ownership of the

Protestant adventurers, so also the manufacturing business of the

nation fell out of the stricken grasp of the hunted and proscribed ‘Papists’ into the clutches of their successful

and remorseless enemies. Amongst these latter there were two

elements—the fanatical Protestant, and the mere adventurer

trading on the religious enthusiasm of the former. The latter used the

fanaticism of the former in order to disarm, subjugate and rob the

common Catholic enemy, and having done so, established themselves as a

ruling landed and commercial class, leaving the Protestant soldier to

his fate as tenant or artisan. Already by the outbreak of the

Williamite war in the generation succeeding Cromwell, the industries

of the North of Ireland had so far developed that the ‘Prentice Boys’ of Derry were the dominating

factor in determining the attitude of that city


---

p.85




towards the contending English Kings, and, with the close

of that war, industries developed so quickly in the country as to

become a menace to the capitalists of England, who accordingly

petitioned the King of England to restrict and fetter their growth,

which he accordingly did. With the passing of this restrictive

legislation against Irish industries, Irish capitalism became

discontented and disloyal without, as a whole, the power or courage to

be revolutionary. It was a re-staging of the ever-recurring drama of

English invasion and Anglo-Irish disaffection, with the usual economic

background. We have pointed out in a previous chapter how each

generation of English adventurers, settling upon the soil as owners,

resented the coming of the next generation, and that their so-called

Irish patriotism was simply inspired by the fear that they should be

dispossessed in their turn as they had dispossessed others. What

applies to the land-owning ‘patriots’ applies

also to the manufacturers. The Protestant capitalists, with the help

of the English, Dutch, and other adventurers, dispossessed the native

Catholics and became prosperous; as their commerce grew it became a

serious rival to that of England, and accordingly the English

capitalists compelled legislation against it, and immediately the

erstwhile ‘English Garrison in Ireland’ became

an Irish ‘patriot’ party.


From time to time many weird and fanciful theories have been

evolved to account for the transformation of English settlers of one

generation into Irish patriots in the next. We have been told it was

the air, or the language, or the religion, or the hospitality, or the

lovableness of Ireland; and all the time the naked economic fact, the

material reason, was plain as the alleged reason was mythical or

spurious. But there are none so blind as those who will not see, yet

the fact remains that, since English confiscations of Irish land

ceased, no Irish landlord body has become patriotic or rebellious, and

since English repressive legislation against Irish manufacturers

ceased,


---

p.86




Irish capitalists have remained valuable assets in the

scheme of English rule in Ireland. So it would appear that since the

economic reason ceased to operate, the air, and the language, and the

religion, and the hospitality, and the lovableness of Ireland have

lost all their seductive capacity, all their power to make an Irish

patriot out of an English settler of the propertied classes.


With the development of this ‘patriotic’

policy amongst the Irish manufacturing class, there had also developed

a more intense and aggressive policy amongst the humbler class of

Protestants in town and country. In fact, in Ireland at that time,

there were not only two nations divided into Catholics and non-Catholics, but each of those two nations in turn was divided into

other two rich and the poor. The development of industry had drawn

large numbers of the Protestant poor from agricultural pursuits into

industrial occupations, and the suppression of those latter in the

interest of English manufacturers left them both landless and

workless. This condition reduced the labourers in town and country to

the position of serfs. Fierce competition for farms and for jobs

enabled the master class to bend both Protestant and Catholic to its

will, and the result was seen in the revolts we have noticed earlier

in our history. The Protestant workman and tenant was learning that

the Pope of Rome was a very unreal and shadowy danger compared with

the social power of his employer or landlord, and the Catholic tenant

was awakening to a perception of the fact that under the new the new

social order the Catholic landlord represented the Mass less than the

rent-roll. The times were propitious for a union of the two

democracies of Ireland. They had travelled from widely different

points through the valleys of disillusion and disappointment to meet

at last by the unifying waters of a common suffering.


To accomplish this union, and make it a living force in the life of

the nation, there was required the activity of a revolutionist


---

p.87




with statesmanship enough to find a common point upon which

the two elements could unite, and some great event, dramatic enough in

its character, to arrest the attention of all and fire them with a

common feeling. The first, the Man, revolutionist and statesman, was

found in the person of Theobald Wolfe Tone, and the second, the Event,

in the French Revolution. Wolfe Tone had, although a Protestant, been

secretary for the Catholic Committee for some time, and in that

capacity had written the pamphlet quoted in a previous chapter, but

eventually had become convinced that the time had come for more

comprehensive and drastic measures than the Committee could possibly

initiate, even were it willing to do so. The French Revolution

operated alike upon the minds of the Catholic and Protestant

democracies to demonstrate this fact, and prepare them for the

reception of it. The Protestant workers saw in it a revolution of a

great Catholic nation, and hence wavered in the belief so insidiously

instilled into them that Catholics were willing slaves of despotism;

and the Catholics saw in it a great manifestation of popular

power—a revolution of the people against the aristocracy, and,

therefore, ceased to believe that aristocratic leadership was

necessary for their salvation.


Seizing this propitious moment, Tone and his associates proposed

the formation of a society of men of every creed for the purpose of

securing an equal representation of all the people in Parliament.


This was, as Tone's later words and works amply prove, intended

solely as a means of unity. Knowing well the nature of the times and

political oligarchy in power, he realised that such a demand would be

resisted with all the power of government; but he wisely calculated

that such resistance to a popular demand would tend to make closer and

more enduring the union of the democracy, irrespective of religion.

And that Tone had no illusions about the value of the aristocracy is

proven in scores of passages in his autobiography. We quote


---

p.88




one, proving alike this point, and also the determining

effect of the French Revolution upon the popular mind in

Ireland:—


As the Revolution advanced, and as events expanded themselves,

the public spirit of Ireland rose with a rapid acceleration. *The fears and animosities of the aristocracy rose in the

same or a still higher proportion*. In a little time the French

Revolution became the test of every man's political creed, and the

nation was fairly divided into great parties—the aristocrats and

democrats borrowed from France, who have ever since been measuring

each other's strength and carrying on a kind of smothered war, which

the course of events, it is highly probable, may soon call into energy

and action’’

.
It will be thus seen that Tone built up his hopes upon a successful

prosecution of a Class War, although those who pretend to imitate him

to-day raise up their hands in holy horror at the mere mention of the

phrase.


The political wisdom of using a demand for equal representation as

a rallying cry for the democracy of Ireland is evidenced by a study of

the state of the suffrage at the time. In an Address from the

United Irishmen of Dublin to the English Society of the Friends of the

People, dated Dublin, October 26,

1792, we find the following description of the state of

representation:—




> 
> The state of Protestant representation is as
> 
> follows:—seventeen boroughs have no resident elector; sixteen
> 
> have but one; ninety out of thirteen electors each; ninety persons
> 
> return for 106 rural boroughs—that is 212 members out of
> 
> 300—the whole number; fifty-four members are returned by five
> 
> noblemen and four bishops; and borough influence has given landlords
> 
> such power in the counties as to make them boroughs also [*gap: ellipse*] yet the Majesty of the People is still quoted with
> 
> affected veneration; and if the crown be ostensibly placed in a part
> 
> of the Protestant portion it is placed there in mockery, for it is
> 
> encircled with thorns.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.89
> 
> 
> With regard to the Catholics, the following is the simple
> 
> and sorrowful fact:—Three millions, every one of whom has an
> 
> interest in the State, and collectively give it its value, are taxed
> 
> without being represented, and bound by laws to which they have not
> 
> given consent.
> 
> 
> 




The above Address, which is signed by Thomas Wright as secretary,

contains one sentence which certain Socialists and others in Ireland

and England might well study to advantage, and is also useful as

illustrating the thought of the time. It is as follows:—


As to any union between the two islands, believe us when we

assert that *our union rests upon our mutual

independence. We shall love each other if we be left to

ourselves*. It is the union of mind which ought to bind these

nations together’’

.
This, then, was the situation in which the Society of United

Irishmen was born. That society was initiated and conducted by men who

*realised* the importance of all

those principles of action upon which latter-day Irish revolutionists

have turned their backs. Consequently it was as effective in uniting

the democracy of Ireland as the ‘patriots’ of

our day have been in keeping it separated into warring religious

factions. It understood that the aristocracy was necessarily hostile

to the principle and practice of Freedom; it understood that the Irish

fight for liberty was but a part of the world-wide upward march of the

human race, and hence it allied itself with the revolutionists of

Great Britain as well as with those of France, and it said little

about ancient glories, and much about modern misery. The Report of the

Secret Committee of the House of Lords reprinted in full the Secret

Manifesto to the Friends of Freedom in Ireland, circulated throughout

the country by Wolfe Tone and his associates, in the month of June,

1791. As this contains the draft of the designs of the revolutionary

association known to history as the Society of United Irishmen, we

quote a few passages in support of our contentions, and to


---

p.90




show the democratic views of its founders. The manifesto is

supposed to have been written by Wolfe Tone in collaboration with

Samuel Neilson and others:


> 
> It is by wandering from the few plain and simple principles of
> 
> Political Faith that our politics, like our religion, has become
> 
> preaching, not practice; words not works. A society such as this will
> 
> disclaim those party appellations which seem to pale the human hearts
> 
> into petty compartments, and parcel out into sects and sections common
> 
> sense, common honesty, and common weal.
> 
> 
> It will not be an aristocracy, affecting the language of
> 
> patriotism, the rival of despotism for its own sake, nor its
> 
> irreconcilable enemy for the sake of us all. It will not, by views
> 
> merely retrospective, stop the march of mankind or force them back
> 
> into the lanes and alleys of their ancestors.
> 
> 
> This society is likely to be a means the most powerful for the
> 
> promotion of a great end. What end? *The Rights of
> 
> Man in Ireland*. The greatest happiness of the greatest number in
> 
> this island, the inherent and indefeasible claim of every free nation
> 
> to rest in this nation—the will and the power to be happy to
> 
> pursue the common weal as an individual pursues his private welfare,
> 
> and to stand in insulated independence, an imperatorial people.
> 
> 
> The greatest happiness of the Greatest Number.—On the rock of
> 
> this principle let this society rest; by this let it judge and
> 
> determine every political question, and whatever is necessary for this
> 
> end let it not be accounted hazardous, but rather our interest, our
> 
> duty, our glory and our common religion. The Rights of Man are the
> 
> Rights of God, and to vindicate the one is to maintain the other. We
> 
> must be free in order to serve Him whose service is perfect
> 
> freedom.
> 
> 
> The external business of this society will be—first,
> 
> publication, in order to propagate their second principles and
> 
> effectuate their ends. Second, communications with the different
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.91
> 
> 
> 
> 
> towns to be assiduously kept up and every exertion used to
> 
> accomplish a National Convention of the People of Ireland, who may
> 
> profit by past errors and by many unexpected circumstances which have
> 
> happened since this last meeting. Third, communications with similar
> 
> societies abroad—as the Jacobin Club of Paris, the Revolutionary
> 
> Society in England, the Committee for Reform in Scotland. *Let the nations go abreast*. Let the interchange of
> 
> sentiments among mankind concerning the Rights of Man be as immediate
> 
> as possible.
> 
> 
> When the aristocracy come forward, the people fall backward; when
> 
> the people come forward, the aristocracy, fearful of being left
> 
> behind, insinuate themselves into our ranks and rise into timid
> 
> leaders or treacherous auxiliaries. They mean to make us their
> 
> instruments; let us rather make them our instruments. One of the two
> 
> must happen. The people must serve the party, or the party must emerge
> 
> in the mightiness of the people, and Hercules will then lean upon his
> 
> club. On the 14th of July, the day
> 
> which shall ever commemorate the French Revolution, let this society
> 
> pour out their first libation to European liberty, eventually the
> 
> liberty of the world, and, their eyes raised to Heaven in His presence
> 
> who breathed into them an ever-living soul, let them swear to maintain
> 
> the rights and prerogatives of their nature as men, and the right and
> 
> prerogative of Ireland as an independent people.
> 
> 
> Dieu et mon Droit (God and my
> 
> right) is the motto of kings. Dieu et
> 
> la liberté (God and liberty), exclaimed Voltaire when he
> 
> beheld Franklin, his fellow citizen of the world. Dieu et nos Droits, (God and our rights), let
> 
> every Irishman cry aloud to each other, the cry of mercy, of justice,
> 
> and of victory.
> 
> 
> 




It would be hard to find in modern Socialist literature anything

more broadly International in its scope and aims, more definitely of a

class character in its methods, or more avowedly democratic in its

nature than this manifesto, yet, although it reveals


---

p.92




the inspiration and methods of a revolutionist acknowledged

to be the most successful organiser of revolt in Ireland since the

days of Rory O'More, all his present-day professed followers

constantly trample upon and repudiate every one of these principles,

and reject them as a possible guide to their political activity. The

Irish Socialist alone is in line with the thought of this

revolutionary apostle of the United Irishmen.


The above quoted manifesto was circulated in June, 1791, and in July of the same year the townspeople

and volunteer societies of Belfast met to celebrate the anniversary of

the Fall of the Bastille, a celebration recommended by the framer of

the *manifesto* as a means of

educating and uniting the real people of Ireland—the producers.

From the Dublin Chronicle of the

time we quote the following passages from the ‘Declaration of the Volunteers and Inhabitants at

Large of the town and neighbourhood of Belfast on the subject of the

French Revolution.’ As Belfast was then the hot-bed of

revolutionary ideas in Ireland, and became the seat of the first

society of United Irishmen, and as all other branches of the society

were founded upon this original, it will repay us to study the

sentiments here expressed.


> 
> Neither on marble, nor brass, can the rights and duties of men be
> 
> so durably registered as on their memories and on their hearts. We
> 
> therefore meet this day to commemorate the French Revolution, that the
> 
> remembrance of this great event mat sink deeply into our hearts,
> 
> warmed not merely with the fellow-feeling of townsmen, but with a
> 
> sympathy which binds us to the human race in a brotherhood of
> 
> interest, of duty and affection.
> 
> 
> Here then we take our stand, and if we be asked what the French
> 
> Revolution is to us, we answer, much. Much as men.
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.93
> 
> 
> 
> 
> It is good for human nature that the grass grows where the
> 
> Bastille stood. We do rejoice at an event that means the breaking up
> 
> of civil and religious bondage, when we behold this misshapen pile of
> 
> abuses, cemented merely by customs, and raised upon the ignorance of a
> 
> prostrate people, tottering to its base to the very level of equal
> 
> liberty and commonwealth. We do really rejoice in this resurrection of
> 
> human nature, and we congratulate our brother-man coming forth from
> 
> the vaults of ingenious torture and from the cave of death. We do
> 
> congratulate the Christian World that there is in it one great nation
> 
> which has renounced all ideas of conquest, and has published the first
> 
> glorious manifesto of humanity, of union, and of peace. In return we
> 
> pray to God that peace may rest in their land, and that it may never
> 
> be in power of royalty, nobility, or a priesthood to disturb the
> 
> harmony of a good people, consulting about those laws which must
> 
> ensure their own happiness and that of unborn millions.
> 
> 
> Go on, then—great and gallant people; to practise the sublime
> 
> philosophy of your legislation, to force applause from nations least
> 
> disposed to do you justice, and by conquest but by the omnipotence of
> 
> reason, to convert and liberate the world—a world whose eyes are
> 
> fixed on you, whose heart is with you, who talks of you with all her
> 
> tongues; you are in very truth the hope of this world, of all except a
> 
> few men in a few cabinets who thought the human race belonged to them,
> 
> not them to the human race; but now are taught by awful example, and
> 
> tremble, and not dare confide in armies arrayed against you and your
> 
> cause.
> 
> 
> 




Thus spoke Belfast. It will be seen that the ideas of the

publishers of the secret manifesto were striking a responsive chord in

the hearts of the people. A series of meetings of the Dublin Volunteer

Corps were held in October of the same year, ostensibly to denounce a

government proclamation offering a reward for the apprehension of

Catholics under arms,


---

p.94




but in reality to discuss the political situation. The

nature of the conclusions arrived at may be judged by a final

paragraph in the resolution, passed 23rd

October, 1791, and signed amongst others by James Napper Tandy,

on behalf of the Liberty Corps of Artillery. It reads:


While we admire the philanthropy of that great and enlightened

nation, who have set an example to mankind, both of political and

religious wisdom, we cannot but lament that distinctions, injurious to

both, have too long disgraced the name of Irishmen; and we most

fervently wish that our animosities were entombed with the bones of

our ancestors; and that we and our Roman Catholic brethren would unite

like citizens, *and claim the Rights of

Man*’’

.
This was in October. In the same month Wolfe Tone went to Belfast

on the invitation of one of the advanced Volunteer Clubs, and formed

the first club of United Irishmen. Returning to Dublin he organised

another. From the minutes of the Inauguration Meeting of this First

Dublin Society of United Irishmen, held at the Eagle Inn, Eustace

Street, 9th November, 1791, we make

the following extracts, which speak for the principles of the original

members of those two parent clubs of a society destined in a short

time to cover all Ireland, and to set in motion the fleets of two

foreign auxiliaries.




> 
> For the attainment then of this great and important
> 
> object—the removal of absurd and ruinous distinctions—and
> 
> for promoting a complete coalition of the people, a club has been
> 
> formed composed of all religious persuasions who have adopted for
> 
> their name The Society of United Irishmen of Dublin, and have taken as
> 
> their declaration that of a similar society in Belfast, which is as
> 
> follows:—
> 
> 
> In the present great era of reform, when unjust governments are
> 
> falling in every quarter of Europe, when religious persecution is
> 
> compelled to abjure her tyranny over conscience; *when the Rights of Man are ascertained in Theory, and
> 
> that Theory substantiated by Practice*; when antiquity can no
> 
> longer defend absurd and oppressive forms against the common sense and
> 
> common interests of mankind; when all government is acknowledged to
> 
> originate from the people, and to be so far only obligatory as it
> 
> protects their rights and promotes their welfare; we think it our duty
> 
> as Irishmen to come forward and state what we feel to be our heavy
> 
> grievance, and what we know to be its effectual remedy.
> 
> 
> We have no National Government; we are ruled by Englishmen and the
> 
> servants of Englishmen, whose object is the interest of another
> 
> country; whose instrument is corruption; whose strength is the
> 
> weakness of Ireland; and these men have the whole of the power and
> 
> patronage of the country as means to seduce and subdue the honesty and
> 
> the spirit of her representatives in the legislature. Such an
> 
> extrinsic power, acting with uniform force in a direction too
> 
> frequently opposite to the true line of our obvious interests, can be
> 
> resisted with effect solely by unanimity, decision, and spirit in the
> 
> people, qualities which may be exerted most legally, constitutionally,
> 
> and efficaciously by that great measure essential to the prosperity
> 
> and freedom of Ireland—an equal Representation of all the People
> 
> in Parliament [*gap: ellipse*].
> 
> 
> We have gone to what we conceive to be the root of the evil; we
> 
> have stated what we conceive to be the remedy—with a Parliament
> 
> thus reformed everything is easy; without it nothing can be done.
> 
> 
> 




Here we have a plan of campaign indicated on the lines of those

afterwards followed so successfully by the Socialists of

Europe—a revolutionary party openly declaring their

revolutionary sympathies, but limiting their first demand to a popular

measure such as would enfranchise the masses, upon whose support their

ultimate success must rest. No one can read the manifesto we have just

quoted without realising that these men aimed at nothing less than a

social and political


---

p.96




revolution such as had been accomplished in France, or even

greater, because the French Revolution did not enfranchise all the

people, but made a distinction between active and passive citizens,

taxpayers and non-taxpayers. Nor yet can an impartial student fail to

realise that it was just this daring aim that was the secret of their

success as organisers, as it is the secret of the political

effectiveness of the Socialists of our day. Nothing less would have

succeeded in causing Protestant and Catholic masses to shake hands

over the bloody chasm of religious hatreds, nothing less will

accomplish the same result in our day among the Irish workers. It must

be related to the credit of the leaders of the United Irishmen that

they remained true to their principles, even when moderation might

have secured a mitigation of their lot. When examined before the

Secret Committee of the House of Lords at the prison of Fort George,

Scotland, Thomas Addis Emmet did not hesitate to tell his inquisitors

that if successful they would have inaugurated a very different social

system to that which then prevailed.


Few movements in history have been more consistently

misrepresented, by open enemies and professed admirers, than that of

the United Irishmen. The suggestio

falsi, and the suppressio

veri have been remorselessly used. The middle class ‘patriotic’ historians, orators, and journalists

of Ireland have ever vied with one another in enthusiastic

descriptions of their military exploits on land and sea, their hairbreadth escapes and heroic martyrdom, but have resolutely suppressed

or distorted their writings, songs and manifestoes. We have striven to

reverse the process, to give publicity to their literature, believing

that this literature reveals the men better than any partisan

biographer can do. Dr. Madden, a most painstaking and conscientious

biographer, declares in his volume of The

Literary Remains of the United Irishmen, that he has

suppressed many of their productions because of their ‘trashy’ republican and irreligious

tendencies.





---

p.97


This is to be regretted, as it places upon other

biographers and historians the trouble (a thousand times more

difficult now) of searching for anew, and re-collecting the literary

material from which to build a proper appreciation of the work of

those pioneers of democracy in Ireland. And as Irish men and women

progress to a truer appreciation of correct social and political

principles, perhaps it will be found possible to say, without being in

the least degree blasphemous or irreverent, that the stones rejected

by the builders of the past have become the corner-stones of the

edifice.




---

p.98


Chapter IX


The Emmet Conspiracy
---------------------------------


*The Rich always betray the Poor.’’—*Henry Joy M'Cracken's Letter

to his sister*, 1798.*
The Emmet Conspiracy—the aftermath of the United Irish

movement of 1798, was even more distinctly democratic, international

and popular in its sympathies and affiliations. The treacherous

betrayal of the United Irish chiefs into the hands of the Government,

had removed from the scene of action practically all the middle-class

supporters of the revolutionary movement; and left the rank and file

to their own resources and to consult their own inclinations. It was,

accordingly, with these humble workers in town and country Emmet had

to deal, when he essayed to reorganise the scattered forces of freedom

for a fresh grapple with the despotic power of the class government

then ruling Ireland and England. All students who have investigated

the matter are as one in conceding that Emmet's conspiracy was more of

a working-class character than its predecessors. Indeed it is a

remarkable fact that this conspiracy, widespread throughout Ireland,

England, and France, should have progressed so rapidly, and with such

elaborate preparations for armed revolt, amongst the poorer section of

the populace, right up to within a short time of the date for the

projected rising, without the alert English Government or its Irish

Executive being able to inform themselves of the matter.


Probably the proletarian character of the movement—the fact

that it was recruited principally amongst the working class of Dublin

and other large centres, as well as amongst the labouring element of

the country districts, was the real reason


---

p.99




why it was not so prolific of traitors as its forerunner.

After the conspiracy had fallen through, the Government, of course,

pretended that it had known of it all along—indeed the British

Government in Ireland always pretends to be omniscient—but

nothing developed during the trial of Emmet to justify such a claim.

Nor has anything developed since, although searchers of the Government

documents of the time, the Castlereagh papers, the records of the

secret service and other sources of information, have been able to

reveal in their true colours of infamy many who had posed in the

limelight for more than a generation as whole-souled patriots and

reformers. Thus Leonard McNally, barrister-at-law, and legal defender

of the United Irishmen, who acted for all the chiefs of that body at

their trials, was one of the Catholic Committee and elected as

Catholic delegate to England in 1811, looked up to and revered as a

fearless advocate of Catholic rights, and champion of persecuted

Nationalists, was discovered to have been all the time in the pay of

the Government, acting the loathsome part of an informer, and

systematically betraying to the Government the inmost secrets of the

men whose cause he was pretending to champion in the court-room. But

this secret was kept for half a century. Francis Magan, another

worthy, received a secret pension of £200 per year from the

Government for the betrayal of the hiding-place of Lord Edward

Fitzgerald, and lived and died revered as an honest, unoffending

citizen. A body of the Royal Meath Militia stationed at Mallow, County

Cork, had conspired to seize the artillery stationed there, and with

that valuable arm, join the insurgents in a body. One of their number

mentioned the plot in his confessions to the Rev. Thomas Barry, parish

priest of Mallow, and was by him ordered to reveal it to the military

authorities. The leader of the plotters, Sergeant Beatty, seeing by

the precautions suddenly taken that the plot was discovered, fought

his way out of the barracks with nineteen men, but was


---

p.100




subsequently captured and hanged in Dublin. Father Barry

(how ironical the title sounds) received £100 per year pension

from the Government, and drew this blood-money in secret for a

lifetime before his crime was discovered. It is recorded that the

great Daniel O'Connell at one time turned pale when shown a receipt

for this blood-money signed by Father Barry, and yet it is known now

that O'Connell himself, as a member of the lawyers' Yeomanry Corps of

Dublin, was turned out on duty to serve against the rebels on the

night of Emmet's insurrection, and in Daunt's Recollections he relates that

O'Connell pointed out to him a house in James's Street which he

(O'Connell) had searched for ‘Croppies’ (patriots).


The present writer has seen in Derrynane, O'Connell's ancestral

home in County Kerry, a brass-mounted blunderbuss, which we were

assured by a member of the family was procured at a house in James's

Street, Dublin, by O'Connell from the owner, a follower of Emmet, a

remark that recalled to our mind that ‘search for Croppies’ of

which Daunt speaks, and gave rise to a conjecture that possibly the

blunderbuss in question owed its presence in Derrynane to that

memorable raid.


But although latter-day investigators have brought to light many

such treasons against liberty as those recorded, and have revealed

depths of corruption in quarters long unsuspected, nothing has yet

been demonstrated to dim the glory or sully the name of the men and

women of the working class, who carried the dangerous secret of

Emmet's conspiracy and guarded it so well and faithfully to the end.

It must be remembered in this connection, that at that period the open

organisation of labourers for any purpose was against the law, that

consequently the trade unions which then flourished amongst the

working class were all illegal organisations, whose members were in

constant danger of arrest and transportation for the crime of

organising, and that, therefore, a proposal to subvert the oppressive

governing class and establish a republic


---

p.101




founded upon the votes of all citizens, as Emmet planned,

was one likely to appeal alike to the material requirements and

imagination of the Irish toilers. And, as they were already trained to

secrecy in organisation, they naturally made splendid material for the

revolutionary movement. It is significant that the only serious fight

on the night of the ill-fated insurrection took place in the Coombe

district of the Liberties of Dublin, a quarter inhabited exclusively

by weavers, tanners, and shoemakers, the best organised trades in the

city, and that a force of Wicklow men brought into Dublin by Michael

Dwyer, the insurgent chieftain, were sheltered on the quays amongst

the dock-labourers; and eventually managed to return home without any

traitor betraying their whereabouts to the numerous Government spies

over-running the city.


The ripeness of the labouring element in the country at large for

any movement that held out hopes of social emancipation may be gauged

by the fact that a partial rebellion had already taken place in 1802

in Limerick, Waterford, and Tipperary, where, according to Haverty's

 History of Ireland, ‘the

alleged grounds for rebellion were the dearness of the potatoes’,

and ‘the right of the old tenants to retain possession of their

farms’.


Such were the domestic materials upon which the conspiracy of Emmet

rested—working-class elements fired with the hope of political

and social emancipation. Abroad he sought alliance with the French

Republic—the incarnation of the political, social, and religious

unrest and revolution of the age, and in Great Britain he formed

alliance with the ‘Sassenach’ reformers who

were conspiring to overthrow the English monarchy. On November 13, 1802, one Colonel Despard, with

nineteen others, was arrested in London charged with the crime of high

treason; they were tried on the charge of conspiracy to murder the

King; although no evidence in support of such a charge was

forthcoming, Despard and seven others


---

p.102




were hanged. According to the Castlereagh papers Emmet and

Despard were preparing for a simultaneous uprising, a certain William

Dowdall, of Dublin, described as one of the most determined of the

society of United Irishmen, being the confidential agent who acted for

both. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick in his books Secret Service Under Pitt, and

 The Sham Squire, brings out

many of these facts, as a result of an extensive and scholarly

investigation of Government records and the papers of private

families, yet, although these books were published half a century ago,

every recurring Emmet anniversary continues to bring us its crop of

orators who know all about Emmet's martyrdom, and nothing about his

principles. Even some of the more sympathetic of his panegyrists do

not seem to realise that they dim his glory when they represent him as

the victim of a protest against an injustice local to Ireland, instead

of as an Irish apostle of a world-wide movement for liberty, equality

and fraternity. Yet this latter was indeed the character and position

of Emmet, and as such the democracy of the future will revere him. He

fully shared in the international sympathies of that Dublin Society of

United Irishmen who had elected a Scottish reformer to be a United

Irishman upon hearing that the Government had sentenced him to

transportation for attending a reform convention in Edinburgh. He

believed in the brotherhood of the oppressed, and in the community of

free nations, and died for his ideal.


Emmet is the most idolised, the most universally praised of all

Irish martyrs; it is, therefore, worthy of note that in the

proclamation he drew up to be issued in the name of the ‘Provisional Government of Ireland’ the first

article decrees the wholesale confiscation of church property and the

nationalising of the same, and the second and third decrees forbid and

declare void the transfer of all landed property, bonds, debentures,

and public securities, until the national government is established

and the national will upon them is declared.





---

p.103


Two things are thus established—viz., that Emmet

believed the ‘national will’ was superior to property rights, and

could abolish them at will; and also that he realised that the

producing classes could not be expected to rally to the revolution

unless given to understand that it meant their freedom from social as

well as from political bondage.




---

p.104


Chapter X


The First Irish Socialist: A Forerunner Of Marx
-----------------------------------------------------------


*It is a system which in its least repulsive aspects

compels thousands and tens of thousands to fret and toil, to live and

die in hunger and rags and wretchedness, in order that a few idle

drones may revel in ease and luxury.’’— Irish People. ,July 9,

1864.*
For Ireland, as for every part of Europe, the first quarter of the

nineteenth century was a period of political darkness, or unbridled

despotism and reaction. The fear engendered in the heart of the ruling

classes by the French Revolution had given birth to an almost insane

hatred of reform, coupled with a wolfish ferocity in hunting down even

the mildest reformers. The triumph of the allied sovereigns over

Napoleon was followed by a perfect saturnalia of despotism all over

Europe, and every form of popular organisation was ruthlessly

suppressed or driven under the surface. But driving organisations

under the surface does not remove the causes of discontent, and

consequently we find that, as rapidly as reaction triumphed above

ground, its antagonists spread their secret conspiracies underneath.

The popular discontent was further increased by the fact that the

return home of the soldiers disbanded from the Napoleonic wars had a

serious economic effect. It deprived the agriculturists of a market

for their produce, and produced a great agricultural and industrial

crisis. It threw out of employment all the ships employed in

provisioning the troops, all the trades required to build, equip and

repair them, all the industries engaged in making war material; and in

addition to suspending the work and flooding the labour market with

the men and


---

p.105




women thus disemployed, it cast adrift scores of thousands

of able-bodied soldiers and sailors, to compete with the civilian

workers who had fed, clothed and maintained them during the war. In

Ireland especially the results were disastrous, owing to the

inordinately large proportion of Irish amongst the disbanded soldiers

and sailors. Those returning home found the labour market glutted with

unemployed in the cities, and in the rural districts the landlords

engaged in a fierce war of extermination with their tenantry, who,

having lost their war market and war prices, were unable to meet the

increasing exactions of the owners of the soil. It was at this period

the great Ribbon conspiracy took hold upon the Irish labourer in the

rural districts, and although the full truth relative to that movement

has never yet been unearthed, sufficient is known to indicate that it

was in effect a secret agricultural trades union of labourers and

cottier farmers—a trades union which undertook, in its own wild

way, to execute justice upon the evictor, and vengeance upon the

traitor to his fellows. Also at this time Irish trade unionism,

although secret and illegal, attained to its maximum of strength and

compact organisation. In 1824 the chief constable of Dublin,

testifying before a committee of the House of Commons, declared that

the trades of Dublin were perfectly organised, and many of the

employers were already beginning to complain of the ‘tyranny of the

Irish trades unions’. Under such circumstances it is not to be

wondered at, that the attention which in the eighteenth century had

been given to political reforms and the philosophy thereof, gave way

in the nineteenth to solicitude for social amelioration.


In England, France, and Germany a crop of social philosophers

sprang up, each with his scheme of a perfect social order, each with a

plan by which the regeneration of society could be accomplished, and

poverty and all its attendant evils abolished. For the most part these

theorists had no complaint to make against the beneficiaries of the

social system of the day; their 


---

p.106


complaint was against the

results of the social system. Indeed they, in most cases, believed

that the governing and possessing classes would themselves voluntarily

renounce their privileges and property and initiate the new order once

they were convinced of its advantages. With this belief it was natural

that the chief direction taken by their criticism of society should be

towards an analysis of the effects of competition upon buyer and

seller, and that the relation of the labourer as producer to the

proprietor as appropriator of the thing produced should occupy no part

of their examination. One result of this one sided view of social

relations necessarily was a complete ignoring of historical

development as a factor in hastening the attainment of their ideal;

since the new order was to be introduced by the governing class, it

followed that the stronger that class became the easier would be the

transition, and consequently, everything which would tend to weaken

the social bond by accentuating class distinction, or impairing the

feelings of reverence held by the labourer for his masters, would be a

hindrance to progress.


Those philosophers formed socialist sects, and it is known that

their followers, when they lost the inspiring genius of their leaders,

degenerated into reactionaries of the most pronounced type, opposed to

every forward move of labour.


The Irish are not philosophers as a rule, they proceed too rapidly

from thought to action.


Hence it is not to be wondered at, that the same period which

produced the Utopian Socialists before alluded to in France, England,

and Germany produced in Ireland an economist more thoroughly Socialist

in the modern sense than any of his contemporaries—William

Thompson, of Clonkeen, Roscarbery, County Cork—a Socialist who

did not hesitate to direct attention to the political and social

subjection of labour as the worst evil of society; nor to depict, with

a merciless fidelity to truth, the disastrous consequences to

political freedom of the presence


---

p.107




in society of a wealthy class. Thompson was a believer in

the possibility of realising Socialism by forming co-operative

colonies on the lines of those advocated by Robert Owen, and to that

extent may be classed as a Utopian. On the other hand he believed that

such colonies must be built by the labourers themselves, and not by

the governing class. He taught that the wealth of the ruling class was

derived from the plunder of labour, and he advocated, as a necessary

preliminary to Socialism, the conquest of political representation on

the basis of the adult suffrage of both sexes. He did not believe in

the State as a basis of Socialist society, but he insisted upon the

necessity of using political weapons to destroy all class privileges

founded in law, and to clear the ground of all obstacles which the

governing class might desire to put in the way of the growth of

Socialist communities.


Lest it may be thought that we are exaggerating the merits of

Thompson's work as an original thinker, a pioneer of Socialist

thought, superior to any of the Utopian Socialists of the Continent,

and long ante-dating Karl Marx in his insistence upon the subjection

of labour as the cause of all social misery, modern crime and

political dependence, as well as in his searching analysis of the true

definition of capital, we will quote a passage from his most important

work, published in 1824: An Inquiry into

the principles of the distribution of Wealth most conducive to Human

Happiness as applied to the newly-proposed System of the Voluntary

Equality of Wealth. Third edition.


What, then, is the most accurate idea of capital? It is that

portion of the product of labour which, whether of a permanent nature

or not, is capable of being made the instrument of profit. Such seem

to be the real circumstances which mark out one portion of the

products of labour as capital. On such distinctions, however, have

been founded the insecurity and oppression of the productive

labourer—the real parent, under the guidance of knowledge, of

all wealth—and the enormous usurpation,


---

p.108




over the productive forces and their fellow-creatures, of

those who, under the name of capitalists, or landlords, acquired the

possession of those accumulated products—the yearly or permanent

supply of the community. Hence the opposing claims of the capitalist

and the labourer. The capitalist, getting into his hands, under the

reign of insecurity and force, the consumption of many labourers for

the coming year, the tools or machinery necessary to make their labour

productive, and the dwellings in which they must live, turned them to

the best account, and bought labour and its future products with them

as cheaply as possible. The greater the profit of capital, or the more

the capitalist made the labourer pay for the advance of his food, the

use of the implements or machinery and the occupation of the dwelling,

the less of course remained to the labourer for the acquisition of any

object of desire’’

.
Or again, see how, whilst advocating political reform as a means to

an end, he depicts its inefficiency when considered as an end in

itself:—


As long as the accumulated capital of society remains in one

set of hands, and the productive power of creating wealth remains in

another, the accumulated capital will, while the nature of man

continues as at present, be made use of to counter-act the natural

laws of distribution, and to deprive the producers of the use of what

their labour has produced. Were it possible to conceive that, under

simple representative institutions, any such of the expedients of

insecurity should be permitted to remain in existence as would uphold

the division of capital and labour, such representative institutions

(though all the plunder of political power should cease) would be of

little further benefit to the real happiness of mankind, than as

affording an easy means for the development of knowledge, and the

ultimate abolition of all such expedients. As long as a class of mere

capitalists exists, society must remain in a diseased state. Whatever

plunder is saved from the hand of political power


---

p.109




will be levied in another way, under the name of profit,

by capitalists who, while capitalists, must be always lawmakers’’

.
Thompson advocated free education for all, and went into great

detail to prove its feasibility, giving statistics to show that the

total cost of such education could easily be borne by Ireland, without

unduly increasing the burden of the producers. In this he was three

generations ahead of his time—the reform he then advocated being

only partially realised in our day. Living in a country in which a

small minority imposed a detested religion by force upon a conquered

people, with the result that a ferocious fanaticism disgraced both

sides, he yet had courage and foresight enough to plead for secular

education, and to the cry of the bigots who then as now declared that

religion would die unless supported by the State, he

answered:—


Not only has experience proved that religion can exist without

interfering with the natural laws of distribution by violation of

security, but it has increased and flourished during centuries in

Ireland, and in Greece, under and in spite of the forced abstraction

of its own resources from its own communicants, to enrich a rival and

hated priesthood, or to feed the force that enchained it’’

.
How different was the spirit of the Socialism preached by Thompson

from the visionary sentimentalism of the Utopians of Continental

Europe, or of Owen in his earlier days in England, with their constant

appeals to the ‘humanity’ of the possessing

classes, is further illustrated by the following passage which,

although lengthy, we make no apology for reproducing. Because of its

biting analysis of the attitude of the rich in the various stages of

political society, and the lust for power which accompanies extreme

wealth, the passage might have never been written by a Socialist of

the twentieth century:—


> 
> The unoccupied rich are without any active pursuit; an object in
> 
> life is wanting to them. The means of gratifying the senses, the
> 
> imagination even, of sating all wants and caprices
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.110
> 
> 
> 
> 
> they possess. The pleasures of power are still to be
> 
> attained. It is one of the strongest and most unavoidable propensities
> 
> of those who have been brought up in indulgence, to abhor restraint,
> 
> to be uneasy under opposition, and therefore to desire power to remove
> 
> these evils of restraint and opposition. How shall they acquire the
> 
> power? First by the direct influence of their wealth, and the hopes
> 
> and fears it engenders; then when these means are exhausted, or to
> 
> make these means more effectual, they endeavour everywhere to seize
> 
> on, to monopolise the powers of Government.
> 
> 
> Where despotism does exist, they endeavour to get entirely into
> 
> their own hands, or in conjunction with the head of the State, or
> 
> other bodies, they seize as large a portion as they can of the
> 
> functions of legislation. Where despotism does not exist, or is
> 
> modified, they share amongst themselves all the subordinate
> 
> departments of Government; they monopolise, either directly or
> 
> indirectly, the command of the armed force, the offices of judges,
> 
> priests and all those executive departments which give the most power,
> 
> require the least trouble, and render the largest pecuniary returns.
> 
> Where despotism exists, the class of the excessively rich make the
> 
> best terms they can with the despot, to share his power whether as
> 
> partners, equals or mere slaves.
> 
> 
> If his situation is such as to give them a confidence in their
> 
> strength, they make terms with the despot, and insist on what they
> 
> call their rights; if they are weak they gladly crawl to the despot,
> 
> and appear to glory in their slavishness to him for the sake of the
> 
> delegated power of making slaves to themselves of the rest of the
> 
> community. Such do the historians of all nations prove the tendencies
> 
> of excessive wealth to be.
> 
> 
> 




In the English-speaking world the work of this Irish thinker is

practically unknown, but on the Continent of Europe his position has

long been established. Besides the work already quoted he wrote an Appeal of one-half of the Human Race—


---

p.111




Women—against the Pretensions of the other

half—Men— to retain them in Political and thence in Civil

and Domestic Slavery published in London in 1825. Labour Rewarded, the Claims of Labour and

Capital Conciliated; or, How to Secure to Labour the Whole Product of

its Exertions, published in 1827, and Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities, published in London in 1830, are two other known works. He also left behind the manuscript of other books on the same subject, but they have never

been published, and their whereabouts is now unknown. It is told of

him that he was for twenty years a vegetarian and total abstainer, and

in his will left the bulk of his fortune to endow the first co-operative community to be established in Ireland, and his body for the

purpose of dissection in the interests of science. His relations

successfully contested the will on the ground that ‘immoral objects

were included in its benefit’.


His position in the development of Socialism as a science lies, in

our opinion, midway between the Utopianism of the early idealists and

the historical materialism of Marx. He anticipated the latter in most

of his analyses of the economic system, and foresaw the part that a

democratisation of politics must play in clearing the ground of the

legal privileges of the professional classes. In a preface to the

English translation of the work of one of his German biographers,

Anton Menger, the writer, H. S. Foxwell, M. A., says of his

contribution to economic science:


‘Thompson's fame will rest, not upon his advocacy of Owenite co-operation, devoted and public-spirited as that was, but upon the fact

that *he was the first writer to elevate the question

of the just distribution of wealth* to the supreme position it has

since held in English political economy. Up to his time political

economy had been rather commercial than industrial, indeed he finds it

necessary to explain the very meaning of the term


---

p.112




‘industrial,’ which he says, was

from the French, no doubt adopted from Saint Simon’.


If we were to attempt to estimate the relative achievements of

Thompson and Marx we should not hope to do justice to either by

putting them in contrast, or by eulogising Thompson in order to

belittle Marx, as some Continental critics of the latter seek to do.

Rather we should say that the relative position of this Irish genius

and of Marx are best comparable to the historical relations of the

pre-Darwinian evolutionists to Darwin; as Darwin systematised all the

theories of his predecessors and gave a lifetime to the accumulation

of the facts required to establish his and their position, so Marx

found the true line of economic thought already indicated, and brought

his genius and encyclopaedic knowledge and research to place it upon

an unshakable foundation. Thompson brushed aside the economic fiction

maintained by the orthodox economists and accepted by the Utopian,

that profit was made in exchange, and declared that it was due to the

subjection of labour and the resultant appropriation, by the

capitalists and landlords, of the fruits of the labour of others. He

does not hesitate to include himself as a beneficiary of monopoly. He

declared, in 1827, that for about twelve years he had been ‘living

on what is called rent, the produce of the labour of others’. All

the theory of the class war is but a deduction from this principle.

But, although Thompson recognised this class war as a fact, he did not

recognise it as a factor, as *the* factor in the

evolution of society towards freedom. This was reserved for Marx, and

in our opinion, is his chief and crowning glory. While Owen and the

Continental Socialists were beseeching the favour of kings,

Parliaments and Congresses, this Irishman was arraigning the rich,

pointing out that lust of power for ever followed riches, that

‘capitalists, while capitalists, would always be law-makers’, but

that ‘as long as a class of mere capitalists exists, society must

remain in a diseased state’. The fact that the daring Celt 


---

p.113


who preached this doctrine, arraigning alike the social and

political rulers of society and society itself, also vehemently

demanded the extension of the suffrage to the whole adult population,

is surely explanation enough why his writings found no favour with the

respectable classes of society, with those same classes who so

frequently lionised the leaders of the Socialist sects of his day.


In our day another great Irishman, Standish O'Grady, perhaps the

greatest litterateur in Ireland, has been preaching in the pages of

 The Peasant Dublin, 1908-9,

against capitalist society, and urged the formation of co-operative

communities in Ireland as an escape therefrom. It is curiously

significant how little Irishmen know of the intellectual achievements

of their race, that O'Grady apparently is entirely unconscious of the

work of his great forerunner in that field of endeavour. It is also

curiously significant of the conquest of the Irish mind by English

traditions, that Irish Nationalists should often be found fighting

fiercely against Socialism as ‘a German idea,’

although every social conception which we find in the flower in Marx,

we can also find in the bud in Thompson, twenty-three years before the

publication of the Communist Manifesto, forty-three years before the issue of Das Kapital.


We will conclude this chapter by another citation from this Irish

pioneer of revolutionary Socialism; we say of revolutionary Socialism

advisedly, for all the deductions from his teachings lead irresistibly

to the revolutionary action of the working class. As, according to the

Socialist philosophy, the political demands of the working-class

movement must at all times depend upon the degree of development of

the age and country in which it finds itself, it is apparent that

Thompson's theories of action were the highest possible expression of

the revolutionary thought of his age.


> 
> The productive labourers, stript of all capital, of tools, 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.114
> 
> 
> houses, and materials to make their labour productive, toil
> 
> from want, from the necessity of existence, their remuneration being
> 
> kept at the lowest compatible figure with the existence of industrious
> 
> habits.
> 
> 
> How shall the wretchedly poor be virtuous? Who cares about them?
> 
> What character have they to lose? What hold has public opinion on
> 
> their action? What care they for the delicate pleasures of reputation
> 
> who are tormented by the gnawings of absolute want? How should they
> 
> respect the property or rights of others who have none of their own to
> 
> beget a sympathy for those who suffer from their privation? How can
> 
> they feel for others' woes, for others' passing light complaints, who
> 
> are tormented by their own substantial miseries? The mere mention of
> 
> the trivial inconveniences of others insults and excites the
> 
> indignation, instead of calling forth their complacent sympathies. Cut
> 
> off from the decencies, the comforts, the necessaries of life, want
> 
> begets ferocity. If they turn they find many in the same situation
> 
> with themselves, partaking of their feelings of isolation from kindly
> 
> sympathies with the happy. They become a public to each other, a
> 
> public of suffering, of discontent and ignorance; they form a public
> 
> opinion of their own in contempt of the public opinion of the rich,
> 
> whom, and their laws, they look upon as the result of force alone.
> 
> From whom are the wretched to learn the principle while they never see
> 
> the practice of morality? Of respect for the security of others? From
> 
> their superiors? From the laws? The conduct of their superiors, the
> 
> operation of those laws have been one practical lesson to them of
> 
> force, of restraint, of taking away without their consent, without any
> 
> equivalent, the fruits of their labour. Of what avail are morals or
> 
> principles or commands, when opposed, when belied by example? These
> 
> can never supply motives of virtuous conduct. *Motives arise from things, from surrounding
> 
> circumstances, not from the idleness of words and empty declamations.
> 
> Words are only useful to 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.115
> 
> 
>  convey and impress a knowledge
> 
> of these things and circumstances. If these things do not exist, words
> 
> are mere mockery*.
> 
> 
> 




With this bit of economic determinist philosophy—teaching

that morality is a thing of social growth, the outcome of things and

circumstances—we leave this earliest Irish apostle of the social

revolution. Fervent Celtic enthusiasts are fond of claiming, and the

researches of our days seem to bear out the claim, that Irish

missionaries were the first to rekindle the lamp of learning in

Europe, and dispel the intellectual darkness following the downfall of

the Roman Empire; may we not also take pride in the fact that an

Irishman was the first to pierce the worse than Egyptian darkness of

capitalist barbarism, and to point out to the toilers the conditions

of their enslavement, and the essential pre-requisites of their

emancipation?




---

p.116


Chapter XI


An Irish Utopia
----------------------------


*Were the hand of Locke to hold from heaven a scheme

of government most perfectly adapted to the nature and capabilities of

the Irish nation, it would drop to the ground a mere sounding scroll

were there no other means of giving it effect than its intrinsic

excellence. All true Irishmen agree in what ought to be done, but how

to get it done is the question.’’— Secret Manifesto. (Ireland),

1793.*
In our last chapter we pointed out how the close of the Napoleonic

wars precipitated a commercial crisis in Great Britain and Ireland,

and how in the latter country it also served to intensify the

bitterness of the relations existing between landlord and tenant.

During the continuance of the wars against Napoleon, agricultural

prices had steadily risen owing to the demand by the British

Government for provisions to supply its huge army and navy. With the

rise in prices rents had also risen, but when the close of the war cut

off the demand, and prices consequently fell, rents did not fall along

with them. A falling market and a stationary or rising rent-roll could

have but one result in Ireland—viz., agrarian war.


The landlords insisted upon their ‘pound of

flesh,’ and the peasantry organised in secret to terrorise their

oppressors and protect themselves. In the year 1829 a fresh cause of

popular misery came as a result of the Act granting Catholic

Emancipation. Until that year no Catholic had the right to sit in the

English House of Commons, to sit on the Bench as a Judge, or to aspire

to any of the higher posts in the Civil, Military, or Naval services.

As the culmination of a long fight against this iniquitous ‘Protestant Ascendancy,’ after he had aroused the

entire Catholic population to a pitch of frenzy


---

p.117




against the injustices inherent in it, the Catholic

leader, Daniel O'Connell, presented himself as a candidate for the

representation in Parliament of the County Clare, declaring that if

elected he would refuse to take the oath then required of a Member of

Parliament, as it libelled the Catholic Religion. In Ireland at that

time open voting prevailed, every elector having to declare openly

before the clerks of the election and all others who chose to attend,

the name of the candidate for whom he voted. In Ireland at that time

also, most of the tenants were tenants-at-will, removable at the mere

pleasure of the agent or landlord. Hence elections were a combination

of farce and tragedy—a farce as far as a means of ascertaining

the real wish of the electors was concerned, a tragedy whenever any of

the tenants dared to vote against the nominee of the landlord. The

suffrage had been extended to all tenants paying an annual rental of

forty shillings, irrespective of religious belief, but the terrible

power of life and death possessed by the landlord made this suffrage

ordinarily useless for popular purposes. Yet when O'Connell appealed

to the Catholic peasantry of Clare to brave the vengeance of their

landed tyrants, and vote for him in the interests of religious

liberty, they nobly responded. O'Connell was elected, and as a result

Catholic Emancipation was soon afterwards achieved. But the ruling

classes and the British Government took their revenge by coupling with

this reform a Bill depriving the smaller tenants of the suffrage, and

raising the amount of rent necessary to qualify for a vote to ten

pounds.


Up till that time landlords had rather encouraged the growth of

population on their estates, as it increased the number of their

political adherents, but with the passage of this Act of Parliament

this reason ceased to exist, and they immediately began the wholesale

eviction of their tenantry and the conversion of the arable lands into

grazing farms. The Catholic middle, professional and landed class by

Catholic Emancipation had the way opened to them for all the snug

berths in the disposal


---

p.118




of the Government; the Catholics of the poorer class as a

result of the same Act were doomed to extermination, to satisfy the

vengeance of a foreign Government and an aristocracy whose power had

been defied where it knew itself most supreme.


The wholesale eviction of the smaller tenants and the absorption of

their farms into huge grazing ranches, thus closing up every avenue of

employment to labour, meant death to the agricultural population, and

hence the peasantry struck back by every means in their power. They

formed lodges of the secret Ribbon Society, made midnight raids for

arms upon the houses of the gentry, assembled at night in large bodies

and ploughed up the grass lands, making them useless for grazing

purposes, filled up ditches, terrorised graziers into surrendering

their ranches, wounded and killed those who had entered the service of

graziers or obnoxious landlords, assassinated agents, and sometimes,

in sheer despair, opposed their unarmed bodies to the arms of the

military. Civil war of the most sanguinary character was convulsing

the country; in May, 1831, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and a huge

military force accompanied by artillery marched through Clare to

overawe the people, but as he did not stop evictions, nor provide

employment for the labourers whom the establishment of grazing had

deprived of their usual employment on the farm, the ‘outrages’ still continued. Nor were the

professional patriots, or the newly emancipated Catholic rich, any

more sympathetic to the unfortunate people. They had opened the way

for themselves to place and preferment by using the labourer and

cottier-farmer as a lever to overthrow the fortress of religious

bigotry and ascendancy, and now when the fight was won, they abandoned

these poor co-religionists of theirs to the tender mercies of their

economic masters. To the cry of despair welling up from the hearts of

the evicted families, crouching in hunger upon the road-side in sight

of their ruined homes, to the heartbroken appeal of the labourer

permanently


---

p.119




disemployed by the destruction of his source of

employment; to the wail of famishing women and children the

politicians invariably had but one answer—‘Be law-abiding, and

wait for the Repeal of the Union’. We are not exaggerating. One of

the most ardent Repealers and closest friends of Daniel O'Connell, Mr.

Thomas Steele, had the following manifesto posted up in the Market

Place of Ennis and other parts of Clare, addressed to the desperate

labourers and farmers:—


Unless you desist, I denounce you as traitors to the cause of

the liberty of Ireland   
[*gap: ellipse*]  
I leave you to the

Government and the fire and bayonets of the military. Your blood be

upon your own souls’’

.
This language of denunciation was uttered to the heroic men and

women who had sacrificed their homes, their security, and the hopes of

food for their children to win the emancipation front religious

tyranny of the well-fed snobs who thus abandoned them. It is difficult

to see how a promised Repeal of the Union some time in the future

could have been of any use to the starving men of Clare, especially

when they knew that their fathers had been starved, evicted and

tyrannised over *before* just as they were *after* the Union. At that time, however, it was

deemed a highly patriotic act to ascribe all the ills that Irish flesh

is heir to, to the Union. For example, Mr. O'Gorman Mahon, speaking in

the House of Commons, London, on February 8,

1831, hinted that the snow-storm then covering Ireland was a

result of the Legislative Union. He said:—


Did the Hon. Members imagine that they could prevent the

unfortunate men who were under five feet of snow from thinking they

could better their condition by a Repeal of the Union. It might be

said that England had not caused the snow, but the people had the snow

on them, and they thought that their connection with England had

reduced them to the state in which they now were’’

.
Another patriot, destined in after years to don the mantle


---

p.120




 of an Irish rebel, William Smith O'Brien, at this time,

1830, published a pamphlet advocating emigration as the one remedy for

Irish misery.


On the other hand a Commission appointed by the House of Lords in

1839 to inquire into the causes of the unrest and secret conspiracies

amongst the poorer class examined many witnesses in close touch with

the life of the peasantry and elicited much interesting testimony

tending to prove that the evil was much more deeply rooted than any

political scheme of Government, and that its real roots were in the

social conditions. Thus examined as to the attitude of the labourers

towards the Ribbon Association, one witness declared:—


‘Many look to the Association for protection. They think they

have no other protection’.


Question:—‘What are the principal objects they have in

view’?


Answer:—‘To keep themselves upon their lands. I have often

heard their conversation, when they say:—’


‘What good did Emancipation do for us? Are we better clothed or

fed, or are our children better clothed or fed? Are we not as naked as

we were, and eating dry potatoes when we can get them? Let us notice

the farmers to give us better food and better wages, and not give so

much to the landlord, and more to the workman; we must not be letting

them be turning the poor people off the ground’.


And a Mr. Poulett Scroope, M.P., declared in one of his writings

upon the necessity for a Poor Law: The tithe question, the Church,

the Grand Jury laws, the more or fewer Catholics appointed to the

Shrievalty or Magistracy—these are all topics for political

agitation among idle mobs; but the midnight massacre, the daily

plunder, the frequent insurrection, the insecurity of life and

property throughout agricultural districts of Ireland, these are

neither caused by agitation, nor can be put down with

agitation’’

.



---

p.121


It will be thus seen that the opinion of the

independent Member of Parliament coincided with that of the revolting

labourers as to the relative unimportance to the toilers of Ireland of

the subjects which then, as now, bulked most largely in the minds of

politicians.


This was the state of things political and social in Ireland in the

year 1831 and as it was in Clare the final effective blow had been

struck for religious emancipation, so it also was Clare that was

destined to see the first effort to discover a peaceful way of

achieving that social Emancipation, without which all other freedom,

religious or political, must ever remain as Dead Sea fruit to the

palate of Labour.


In 1832 the great English socialist, Robert Owen, visited Ireland

and held a number of meetings in the Rotunda, Dublin, for the purpose

of explaining the principles of Socialism to the people of that city.

His audiences were mainly composed of the well-to-do inhabitants, as

was, indeed, the case universally at that period when Socialism was

the fad of the rich instead of the faith of the poor. The Duke of

Leinster, the Catholic Archbishop Murray, Lord Meath, Lord Cloncurry,

and others occupied the platform, and as a result of the picture drawn

by Owen of the misery then existing, and the attendant insecurity of

life and property amongst all classes, and his outline of the

possibilities which a system of Socialist co-operation could produce,

an association styling itself the Hibernian

Philanthropic Society was formed to carry out his ideas. A sum of

money was subscribed to aid the prospects of the society, a General

Brown giving £1,000, Lord Cloncurry £500, Mr. Owen himself

subscribing £1,000, and £100 being raised from other

sources. The society was short-lived and ineffectual, but one of the

members, Mr. Arthur Vandeleur, an Irish landlord, was so deeply

impressed with all he had seen and heard of the possibilities of

Owenite Socialism, that in 1831, when crime and outrage in the country

had reached its zenith,


---

p.122




and the insecurity of life in his own class had been

brought home to him by the assassination of the steward of his estate

for unfeeling conduct towards the labourers, he resolved to make an

effort to establish a Socialist colony upon his property at Ralahine,

County Clare. For that purpose he invited to Ireland a Mr. Craig, of

Manchester, a follower of Owen, and entrusted him with the task of

carrying the project into execution.


Though Mr. Craig knew no Irish, and the people of Ralahine, as a

rule, knew no English—a state of matters which greatly

complicated the work of explanation—an understanding was finally

arrived at, and the estate was turned over to an association of the

people organised under the title of The Ralahine

Agricultural and Manufacturing Co-operative Association.


In the preamble to the Laws of the Association, its objects were

defined as follows:—


1. The acquisition of a common capital.
2. The mutual assurance of its members against the evils of

poverty, sickness, infirmity, and old age.
3. The attainment of a greater share of the comforts of life than

the working classes now possess.
4. The mental and moral improvement of its adult members.
5. The education of their children.



The following paragraphs selected from the Rules of the Association

will give a pretty clear idea of its most important features:—


> Basis Of The Society
> --------------------
> 
> 
> That all the stock, implements of husbandry,
> 
> and other property belong to and are the property of Mr. Vandeleur,
> 
> until the Society accumulates sufficient to pay for them; they then
> 
> become the joint property of the Society.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.123
> 
> 
> Production
> ----------
> 
> 
> We engage that whatever talents we may individually possess,
> 
> whether mental or muscular, agricultural, manufacturing, or
> 
> scientific, shall be directed to the benefit of all, as well by their
> 
> immediate exercise in all necessary occupations as by communicating
> 
> our knowledge to each other, and particularly to the young.
> 
> 
> That, as far as can be reduced to practice, each individual shall
> 
> assist in agricultural operations, particularly in harvest, it being
> 
> fully understood that no individual is to act as steward, but all are
> 
> to work.
> 
> 
> That all the youth, male or female, do engage to learn some useful
> 
> trade, together with agriculture and gardening, between the ages of
> 
> nine and seventeen years.
> 
> 
> That the committee meet every evening to arrange the business for
> 
> the following day.
> 
> 
> That the hours of labour be from six in the morning till six in the
> 
> evening in summer, and from daybreak till dusk in winter, with the
> 
> intermission of one hour for dinner.
> 
> 
> That each agricultural labouring man shall receive eightpence, and
> 
> every woman fivepence per day for their labour (these were the
> 
> ordinary wages of the country, the secretary, storekeeper, smiths,
> 
> joiners, and a few others received something more; the excess being
> 
> borne by the proprietor) which it is expected will be paid out at the
> 
> store in provisions, or any other article the society may produce or
> 
> keep there; any other articles may be purchased elsewhere.
> 
> 
> That no member be expected to perform any service or work but such
> 
> as is agreeable to his or her feelings, or they are able to perform;
> 
> but if any member thinks that any other member is not usefully
> 
> employing his or her time, it is his or her duty to report it to the
> 
> committee, whose duty it will be to bring that member's conduct before
> 
> a general meeting, who shall have power, if necessary, to expel that
> 
> useless member.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.124
> 
> 
> Distribution And Domestic Economy
> ---------------------------------
> 
> 
> That all the services usually performed by servants be performed by
> 
> the youth of both sexes under the age of seventeen years, either by
> 
> rotation or choice.
> 
> 
> That the expenses of the children's food, clothing, washing,
> 
> lodging, and education be paid out of the common funds of the society,
> 
> from the time they are weaned till they arrive at the age of
> 
> seventeen, when they shall be eligible to become members.
> 
> 
> That
> 
> a charge be made for the food and clothing, &c., of those
> 
> children trained by their parents, and residing in their dwelling
> 
> houses.
> 
> 
> That each person occupying a house, or cooking and consuming their
> 
> victuals therein, must pay for the fuel used.
> 
> 
> That no charge be made for fuel used in the public room.
> 
> 
> That it shall be a special object for the sub-committee of domestic
> 
> economy, or the superintendent of that department, to ascertain and
> 
> put in practice the best and most economical methods of preparing and
> 
> cooking the food.
> 
> 
> That all the washing be done together in the public washhouse; the
> 
> expenses of soap, labour, fuel, & c., to be equally borne by all the
> 
> adult members.
> 
> 
> That each member pay the sum of one half-penny out of every
> 
> shilling received as wages to form a fund to be placed in the hands of
> 
> the committee, who shall pay the wages out of this fund of any member
> 
> who may fall sick or meet with an accident.
> 
> 
> Any damage done by a member to the stock, implements, or any other
> 
> property belonging to the society to be made good out of the wages of
> 
> the individual, unless the damage is satisfactorily accounted for to
> 
> the committee.
> 
> 
> Education And Formation Of Character
> ------------------------------------
> 
> 
> We guarantee each other that the young children of any person dying
> 
> whilst a member of this society, shall be equally
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.125
> 
> 
> 
> 
> protected, educated, and cherished with the children of
> 
> the living members, and entitled, when they arrive at the age of
> 
> seventeen, to all the privileges of members.
> 
> 
> That each individual shall enjoy perfect liberty of conscience, and
> 
> freedom of expression of opinion, and in religious worship.
> 
> 
> That no spirituous liquors of any kind, tobacco, or snuff be kept
> 
> in the store, or on the premises.
> 
> 
> That if any of us should unfortunately have a dispute with any
> 
> other person, we agree to abide by a decision of the majority of the
> 
> members, or any person to whom the matter in question may be by them
> 
> referred.
> 
> 
> That any person wishing to marry another do sign a declaration to
> 
> that effect one week previous to the marriage taking place, and that
> 
> immediate preparations be made for the erection, or fitting-up of a
> 
> suitable dwelling house for their reception.
> 
> 
> That any person wishing to marry another person, not a member,
> 
> shall sign a declaration according to the last rule; the person not a
> 
> member shall then be balloted for, and, if rejected, both must leave
> 
> the society.
> 
> 
> That if the conduct of any member be found injurious to the wellbeing of the society, the committee shall explain to him or her in
> 
> what respect his or her conduct shall continue to transgress the
> 
> rules, such member shall be brought before a general meeting, called
> 
> for the purpose, and if the complaint be substantiated, three-fourths
> 
> of the members present shall have power to expel, by ballot, such
> 
> refractory member.
> 
> 
> Government
> ----------
> 
> 
> The society to be governed, and its business transacted, by a
> 
> committee of nine members, to be chosen half-yearly, by ballot, by all
> 
> the adult male and female members, the ballot list to contain at least
> 
> four of the last committee.
> 
> 
> The committee to meet every evening and their transactions
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.126
> 
> 
> 
> 
> to be regularly entered into a minute book, the
> 
> recapitulation of which is to be given at the society's general
> 
> meeting by the secretary.
> 
> 
> That there be a general weekly meeting of the society; that the
> 
> treasurer's accounts be audited by the committee, and read over to the
> 
> society; that the ‘Suggestion Book’ be also
> 
> read at this meeting.
> 
> 
> 




The colony did not use the ordinary currency of the country, but

instead adopted a ‘Labour Note’ system of

payment, all workers being paid in notes according to the number of

hours worked, and being able to exchange the notes in the store for

all the necessities of life. The notes were printed on stiff cardboard

about the size of a visiting card, and represented the equivalent of a

whole, a half, a quarter, an eighth, and a sixteenth of a day's

labour. There were also special notes printed in red ink representing

respectively the labours of a day and a half, and two days. In his

account of the colony published under the title of History of Ralahine, by Heywood & Sons, Manchester (a book we earnestly recommend to all our readers), Mr. Craig says:—‘The labour was recorded daily on a ‘Labour Sheet’, which was exposed to view during

the following week. The members could work or not at their own

discretion. If no work, no record, and, therefore, no pay. Practically

the arrangement was of great use. There were no idlers’. Further on

he comments:—


The advantages of the labour notes were soon evident in the

saving of members. They had no anxiety as to employment, wages, or the

price of provisions. Each could partake of as much vegetable food as

he or she could desire. The expenses of the children from infancy, for

food or education, were provided for out of the common fund.’’


The object should be to obtain a rule of justice, if we seek

the law of righteousness. This can only be fully realised in that

equality arising out of a community of property where


---

p.127




the labour of one member is valued at the same rate as

that of another member, and labour is exchanged for labour. It was not

possible to attain to this condition of equality at Ralahine, but we

made such arrangements as would impart a feeling of security, fairness

and justice to all. The prices of provisions were fixed and uniform. A

labourer was charged one shilling a week for as many vegetables and as

much fruit as he chose to consume; milk was a penny per quart; beef

and mutton fourpence, and pork two and one-half pence per pound. The

married members occupying separate quarters were charged sixpence per

week for rent, and twopence for fuel’’

.
In dealing with Ireland no one can afford to ignore the question of

the attitude of the clergy; it is therefore interesting to quote the

words of an English visitor to Ralahine, a Mr. Finch, who afterwards

wrote a series of fourteen letters describing the community, and

offered to lay a special report before a Select Committee of the House

of Commons upon the subject. He says:—


The only religion taught by the society was the unceasing

practice of promoting the happiness of every man, woman, and child to

the utmost extent in their power. Hence the Bible was not used as a

school-book; no sectarian opinions were taught in the schools; no

public dispute about religious dogmas or party political questions

took place; nor were members allowed to ridicule each other's

religion; nor were there any attempts at proselytism. Perfect freedom

in the performance of religious duties and religious exercises was

guaranteed to all. The teaching of religion was left to ministers of

religion and to the parents; but no priest or minister received

anything from the funds of the society. Nevertheless, both Protestant

and Catholic priests were friendly to the system as soon as they

understood it, and one reason was that they found these sober,

industrious persons had now a little to give them out of their

earnings, whereas formerly they had been beggars’’

.


---

p.128


Mr. Craig also states that the members of the

community, after it had been in operation for some time, were better

Catholics than before they began. He had at first considerable

difficulty in warding off the attacks of zealous Protestant

proselytisers, and his firmness in doing so was one of the chief

factors in winning the confidence of the people as well as their

support in insisting upon the absolutely non-sectarian character of

the teaching.


All disputes between the members were settled by appeals to a

general meeting in which all adults of both sexes participated, and

from which all judges, lawyers, and other members of the legal

fraternity were rigorously excluded.


To those who fear that the institution of common property will be

inimical to progress and invention, it must be reassuring to learn

that this community of ‘ignorant’ Irish

peasants introduced into Ralahine the first reaping machine used in

Ireland, and hailed it as a blessing at a time when the gentleman

farmers of England were still gravely debating the practicability of

the invention. From an address to the agricultural labourers of the

County Clare, issued by the community on the introduction of this

machine, we take the following passages, illustrative of the

difference of effect between invention under common ownership and

capitalist ownership:—


This machine of ours is one of the first machines ever given to

the working classes to lighten their labour, and at the same time

increase their comforts. It does not benefit any one person among us

exclusively, nor throw any individual out of employment. Any kind of

machinery used for shortening labour—except used in a co-operative society like ours— must tend to lessen wages, and to

deprive working men of employment, and finally either to starve them,

force them into some other employment (and then reduce wages in that

also) or compel them to emigrate. Now, if the working classes


---

p.129




would cordially and peacefully unite to adopt our system,

no power or party could prevent their success’’

.
This was published by order of the committee, 21st August, 1833, and when we observe the date we cannot

but wonder at the number of things Clare—and the rest of

Ireland—has forgotten since.


It must not be supposed that the landlord of the estate on which

Ralahine was situated had allowed his enthusiasm for Socialism to run

away with his self-interest. On the contrary, when turning over his

farms to the community he stipulated for the payment to himself of a

very heavy rental in kind. We extract from Brotherhood, a Christian Socialist

Journal published in the north of Ireland in 1891, a statement of the

rental, and a very luminous summing-up of the lesson of Ralahine, by

the editor, Mr. Bruce Wallace, long a hard and unselfish worker for

the cause of Socialism in Ireland:—


> 
> The Association was bound to deliver annually, either at Ralahine,
> 
> Bunratty, Clare, or Limerick, as the landlord might require, free of
> 
> expense—
> 
> 
> 
> 
> |  |  |
> | --- | --- |
> | Wheat | 320 brls. |
> | Barley | 240 brls. |
> | Oats | 50 brls. |
> | Butter | 10 cwt. |
> | Pork | 30 cwt. |
> | Beef | 70 cwt. |
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> At the prices then prevailing, this amount of produce would be
> 
> equivalent to about, £900, £700 of rent for the use of
> 
> natural forces and opportunities, and £200 of interest upon
> 
> capital. It was thus a pretty stiff tribute that these poor Irish
> 
> toilers had to pay for the privilege of making a little bit of their
> 
> native soil fruitful. This tribute was, of course, so much to be
> 
> deducted from the means of improving their sunken condition. In any
> 
> future efforts that may be made to profit by the example
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.130
> 
> 
> 
> 
> of Ralahine and to apply again the principles of co-operation in farming, there ought to be the utmost care taken to
> 
> reduce to a minin um the tribute payable to non-workers, and if
> 
> possible to get rid of it altogether. If, despite this heavy burden of
> 
> having to produce a luxurious maintenance for loungers, the condition
> 
> of the toilers at Ralahine, as we shall see, was marvellously raised
> 
> by the introduction of the co-operative principle amongst them, how
> 
> much more satisfactorily would it have been raised had they been free
> 
> of that depressing dead weight?
> 
> 
> 




Such is the lesson of Ralahine. Had all the land and buildings

belonged to the people, had all other estates in Ireland been

conducted on the same principles, and the industries of the country

also so organised, had each of them appointed delegates to confer on

the business of the country at some common centre as Dublin, the

framework and basis of a free Ireland would have been realised. And

when Ireland does emerge into complete control of her own destinies

she must seek the happiness of her people in the extension on a

national basis of the social arrangements of Ralahine, or else be but

another social purgatory for her poor—a purgatory where the

pangs of the sufferers will be heightened by remembering the delusive

promises of political reformers.


In the most crime-ridden county in Ireland this partial experiment

in Socialism abolished crime; where the fiercest fight for religious

domination had been fought it brought the mildest tolerance; where

drunkenness had fed fuel to the darkest passions it established

sobriety and gentleness; where poverty and destitution had engendered

brutality, midnight marauding, and a contempt for all social bonds, it

enthroned security, peace and reverence for justice, and it did this

solely by virtue of the influence of the new social conception

attendant upon the institution of common property bringing a common

interest to all. Where such changes came in the bud, what


---

p.131




might we not expect from the flower? If a partial

experiment in Socialism, with all the drawbacks of an experiment, will

achieve such magnificent results what could we not rightfully look for

were all Ireland, all the world, so organised on the basis of common

property, and exploitation and mastership forever abolished ?


The downfall of the Association came as a result of the iniquitous

land laws of Great Britain refusing to recognise the right of such a

community to hold a lease or to act as tenants. The landlord, Mr.

Vandeleur, lost his fortune in a gambling transaction in Dublin, and

fled in disgrace, unable to pay his debts. The persons who took over

the estate under bankruptcy proceedings refused to recognise the

community, insisted upon treating its members as common labourers on

the estate, seized upon the buildings and grounds and broke up the

Association.


So Ralahine ended. But in the rejuvenated Ireland of the future the

achievement of those simple peasants will be dwelt upon with

admiration as a great and important landmark in the march of the human

race towards its complete social emancipation. Ralahine was an Irish

point of interrogation erected amidst the wildernesses of capitalist

thought and feudal practice, challenging both in vain for an answer.

Other smaller communities were also established in Ireland during the

same period. A Lord Wallscourt established a somewhat similar

community on his estate in County Galway; The

Quarterly Review of November, 1819, states that there was

then a small community existent nine miles outside Dublin, which held

thirty acres, supported a priest and a school of 300 children, had

erected buildings, made and sold jaunting cars, and comprised

butchers, carpenters and wheelwrights; the Quakers of Dublin

established a Co-operative Woollen Factory, which flourished until it

was destroyed by litigation set on foot by dissatisfied members who

had been won over to the side of rival capitalists, and a communal

home was established and 


---

p.132


long maintained in Dublin by

members of the same religious sect, but without any other motive than

that of helping forward the march of social amelioration. We

understand that the extensive store of Messrs. Ganly & Sons on Usher's

Quay in Dublin was the home of this community, who lived, worked and

enjoyed themselves in the spacious halls, and slept in the smaller

rooms of what is now the property of a capitalist

auctioneer.




---

p.133


Chapter XII


A Chapter Of Horrors: Daniel O'Connell And The Working Class
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


*> 1. ‘‘'Tis civilisation, so ye say, and cannot be changed for the
> 
> weakness of men,
>   
> Take heed, take heed, 'tis a dangerous way to drive the wild wolf
> 
> to the end of his den.
>   
> Take heed of your civilisation, ye, 'tis a pyramid built upon
> 
> quivering hearts,
>   
> There are times, as Paris in '93, when the commonest men play
> 
> terrible parts.
>   
> Take heed of your progress, its feet are shod with the souls it
> 
> slew, with its own pollutions,
>   
> Submission is good, but the order of God may flame the torch of the
> 
> revolutions.’’
> 

—*John Boyle O'Reilly*.*
For both Ireland and Great Britain the period between the winning

of Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the year 1850 was marked by great

misery and destitution amongst the producing classes, accompanied by

abortive attempts at revolution in both countries, and the concession

of some few unimportant political and social reforms. In Ireland the

first move against the forces of privilege was the abolition of the

Tithes, or, more correctly speaking, the abolition of the harsh and

brutal features attendant upon the collection of the tithes. The

clergy of the Episcopalian Church, the Church by law established in

Ireland, were legally entitled to levy upon the people of each

district, irrespective of religion, a certain tax for the upkeep of

that Church and its ministers. The fact that this was in conformity

with the practice of the Catholic Church in countries where it was

dominant did not, of course, make this


---

p.134




any more palatable to the Catholic peasantry of Ireland,

who continually saw a part of their crops seized upon and sold to

maintain a clergy whose ministrations they never attended, and whose

religion they detested. Eventually their discontent at the injustice

grew so acute as to flare forth in open rebellion, and accordingly all

over Ireland the tenants began to resist the collection of tithes by

every means in their power.


The Episcopalian clergymen called on the aid of the law, and,

escorted by police and military, seized the produce of the poor

tenants and carried it off to be sold at auction; the peasantry, on

the other hand, collected at dead of night and carried off the crops

and cattle from farms upon which the distraint was to be made, and,

when that was impossible, they strove by acts of violence to terrorise

auctioneers and buyers from consummating the sale. Many a bright young

life was extinguished on the gallows, or rotted away in prison cells,

as a result of this attempt to sustain a hated religion by

contributions exacted at the point of the bayonet, until eventually

the struggle assumed all the aspect of a civil war. At several places

when the military were returning from raiding the farm of some poor

peasant, the country people gathered, erected barricades, and opposed

their passage by force. Significantly enough of the temper and

qualities of the people in those engagements, they generally succeeded

in rescuing their crops and cattle from the police and military, and

in demonstrating that Ireland still possessed all the material

requisite for armed rebellion.


In one conflict at Newtownbarry, twelve peasants were shot and

twenty fatally wounded; in another at Carrigshock eleven policemen

were killed and seventeen wounded; and at a great fight at

Rathcormack, twelve peasants were killed in a fight with a large body

of military and armed police. Eye-witnesses declared that the poor

farmers and labourers engaged, stood the charge and volleys of the

soldiers as firmly as if they


---

p.135




had been seasoned troops, a fact that impressed the

Government more than a million speeches could have done. The gravity

of the crisis was enhanced by the contrast between the small sum often

involved, and the bloodshed necessary to recover it. Thus, at

Rathcormack, twelve peasants were massacred in an attempt to save the

effects of a poor widow from being sold to pay a sum of forty

shillings due as tithes. The ultimate effect of all this resistance

was the passage of a Tithes Commutation Act by

which the collection of tithes was abolished, and the substitution in

its place of a ‘Tithe Rent Charge’ by means of

which the sums necessary for the support of the Episcopalian clergy

were included in the rent and paid as part of that tribute to the

landed aristocracy. In other words, the economic drain remained, but

it was deprived of all the more odious and galling features of its

collection. The secret Ribbon and Whiteboy Societies were the most

effective weapons of the peasantry in this fight, and to their

activities the victory is largely to be attributed. The politicians

gave neither help nor countenance to the fight, and save for the

advocacy of one small Dublin newspaper, conducted by a small but

brilliant band of young Protestant writers, no journal in all Ireland

championed their cause. For the Catholic clergy it is enough to say

that while this tithe war was being waged, they were almost

universally silent about that ‘grievous sin of

secret conspiracy’ upon which they are usually so eloquent. We

would not dare to say that they recognised that, as the secret

societies were doing their work against a rival priesthood, it was

better to be sparing in their denunciations for the time being;

perhaps that is not the explanation, but at all events it is

noteworthy that as soon as the tithe war was won, all the old stock

invectives against every kind of extra-constitutional action were

immediately renewed.


Contemporaneously with this tithe-war had grown up the agitation

for repeal of the Legislative Union led by Daniel


---

p.136




O'Connell, and supported by the large body of the middle

classes, and by practically all the Catholic clergy. At the outset of

this agitation the Irish working class, partly because they accepted

O'Connell's explanation of the decay of Irish trade as due to the

Union; and partly because they did not believe he was sincere in his

professions of loyalty to the English monarchy, nor in his desire to

limit his aims to repeal, enthusiastically endorsed and assisted his

agitation. He, on his part, incorporated the trades bodies in his

association with rights equal to that of regularly enrolled members, a

proceeding which evoked considerable dissent from many quarters. Thus

the Irish Monthly Magazine

(Dublin), a rabidly O'Connellite journal, in its issue of September,

1832, complains that the National Union (of Repealers) is in danger

because ‘there is a contemporary union composed of the tradesmen and

operative classes, the members of which are qualified to vote at its

sittings, and who are in every respect put upon a perfect equality

with the members of the National Union’. And in its December number

of the same year it returns to the charge with the significant

statement that ‘In fact we apprehend great mischief and little good

from the trades union as at present constituted’. The

representative of the English King in Ireland, Lord Lieutenant

Anglesey, apparently coincided in the opinion of this follower of

O'Connell as to the danger of Irish trade unions in politics, for when

the Dublin trade bodies projected a mammoth demonstration in favour of

Repeal, he immediately proclaimed it, and ordered the military to

suppress it, if necessary, by armed force. But as O'Connell grew in

strength in the country, and attracted to himself more and more of the

capitalist and professional classes in Ireland, and as he became more

necessary to the schemes of the Whig politicians in England, and

thought these latter more necessary to his success, he ceased to play

for the favour of organised labour, and gradually developed into the

most bitter and unscrupulous enemy of


---

p.137




trade unionism Ireland has yet produced, signalising the

trades of Dublin always out for his most venomous attack.


In 1835 O'Connell took his seat on the Ministerial side of the

House of Commons as a supporter of the Whig Government. At that time

the labouring population of England were the most exploited, degraded,

and almost dehumanised of all the peoples of Europe. The tale of their

condition reveals such inhumanity on the part of the masters, such

woeful degradation on the side of the toilers, that were it not

attested by the sober record of witnesses before various Parliamentary

Commissions the record would be entirely unbelievable. Women worked

down in coal mines, almost naked, for a pitiful wage, often giving

birth to children when surprised by the pains of parturition amidst

the darkness and gloom of their places of employment; little boys and

girls were employed drawing heavy hutches (wagons) of coal along the

pit-floors by means of a strap around their bodies and passing through

between their little legs; in cotton factories little tots of eight,

seven, and even six years of age of both sexes were kept attending

machinery, being hired like slaves from workhouses for that purpose,

and worked twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen hours per day, living,

sleeping, and working under conditions which caused them to die off as

with a plague; in pottery works, bakeshops, clothing factories and

workrooms the overwork and unhealthy conditions of employment led to

such suffering and degradation and shortening of life that the very

existence of the working-class was endangered. In the agricultural

districts the sufferings of the poor were so terrible that the English

agricultural labourer—the most stolidly patient, unimaginative

person on the face of the earth—broke out into riots, machine-breaking, and hay-rick burning. As in Ireland, Captain Rock or Captain

Moonlight had been supposed to be the presiding genius of the

nocturnal revolts of the peasantry, so in England, Captain Swing, an

equally mythical


---

p.138




personage, took the blame or the credit. In a booklet

circulated amongst the English agricultural labourers, Captain Swing

is made to say: ‘I am not the author of these burnings. These fires

are caused by farmers having been turned out of their lands to make

room for foxes, peasants confined two years in prison for picking up a

dead partridge, and parsons taking a poor man's only cow for the tithe

of his cabbage garden’. So great was the distress, so brutal the

laws, and so hopelessly desperate the labourers, that in the Special

Assize held at Winchester in December, 1830, no less than three

hundred prisoners were put upon trial, a great number of whom were

sentenced to death. Of the number so condemned, six were actually

hanged, twenty transported for life, and the rest for smaller periods.

We are told in the English Via

Dolorosa, of William Heath, that ‘a child of

fourteen had sentence of death recorded against him; and two brothers,

one twenty, the other nineteen, were ruthlessly hanged on Penenden

Heath, whither they were escorted by a regiment of Scots Greys’. As

to whom was responsible for all this suffering, contemporary witnesses

leave no doubt: The London Times, most conservative of all

capitalist papers, in its issue of December

27, 1830, declared:—‘We do affirm that the actions of

this pitiable class of men (the labourers) are a commentary on the

treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and middling

classes. The present population must be provided for in body and

spirit on more liberal and Christian principles, or the whole mass of

labourers will start into legions of banditti—banditti less

criminal than those who have made them so; those who by a just but

fearful retribution will soon become their victims’. And in 1833 a

Parliamentary Commission reported that ‘The condition of the

agricultural labourers was brutal and wretched; their children during

the day were struggling with the pigs for food, and at night were

huddled down on damp straw under a roof of rotten thatch’.




---

p.139


In the large towns the same state of rebellion

prevailed, the military were continually on duty, and so many people

were killed that the coroners ceased to hold inquests. Such was the

state of England—misery and revolt beneath, and sanguinary

repression coupled with merciless greed above—at the time when

O'Connell, taking his seat in Parliament, threw all his force on the

side of capitalist privilege and against social reform.


In 1838 five cotton-spinners in Glasgow, in Scotland, were

sentenced to seven years' transportation for acts they had committed

in connection with trade union combination to better the miserable

condition of their class. As the punishment was universally felt to be

excessive, even in the brutal spirit of the times, Mr. Walkley, Member

of Parliament for Finsbury, on the 13th of

February of that year, brought forward a motion in the House of

Commons for a ‘Select Committee to enquire into

the constitution, practices, and effects of the Association of Cotton Operatives of Glasgow.’ O'Connell opposed the motion, and used the opportunity to attack the Irish trade-unions. He said:—


‘There was no tyranny equal to that which was exercised by the

trade-unionists in Dublin over their fellow labourers. One rule of the

workmen prescribed a minimum rate of wages *so that

the best workman received no more than the worst*. Another part of

their system was directed towards depriving the masters of all freedom

in their power of selecting workmen, the names of the workmen being

inscribed in a book, and the employer compelled to take the first on

the list’.


He said that at Bandon a large factory had been closed, through the

efforts of the men to get higher wages, ditto at Belfast, and ‘it

was calculated that wages to the amount of £500,000 per year

were lost to Dublin by trade-unions. The combination of tailors in

that city, for instance, had raised the price of clothes to such a

pitch that it was worth a person's while to go to Glasgow and wait a

couple of days for a suit, the difference in


---

p.140




the price paying the expense of the trip’ He also

ascribed the disappearance of the shipbuilding trades from Dublin to

the evil effects of trade unions.


Because of O'Connell's speech his friends, the Whig Government,

appointed a committee, not to enquire into the Glasgow cases, but to

investigate the acts of the Irish, and especially of the Dublin, trade

unions. The Special Committee sat and collected two volumes of

evidence, O'Connell producing a number of witnesses to bear testimony

against the Irish trade unionists, but the report of the committee was

never presented to the House of Commons. In June of the same year,

1838, O'Connell had another opportunity to vent his animus against the

working class, and serve the interest of English and Irish capitalism,

and was not slow to take advantage of it. In the year 1833, mainly

owing to the efforts of the organised factory operatives, and some

high-spirited philanthropists, a law had been enacted forbidding the

employment of *children under nine years of age*

in factories except silk-mills, and forbidding those under thirteen

from working more than forty-eight hours per week, or nine hours per

day. The ages mentioned will convey to the reader some idea of how

infantile flesh and blood had been sacrificed to sate the greed of the

propertied class. Yet this eminently moderate enactment was fiercely

hated by the godly capitalists of England, and by every unscrupulous

device they could contrive they strove to circumvent it. So constant

and effective was their evasion of its merciful provisions that on the

23rd of June the famous friend of the

factory operatives, Lord Ashley, in the House of Commons, moved as an

amendment to the Order of the Day the second reading of a Bill to more effectually regulate Factory Works,

its purpose being to prevent or punish any further infringement of the

Act of 1833. O'Connell opposed the motion, and attempted to justify

the infringement of the law by the employers by stating that ‘they

(Parliament) had legislated against the


---

p.141




nature of things, and against the right of industry’.

‘Let them not’, he said, ‘be guilty of the childish folly of

regulating the labour of adults, and go about parading before the

world *their ridiculous humanity*, which would

end by converting their manufacturers into beggars’. The phrase

about regulating the labour of adults was borrowed from the defence

set up by the capitalists that preventing the employment of children

also interfered with the labour of adults—freeborn Englishmen!

O'Connell was not above using this clap-trap, as he on a previous

occasion had not been above making the lying pretence that the

enforcement of a *minimum* wage prevented the

payment of *high* wages to any specially skilled

artisan.


On this question of the attitude to be taken up towards the claims

of labour, O'Connell differed radically with one of his most capable

lieutenants, Fergus O'Connor. The latter, being returned to Parliament

as a Repealer, was struck by the miserable condition of the real

people of England in whose interests Ireland was supposed to be

governed, and as the result of his investigation into its cause, he

arrived at the conclusion that the basis of the oppression of Ireland

was economic, that labour in England was oppressed by the same class

and by the operation of the same causes as had impoverished and ruined

Ireland, and that the solution of the problem in both countries

required the union of the democracies in one common battle against

their oppressors. He earnestly strove to impress this view upon

O'Connell, only to find, that in the latter class-feeling was much

stronger than desire for Irish National freedom, and that he,

O'Connell, felt himself to be much more akin to the propertied class

of England than to the working class of Ireland. This was proven by

his actions in the cases above cited. This divergence of opinion

between O'Connell and O'Connor closed Ireland to the latter and gave

him to the Chartists as one of their most fearless and trusted

leaders.


When he died, more than 50,000 toilers marched in the funeral


---

p.142




 procession which bore his remains to his last resting-place. He was one of the first of that long list of Irish fighters in

Great Britain whose unselfish sacrifices have gone to make a record

for an ‘English’ Labour movement. That the

propertied and oppressing classes were well aware of the value of

O'Connell's services against the democracy, and were believed to be

grateful for the same was attested by the action of Richard Lalor

Shiel when, defending him during the famous State trials, he claimed

the consideration of the Court for O'Connell, because he had stood

between the people of Ireland and the people of England, and so

‘prevented a junction which would be formidable enough to overturn

any administration that could be formed’. But, as zealous as

O'Connell and the middle class repealers were to prevent any

international action of the democracies, the Irish Working Class were

as enthusiastic in their desire to consummate it. Irish Chartist

Associations sprang up all over the island, and we are informed by a

writer in the United Irishman of

John Mitchel, 1848, that in Dublin they had grown so strong and so

hostile to O'Connellism that at one time negotiations were in progress

for a public debate between the Liberator and a representative of the

Dublin trades. But upon the arrest and imprisonment of O'Connell, he

continues, the Working Class were persuaded to abandon their separate

organisations for the sake of presenting a common front to the

Government, a step they afterwards regretted. To this letter John

Mitchel, as editor, appended a note reminding his readers of the anti-labour record of O'Connell, and adducing it as a further reason for

repudiating his leadership. Yet it is curious that in his History of Ireland Mitchel omits

all reference to this disgraceful side of O'Connell's career, as do

indeed all the other Irish ‘Historians.’ If

silence gives consent, then all our history (?) writing scribes have

consented to, and hence approved of, this suppression of the facts of

history in order to assist in perpetuating the blindness and the

subjection of labour.




---

p.143


Chapter XIII


Our Irish Girondins Sacrifice The Irish Peasantry Upon The Altar Of Private Property
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


*There is a class of Revolutionists named Girondins

whose fate in history is remarkable *enough*. Men who rebel, and urge the lower classes

to rebel, ought to have other than formulas to go upon. Men who

discern in the misery of the toiling, complaining millions, not misery

but only a raw material which can be wrought upon and traded in for

one's own poor hide-bound theories and egoisms, to whom millions of

living fellow-creatures with beating hearts in their

bosoms—beating, suffering, hoping—are ‘masses’, mere explosive masses, for blowing down Bastilles with, for voting at hustings for ‘us’, such men are of the questionable species.’’—*Thomas Carlyle*.*
The outbreak of the famine, which commenced on a small scale in

1845, and increased in area and intensity until 1849, brought to a

head the class antagonism in Ireland, of which the rupture with the

trades was one manifestation, and again revealed the question of

property as the test by which the public conduct is regulated, even

when those men assume the garb of revolution. Needless to say, this is

not the interpretation of the history of that awful period we are

given by the orthodox Irish or English writers upon the subject. Irish

Nationalists of all stripes and English critics of every variety

agree, with wonderful unanimity, in ascribing a split in the Repeal

Association which led to the formation by the seceders of the body

known as the Irish Confederation to the

academic question of whether force might or might not be employed to

achieve a political end. The majority of the Repeal Association,


---

p.144




we are told, subscribed to the principle enunciated by

O'Connell that ‘the greatest sublunary blessings were not worth the

shedding of a single drop of human blood’, and John Mitchel, Father

Meehan, Gavan Duffy, Thomas Francis Meagher, Devin Reilly, William

Smith O'Brien, Fintan Lalor, and others repudiated that doctrine, and

on this point of purely theoretical divergence the secession from

O'Connell took place. It is difficult to believe that any large number

of Irishmen ever held such a doctrine seriously; it is quite certain

that the Irish Catholic priesthood, O'Connell's chief lieutenants, did

not hold nor counsel such a doctrine during the Tithe War. O'Connell

himself had declared that he would willingly join in helping England

in ‘bringing down the American eagle in its highest pride of

flight’, which surely would have involved war, and in the House of

Commons on one occasion, in reply to Lord Lyndhurst, who had

characterised the Irish as ‘aliens in blood, in language, and in

religion’, Richard Lalor Shiel, a champion of O'Connellism, had

delivered a magnificent oration vaunting the prowess of Irish soldiers

in the English army. In passing we note that Shiel considered the

above phrase of Lord Lyndhurst an insult; modern Irish Nationalists

triumphantly assert the idea, embodied in that phrase, as the real

basis of Irish nationalism.


Nor yet were the seceders, the Young Irelanders as they were

called, in favour of physical force, save as a subject for flights in

poetry and oratory. In reality the secession took place on a false

issue; the majority on either side being disinclined to admit, even if

they recognised, the real issue dividing them. That issue was the old

and ever-present one of the Democratic principle in human society versus the Aristocratic. The Young Irelanders,

young and enthusiastic, felt the force of the Democratic principle

then agitating European society, indeed the very name of Young Ireland

was an adaptation of the names used by the Italian revolutionist

Mazzini for the revolutionary


---

p.145




associations, Young Italy, Young Switzerland, Young

France, and Young Germany, he founded after the year 1831. And as the

progress of the revolutionary movement on the Continent, (accompanied

as it was by the popularisation of Socialistic ideas among the

revolutionary masses) synchronised with the falling apart of the

social system in Ireland owing to the famine, the leaders of the Young

Ireland party responded to and moved along with the revolutionary

current of events without ever being able to comprehend the depth and

force of the stream upon whose surface they were embarked. The truth

of this is apparent to all who study their action when at last the

long talked of day-for-revolution had arrived. By that time, 1848,

Ireland was in the throes of the greatest famine in her history.


A few words explanatory of that famine may not be amiss to some of

our readers. The staple food of the Irish peasantry was the potato;

all other agricultural produce, grains and cattle, was sold to pay the

landlord's rent. The ordinary value of the potato crop was yearly

approximately twenty million pounds in English money; in 1848, in the

midst of the famine the value of agricultural produce in Ireland was

£44,958,120. In that year the entire potato crop was a failure,

and to that fact the famine is placidly attributed, yet those figures

amply prove that there was food enough in the country to feed double

the population, were the laws of capitalist society set aside, and

human rights elevated to their proper position. It is a common saying

amongst Irish Nationalists that ‘Providence sent the potato blight;

but England made the famine.’ The statement is true, and only needs

amending by adding that ‘England made the famine by a rigid

application of the economic principles that lie at the base of

capitalist society.’ No man who accepts capitalist society and the

laws thereof can logically find fault with the statesmen of England

for their acts in that awful period. They stood for the rights of

property and free competition,


---

p.146




and philosophically accepted their consequences upon

Ireland; the leaders of the Irish people also stood for the rights of

property, and refused to abandon them even when they saw the

consequences in the slaughter by famine of over a million of the Irish

toilers. The first failure of the potato crop took place in 1845, and

between September and December of that year 515 deaths from hunger

were registered, although 3,250,000 quarters of wheat and numberless

cattle had been exported. From that time until 1850 the famine spread,

and the exports of food continued. Thus in 1848 it was estimated that

300,000 persons died of hunger and 1,826,132 quarters of wheat and

barley were exported. Typhus fever, which always follows on the heels

of hunger, struck down as many as perished directly of famine, until

at last it became impossible in many districts to get sufficient

labourers with strength enough to dig separate graves for the dying.

Recourse was had to famine pits, into which the bodies were thrown

promiscuously; whole families died in their miserable cabins, and lay

and rotted there, and travellers in remote parts of the country often

stumbled upon villages in which the whole population had died of

hunger. In 1847, ‘black '47’, 250,000 died of

fever; 21,770 of starvation. Owing to the efforts of emigration agents

and remittances sent from relatives abroad in the same year, 89,783

persons embarked for Canada. They were flying from hunger, but they

could not fly from the fever that follows in the wake of hunger, and

6,100 died and were thrown overboard on the voyage, 4,100 died on

their arrival in Canada, 5,200 in hospitals, and 1,900 in interior

towns.


Great Britain was nearer than America, and many who could not

escape to America rushed to the inhospitable shores of Britain; but

pressure was brought to bear upon the steamship companies, and they

raised the rates upon all passengers by steerage to an almost

prohibitive price. In this flight to England occurred one of the most

fearful tragedies of all history, a


---

p.147




tragedy which, in our opinion, surpasses that of the Black

Hole of Calcutta in its accumulation of fearful and gruesome horrors.

On December 2, 1848, a steamer left

Sligo with 200 steerage passengers on board bound for Liverpool. On

that bleak north-western coast such a passage is at all times rough,

and storms are both sudden and fierce. Such a storm came on during the

night, and as the unusual number of passengers crowded the deck the

crew unceremoniously and brutally drove them below decks, and battened

down the hatches to prevent their re-emergence. In the best of weather

the steerage of such a coasting vessel is, even when empty of human

freight, foul, suffocating and unbearable; the imagination fails to

realise what it must have been on that awful night when 200 poor

wretches were driven into its depths. To add to the horror, when some

of the more desperate beat upon the hatches and demanded release, the

mate, in a paroxysm of rage, ordered tarpaulin to be thrown across the

opening to stifle their cries. It did stifle the cries, it also

excluded the air and the light, and there in that inferno those 200

human beings fought, struggled and gasped for air while the elements

warred outside and the frail tub of a ship was tossed upon the surface

of the waters. At last, when some one stronger than the rest managed

to break through and reach the deck, he confronted the ship's officers

with the news that their brutality had made them murderers, that grim

death was reaping his harvest amongst the passengers. It was too true.

Out of the 200 passengers battened down below decks, 72, more than a

third of the entire number, had expired, suffocated for want of air or

mangled to death in the blind struggle of despair in the darkness.

Such is the tale of that voyage of the ship ‘Londonderry’, surely the most

horrible tale of the sea in the annals of any white people!


Amidst such conditions the Irish Confederation had been preaching

the moral righteousness of rebellion, and discoursing learnedly in

English to a starving people, the most of whom


---

p.148




knew only Irish, about the historical examples of Holland,

Belgium, Poland, and the Tyrol. A few men, notably John Mitchel, James

Fintan Lalor, and Thomas Devin Reilly, to their credit be it said,

openly advocated, as the first duty of the people, the refusal to pay

rents, the retention of their crops to feed their own families, and

the breaking-up of bridges and tearing-up of railroad lines, to

prevent the removal of food from the country. Had such advice been

followed by the Young Irelanders as a body it would, as events showed,

have been enthusiastically adopted by the people at large, in which

event no force in the power of England could have saved landlordism or

the British Empire in Ireland. As explained by Fintan Lalor, the

keenest intellect in Ireland in his day, it meant the avoidance of all

pitched battles with the English army, and drawing it into a struggle

along lines and on a plan of campaign where its discipline, training,

and methods would be a hindrance rather than a help, and where no

mobilisation, battalion-drilling nor technical knowledge of military

science was required of the insurgent masses. In short, it involved a

social and a national revolution, each resting upon the other. But the

men who advocated this were in a hopeless minority, and the chiefs of

the Young Irelanders were as rabidly solicitous about the rights of

the landlord as were the chiefs of the English Government. While the

people perished, the Young Irelanders talked, and their talk was very

beautiful, thoroughly grammatical, nicely polished, and the proper

amount of passion introduced always at the proper psychological

moment. But still the people perished. Eventually the Government

seized upon the really dangerous man—the man who had hatred of

injustice deeply enough rooted to wish to destroy it at all costs, the

man who had faith enough in the masses to trust a revolutionary

outbreak to their native impulses, and who possessed the faculty of

combining thought with action, John Mitchell. With his arrest the

people looked for immediate revolution,


---

p.149




so did the Government, so did Mitchel himself. All were

disappointed. John Mitchel was carried off to penal servitude in Van

Diemen's Land (Tasmania) after scornfully refusing to sign a manifesto

presented to him in his cell by Thomas Francis Meagher and others,

counselling the people *not* to attempt to rescue

him. The working class of Dublin and most of the towns were clamouring

for their leaders to give the word for a rising; in many places in the

country the peasantry were acting spontaneously. Eventually news

reached Dublin in July, 1848, that warrants were issued for the arrest

of the chiefs of the Young Ireland party. They determined to appeal to

the country. But everything had to be done in a ‘respectable’ manner; English army on one side,

provided with guns, bands, and banners; Irish army on the other side,

also provided with guns, bands and banners, ‘serried ranks with glittering steel’, no mere

proletarian insurrection, and no interference with the rights of

property. When C. G. Duffy was arrested on Saturday, 9th of July, in Dublin, the Dublin workers

surrounded the military escort on the way to the prison at Newgate,

stopped the carriage, pressed up to Duffy and offered to begin the

insurrection then and there. ‘Do you wish to be rescued’? said

one of the leaders. ‘Certainly not’, said Duffy. And the puzzled

toilers fell back and allowed the future Australian Premier to go to

prison. In Cashel, Tipperary, Michael Doheny was arrested. The people

stormed the jail and rescued him. He insisted upon giving himself up

again and applied for bail. In Waterford Meagher was arrested. As he

was being taken through the city, guarded by troops, the people

erected a barricade in the way across a narrow bridge over the River

Suir, and when the carriage reached the bridge some cut the traces of

the horses and brought the cavalcade to a standstill. Meagher ordered

them to remove the barricade; they begged him to give the word for

insurrection and they would begin then and there. The important city

was in their


---

p.150




hands, but Meagher persisted in going with the soldiers,

and the poor working-class rebels of Waterford let him go, crying out

as they did so, ‘You will regret it, you will regret it, and it is

your own fault’. Meagher afterwards proved himself a fearless

soldier of a regular army, but as an insurgent he lacked the necessary

initiative.


But the crowning absurdity of all was the leadership of William

Smith O'Brien. He wandered through the country telling the starving

peasantry to get ready, but refusing to allow them to feed themselves

at the expense of the landlords who had so long plundered, starved,

and evicted them; he would not allow his followers to seize upon the

carts of grain passing along the roads where the people were dying of

want of food; at Mullinahone he refused to allow his followers to fell

trees to build a barricade across the road until they had asked

permission of the landlords who owned the trees; when the people of

Killenaule had a body of dragoons entrapped between two barricades he

released the dragoons from their dangerous situation upon their leader

assuring him that he had no warrant for his (O'Brien's) arrest; in

another place he surprised a party of soldiers in the Town Hall with

their arms taken apart for cleaning purposes, and instead of

confiscating the arms, he told the soldiers that their arms were as

safe as they would be in Dublin Castle.


When we remember the state of Ireland then, with her population

perishing of famine, all the above recital reads like a page of comic

opera. Unfortunately it is not; it is a page from the blackest period

of Ireland's history. Reading it, we can understand why Smith O'Brien

has a monument in Dublin, although Fintan Lalor's name and writings

have been boycotted for more than fifty years. W. A. O'Connor, B.A.,

in his History of the Irish People, sums up Smith O'Brien's career thus:—‘The man had broken up a peaceful organisation in the cause of war, promised war to a people in desperate strait,


---

p.151




went into the country to wage war, then considered it guilt to do any act of war’. It must, of course, be conceded that Smith O'Brien was a man of high moral probity, but it is equally necessary to affirm that he was a landlord, vehemently solicitous for the rights of his class, and allowing his solicitude for those rights to stand between the millions of the Irish race and their hopes of life and freedom. It ought, however, also be remembered, in extenuation of his conduct in that awful crisis, that he had inherited vast estates as the result of the social, national, and religious

apostacy of his forefathers, and in view of such an ancestry, it is

more wonderful that he had dreamed of rebellion than that he had

repudiated revolution.


Had Socialist principles been applied to Ireland in those days not

one person need have died of hunger, and not one cent of charity need

have been subscribed to leave a smirch upon the Irish name. But all

except a few men had elevated landlord property and capitalist

political economy to a fetish to be worshipped, and upon the altar of

that fetish Ireland perished. At the lowest computation 1,225,000

persons died of absolute hunger; all of these were sacrificed upon the

altar of capitalist thought.


Early in the course of the famine the English Premier, Lord John

Russell, declared that nothing must be done to interfere with private

enterprise or the regular course of trade, and this was the settled

policy of the Government from first to last. A Treasury Minute of August 31,

1846, provided that ‘depots for the sale of food were to be

established at Longford, Banagher, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and

Sligo, and subordinate depots at other places on the western

coast’, but the rules provided that such depots were not to be

opened where food could be obtained from private dealers, and, when

opened, food was to be sold at prices which would permit of private

dealers competing. In all the Acts establishing relief works, it was

stipulated that all the labour must be entirely


---

p.152




unproductive, so as not to prevent capitalists making a

profit either then or in the future. Private dealers made fortunes

ranging from £40,000 to £80,000. In 1845 a Commissariat

Relief Department was organised to bring in Indian Corn for sale in

Ireland, but *none was to be sold until all private

stores were sold out*: the State of Massachusetts hired an

American ship-of-war, the *Jamestown*, loaded it with grain, and

sent it to Ireland; the Government placed the cargo in storage,

claiming that putting it on the market would disturb trade. A Poor

Relief Bill in 1847 made provision for the employment of labour on

public works, but stipulated that none should be employed who retained

more than a quarter of an acre of land; this induced tens of thousands

to surrender their farms for the sake of a bite to eat, and saved the

landlords all the trouble and expense of eviction. When this had been

accomplished to a sufficient extent 734,000 persons were discharged,

and as they had given up their farms to get employment on the works

they were now as helpless as men on a raft in mid-ocean. Mr. Mulhall,

in his Fifty Years of National Progress, estimates the number of persons evicted between

1838 and 1888 as 3,668,000; the greater number of these saw their

homes destroyed during the years under consideration, and this Poor

Relief Bill, nick-named an ‘Eviction-Made-Easy-Act’, was one main weapon for their undoing. In 1846, England,

hitherto a Protectionist country, adopted Free Trade, ostensibly in

order to permit corn to come freely and cheaply to the starving Irish.

In reality, as Ireland was a corn and grain exporting country, the

measure brought Continental agricultural produce to England into

competition with that of Ireland, and hence, by lowering agricultural

prices, still further intensified the misery of the Irish producing

classes. The real meaning of the measure was that England, being a

manufacturing nation, desired to cheapen food in order that its wage-slaves might remain content with low wages, and indeed one of the most

immediate results


---

p.153




of free trade in England was a wholesale reduction of the

wages of the manufacturing proletariat.


The English capitalist class, with that hypocrisy that everywhere

characterises the class in its public acts, used the misery of the

Irish as a means to conquer the opposition of the English landlord

class to free trade in grains, but in this, as in every other measure

of the famine years, they acted consistently upon the lines of

capitalist political economy. Within the limits of that social system

and its theories their acts are unassailable and unimpeachable; it is

only when we reject that system, and the intellectual and social

fetters it imposes, that we really acquire the right to denounce the

English administration of Ireland during the famine as a colossal

crime against the human race. The non-socialist Irish man or woman who

fumes against that administration is in the illogical position of

denouncing an effect of whose cause he is a supporter. That cause was

the system of capitalist property. With the exception of those few men

we have before named, the Young Ireland leaders of 1848 failed to rise

to the grandeur of the opportunity offered them to choose between

human rights and property rights as a basis of nationality, and the

measure of their failure was the measure of their country's

disaster.




---

p.154


Chapter XIV


Socialistic Teaching Of Young Irelanders;

The Thinkers And The Workers
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


*> 1. ‘‘What do ye at our door,
>   
> Ye guard our master's granaries from the thin hands of the
> 
> poor.’’
> 

—*Lady Wilde (Speranza)*.**> 1. ‘‘God of Justice, I cried, send Thy spirit down
>   
> On those lords so cruel and proud.
>   
> Soften their hearts and relax their frown,
>   
> Or else, I cried aloud,
>   
> Vouchsafe strength to the peasant's hand
>   
> To drive them at length from out the land.’’
> 

—*Thomas Davis*.*
We have pointed out that the Young Ireland chiefs who had so

fervently declaimed about the revolution were utterly incapable of

accepting it when at last it presented itself to them; indeed Doheny

uses that very word in describing the scenes at Cashel. ‘It was the

revolution’, he said, ‘if we had accepted it’. We might with

perfect justice apply to these brilliant but unfortunate men the words

of another writer, Lissagaray, in describing a similar class of

leaders in France, and say ‘having all their life sung the glories

of the Revolution, when it rose up before them they ran away appalled,

like the Arab fisher at the apparition of the genie’. To the

average historian who treats of the relations between Ireland and

England as of a struggle between two nations, without any

understanding of the economic conditions, or of the great world

movements which caught both countries in their grasp, the hesitancy

and vacillation of the Young Ireland chiefs in the crisis of their

country's fate constitutes an insoluble problem and has too often been

used to point a sneer at Irishmen when the


---

p.155




writer was English; or to justify a sickening apology when

the writer was Irish. Neither action is at all warranted. The simple

fact is that the Irish workers in town and country were ready and

willing to revolt, and that the English Government of the time was

saved from serious danger only by the fact that Smith O'Brien and

those who patterned after him, dreaded to trust the nation to the

passion of the so-called lower classes. Had rebellion broken out at

the time in Ireland, the English Chartists, who had been arming and

preparing for a similar purpose would, as indeed Mitchel pointed out

continually in his paper, have seized the occasion to take the field

also. Many regiments of the English army were also honey-combed with

revolt, and had repeatedly shown their spirit by publicly cheering for

the Irish and Chartist cause. An English leader of the Chartists, John

Frost, was sentenced to a heavy term of transportation for his

seditious utterances at this time, and another great English champion

of the working class, Ernest Jones, in commenting upon the case,

declared defiantly in a public meeting that ‘the time would come

when John Mitchel and John Frost would be brought back, and Lord John

Russell sent to take their place, and the Green Flag would fly in

triumph over Downing Street and Dublin Castle’, Downing Street was

the residence of the English Prime Minister. For uttering this

sentiment, Ernest Jones was arrested and sentenced to twelve months'

imprisonment.


In their attitude towards all manifestation of working-class revolt

in England the Young Irelanders were sorely divided. In his paper The United Irishman John Mitchel

hailed it exultantly as an aid to Ireland, and as a presage of the

victory of real democracy, setting aside a large portion of his space

in every issue to chronicle the progress of the cause of the people in

England. His attitude in this matter was one of the most potent causes

of his enduring popularity amongst the masses. On the other hand, the

section of Young Irelanders who had


---

p.156




made Smith O'Brien their idol for no other discoverable

reason than the fact that he was rich and most respectable, strove by

every means in their power to disassociate the cause of Ireland from

the cause of democracy. A wordy war between Mitchel and his critics

ensued, each side appealing to the precedent of 1798, with the result

that Mitchel was easily able to prove that the revolutionists of that

period—notably Wolfe Tone—had not only allied the cause of

Ireland with the cause of democracy in general, but had vehemently

insisted upon the necessity of a social revolution in Ireland at the

expense of the landed aristocracy. Copying Fintan Lalor, Mitchel made

the principles involved in those ideas the slogans of his

revolutionary campaign. He insisted correctly upon a social

insurrection as the only possible basis for a national revolution,

that the same insurrectionary upheaval that destroyed and ended the

social subjection of the producing classes would end the hateful

foreign tyranny reared upon it. Two passages from his writings are

especially useful as bearing out and attesting his position on those

points—points that are still the fiercest subjects of dispute in

Ireland. In his Letter to the farmers of

Ireland March 4, 1848, h

esays, ‘But I am told it is vain to speak thus to you; that the peace

policy of O'Connell is dearer to you than life and honour—that

many of your clergy, too, exhort you to die rather than violate what

the English call ‘law’—and that you are

resolved to take their bidding. Then die—die in your patience

and perseverance, but be well assured of this—that the priest

who bids you perish patiently amidst your own golden harvest preaches

the gospel of England, insults manhood and common sense, bears false

witness against religion, and blasphemes the Providence of

God’.


When the Republican Government, which came into power in Paris

after the revolution of February, 1848, recognizing that it owed its

existence to the armed working men, and that those workers were

demanding some security for their own


---

p.157




class as a recompense for their bloody toil, enacted a law

guaranteeing ‘the right to work’ to all, and

pledging the credit of the nation to secure that right, Mitchel

joyfully hailed that law as an indication that the absurd theories of

what he rightfully styled the ‘English

system’, or capitalism, had no longer a hold upon the minds of the

French people. We quote a portion of that article. Our readers will

note that the Free Trade referred to is Free Trade in Labour as

against State Protection of the rights of the workers:


> 
> Dynasties and thrones are not half so important as workshops, farms
> 
> and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties and thrones, and even
> 
> provisional governments, are good for anything exactly in proportion
> 
> as they secure fair play, justice, and freedom to those who
> 
> labour.
> 
> 
> It is here that France is really ahead of all the world. The great
> 
> Third Revolution has overthrown the enlightened pedantic political
> 
> economy (what we know in Ireland as the English political economy, or
> 
> the Famine Political Economy), and has established once and for all
> 
> the true and old principles of protection to labour, and the right and
> 
> duty of combination among workmen.
> 
> 
> By a decree of the Provisional Government dated February 25th:
> 
> 
> It engages to guarantee work to all citizens. It recognises the
> 
> right of workmen to combine for the purpose of enjoying the lawful
> 
> proceeds of their labour’’
> 
> .




The French Republicans do not, like ignorant and barbarous English

Whigs, recognise a right to pauper relief and make it a premium upon

idleness. They know that man has a charter to eat bread in the sweat

of his brow and not otherwise, and they acknowledge that highest and

most sacred mission of government to take care that bread may be had

for the earning. For this reason they expressly, and in set terms,

renounce ‘competition’ and ‘free trade’ *in the sense in

which an


---

p.158




English Whig uses these words*, and deliberately adopt

combination and protection—that the nation should combine to

protect by laws its own national industry, and that individuals should

combine with other individuals to protect by trades associations the

several branches of national industry.


The free trade and competition—in other words the English

system—is pretty well understood now; its obvious purpose and

effect are to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, to make

capital the absolute ruler of the world, and labour a blind and

helpless slave. By free trade the manufacturers of Manchester are

enabled to clothe India, China, and South America, and the artizans of

Manchester can hardly keep themselves covered from the cold. By dint

of free trade Belfast grows more linen cloth than it ever did before;

but the men who weave it have hardly a shirt to their backs. Free

trade fills with corn the stores of speculating capitalists, but

leaves those who have sown and reaped the corn without a meal. Free

trade unpeoples villages and peoples poorhouses consolidates farms and

gluts the graveyards with famished corpses.


There is to be no more of this free trade in France. Men can no

longer ‘do what they like with their own’ there.


February, 1848, came, and the pretext of the reform banquet. Again

Paris had her three days' agony, and was delivered of her third and

fairest born revolution.


There could be no mistake this time; the rubbish of thrones and

dynasties is swept out for ever, and the people sit sovereign in the

land. One of their first and greatest acts is the enactment of a

commission to inquire into the whole of the great labour question, and

to all the documents issued by this commission appear signed the names

of Louis Blanc and the insurgent of Lyons, Albert Ouvrier (workman).

He is not ashamed of his title, though now a great officer of the

State. He is a working man, and is proud of it ‘in any bond, bill,

quittance, or obligation’, Ouvrier.




---

p.159


Sixty-six years ago the farmers of France had their

revolution. Eighteen years ago the ‘respectable’ middle classes had theirs, and have

made a good penny in it since, but upon this third and last all the

world may see the stamp and impress of the man who made

it—Albert Ouvrier, his mark. We have all three revolutions to

accomplish, and the sooner we set about it the better. Only let us

hope all the work may be done in one. Let not the lessons of history

be utterly useless.


The detestable system of ‘free trade’ and

‘fair competition’ which is described by Louis

Blanc as ‘that specious system of leaving unrestricted all pecuniary

dealings between man and man, which leaves the poor man at the mercy

of the rich, and promises to cupidity, that waits its time, an easy

victory over hunger that cannot wait’, the system that seeks to

make Mammon and not God or justice rule this world—in one word,

the English or famine system—must be abolished utterly; in farms

or workshops, in town and country, abolished utterly; and to do this

were worth three revolutions, or three times three.



So wrote Mitchel when, burning with a holy hatred of tyranny, he

poured the vitriol of his scorn upon all the pedants who strutted

around him, pedants who were as scrupulous in polishing a phrase for a

lecture as a sword for a parade—and incapable of advancing

beyond either.


His joy was, we now know, somewhat premature, as the government

which passed the law was itself a capitalistic government, and as soon

as it found itself strong enough, and had won over the army, repealed

its own law, and suppressed, with the most frightful bloodshed, the

June insurrection of the workmen striving to enforce its fulfilment.

It is the latter insurrection which Mitchel denounces in his Jail Journal when, led astray by the

garbled reports of English newspapers, he anathematises the very men

whom he had in this article, when fuller sources of information were

available,


---

p.160




courageously and justly praised. But another

revolutionist, Devin Reilly, in The Irish Felon, more correctly appraised the position of the June

insurgents, and also appreciated the fact that Ireland for its

redemption required something more far-reaching, something sounding

deeper springs of human action, something more akin to the teachings

that inspired the heroic workers of France than was to be found in the

‘personal probity’, or ‘high principles’, or ‘aristocratic

descent’, or ‘eminent respectability’ of a few leaders.


When Mitchel was arrested and his paper suppressed, two other

papers sprang up to take the post of danger thus left vacant. One The Irish Tribune, represented the

element which stood for the ‘moral right of insurrection’, and

the other, The Irish Felon, embodied the ideas of those who insisted that the English conquest of

Ireland was two-fold, social, or economic, and political, and that

therefore the revolution must also have these two aspects. These

latter were at all times in the fullest sympathy with the movements of

the working-class democracy at home and abroad. John Martin edited The Irish Felon, James Fintan Lalor

and Devin Reilly were its chief writers. Reilly, who hailed originally

from Monaghan, had long been a close observer of, and sympathiser

with, the movements of the working class, and all schemes of social

redemption. As a writer on The

Nation newspaper he had contributed a series of articles

on the great French Socialist, Louis Blanc, in a review of his great

work Dix Ans (Ten Years), in which, while dissenting from the ‘State Socialistic’ schemes of social

regeneration favoured by Blanc, he yet showed the keenest appreciation

of the gravity and universality of the social question, as well as

grasping the innate heroism and sublimity of the working-class

movement. This attitude he preserved to the last of his days. When in

exile in America, after the insurrection, he was chosen by the

printers of Boston to edit a paper, the Protective

Union, they had founded on


---

p.161




co-operative principles to advocate the rights of labour,

and was thus one of the first pioneers of labour journalism in the

United States—a proud and fitting position for a true Irish

revolutionist. As writer in The American

Review he wrote a series of articles on the European

situation, of which Horace Greeley said that, if collected and

published as a book, they would create a revolution in Europe.

Commenting upon the uprising in France in June he says in The Irish Felon:


We are not Communists—we abhor communism for the same

reason we abhor poor-law systems, and systems founded on the absolute

sovereignty of wealth. Communism destroys the independence and dignity

of labour, makes the workingman a State pauper and takes his manhood

from him. But, communism or no communism, these 70,000 workmen had a

clear right to existence—they had the best right to existence of

any men in France, and if they could have asserted their right by

force of arms they would have been fully justified. *The social system in which a man willing to work is

compelled to starve, is a blasphemy, an anarchy, and no system*.

For the present these victims of monarchic rule, disowned by the

republic, are conquered; 10,000 are slain, 20,000 perhaps doomed to

the Marquesas. *But for all that the rights of labour

are not conquered, and will not and cannot be conquered. Again and

again the labourer will rise up against the idler—the workingmen

will meet this bourgeoisie, and grapple and war with them till their

equality is established, not in word, but in fact*’’

.
This was the spirit of the men grouped around The Irish Felon, its editor alone

excepted. Students of Socialism will recognize that many who are

earnest workers for Socialism to-day would, like Devin Reilly, have

‘abhorred’ the crude Communism of 1848. The

fact that he insisted upon the unqualified right of the working class

to work out its own salvation, by force of arms if necessary, is what

entitles Devin Reilly to a high place of honour in the estimation of

the militant


---

p.162




proletariat of Ireland. The opening passage in an Address of the Medical Students of Dublin to

All Irish Students of Science and Art, adopted at a

meeting held in Northumberland Buildings, Eden Quay, on April 4, 1848, and signed by John Savage as

Chairman and Richard Dalton Williams as Secretary, shows also that

amongst the educated young men of that generation there was a general

recognition of the fact that the struggle of Ireland against her

oppressors was naturally linked with, and ought to be taken in

conjunction with, the world-wide movement of the democracy. It says

‘a war is waging at this hour all over Europe between Intelligence

and Labour on the one side and Despotism and Force on the other’, a

sentiment which Joseph Brennan versified in a poem on ‘Divine Right’, in which the excellence of the sentiment must be held to atone for the poverty of the poetry. One verse says:—


> 1. The only right acknowledged
>   
> By the people living now,
>   
> Is the right to obtain honour
>   
> By the sweat of brain and brow.
>   
> The Right Divine of Labour
>   
> To be first of earthly things,
>   
> That the Thinker and the Worker
>   
> Are manhood's only kings
> 





But the palm of honour for the clearest exposition of the doctrine

of revolution, social and political, must be given to James Fintan

Lalor, of Tenakill, Queen's County. Lalor, unfortunately, suffered

from a slight physical disability, which incapacitated him from

attaining to any leadership other than intellectual, a fact that, in

such a time and amidst such a people, was fatal to his immediate

influence. Yet in his writings, as we study them to-day, we find

principles of action and of society which have within them not only

the best plan of campaign suited for the needs of a country seeking

its freedom through insurrection against a dominant nation, but also

held the seeds of


---

p.163




the more perfect social peace of the future. All his

writings at this period are so illuminating that we find it difficult

to select from the mass any particular passages which more deserve

reproduction than others. But as an indication of the line of argument

pursued by this peerless thinker, and as a welcome contrast to the

paralysing respect, nay, reverence, for landlordism evidenced by Smith

O'Brien and his worshippers, perhaps the following passages will

serve. In an article entitled The Faith of a

Felon, published July 8, 1848, he

tells how he had striven to convert the Irish Confederation to his

views and failed, and says:




> 
> They wanted an alliance with the landowners. They chose to consider
> 
> them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce them to hoist the
> 
> green flag. They wished to preserve an aristocracy. They desired, not
> 
> a democratic, but merely a national, revolution. Had the
> 
> Confederation, in the May or June of '47, thrown heart and mind and
> 
> means into the movement, I pointed out they would have made it
> 
> successful, and settled at once and forever all questions between us
> 
> and England. The opinions I then stated and which I yet stand firm to,
> 
> are these:
> 
> 1. That in order to save their own lives, the occupying
> 
> tenants of the soil of Ireland ought, next autumn, to refuse all rent
> 
> and arrears of rent then due, beyond and except the value of the
> 
> overplus of harvest-produce remaining in their hands, after having
> 
> deducted and reserved a due and full provision for their own
> 
> subsistence during the next ensuing twelve months.
> 2. That they ought to refuse and resist being made beggars,
> 
> landless and homeless, under the English law of ejection.
> 3. That they ought further, *on
> 
> principle*, to refuse *all rent* to the
> 
> present usurping proprietors, until the people, the *true proprietors* (or lords paramount, in legal
> 
> parlance) have, in national congress or convention, decided what rents
> 
> they are to pay, and to whom they are to pay them.
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.164
> 
> 6. And that the people, on grounds of policy and economy,
> 
> ought to decide (as a general rule admitting of reservations) that
> 
> these rents shall be paid to *themselves*, the
> 
> people, for public purposes, and for behoof and benefit of them, the
> 
> entire general people.
> 
> 
> 
> It has been said to me that such a war, on the principles I
> 
> propose, would be looked on with detestation by Europe. I assert the
> 
> contrary; I say such a war would propagate itself throughout Europe.
> 
> Mark the words of this prophecy—the principle I propound goes to
> 
> the foundations of Europe, and sooner or later will cause Europe to
> 
> outrise. *Mankind will yet be masters of the
> 
> earth*. The right of the people to make the laws—this
> 
> produced the first great modern earthquake, whose latent shocks, even
> 
> now, are heaving in the heart of the world. The right of the people to
> 
> own the land—this will produce the next. Train your hands, and
> 
> your sons' hands, gentlemen of the earth, for you and they will yet
> 
> have to use them.
> 
> 
> 




The paragraph is significant, as demonstrating that Fintan Lalor,

like all the really dangerous revolutionists of Ireland, advocated his

principles as part of the creed of the democracy of the world, and not

merely as applicable only to the incidents of the struggle of Ireland

against England. But this latter is the interpretation which the

middle-class politicians and historians of Ireland have endeavoured to

give his teachings after the failure of their attempt, continued for

half a century, to ignore or suppress all reference to his

contribution to Irish revolutionary literature. The working-class

democracy of Ireland will, it is to be hoped, be, for their part, as

assertive of the universality of Lalor's sympathies as their bourgeois

compatriots are in denying it. That working class would be uselessly

acquiescing in the smirching of its own record, were it to permit

emasculation of the message of this Irish apostle of revolutionary

Socialism. And, in emphasising the catholicity of his sympathies as

well as the keenness of his insight into the social structure, that


---

p.165




Irish working class will do well to confront the apostate

patriotism of the politicians and anti-Socialists of Ireland with the

following brilliant passage from the work already quoted, and thus

show how Lalor answered the plea of those who begged him to moderate

or modify his position, to preach it as a necessity of Ireland's then

desperate condition, and not as a universal principle.


I attest and urge the plea of utter and desperate necessity to

fortify her (Ireland's) claim, but not to found it. *I rest it on no temporary and passing conditions, but on principles that are permanent, and imperishable, and universal—available to all times and to all countries as well as to our own*—I pierce through the upper stratum of occasional and shifting circumstances to bottom and base on the rock below. I put the question in its eternal form—the form in which, how often so ever suppressed for a season, it can never be finally subdued, but will remain and return, outliving and outlasting the cowardice and

corruption of generations. I view it as ages will view it—*not through the mists of a famine, but by the living

lights of the firmament*.’’


By such lights the teachings of Fintan Lalor are being viewed to-day, with the result that, as he recedes from us in time, his grandeur

as a thinker is more and more recognised; his form rises clearer and

more distinct to our view, as the forms of the petty agitators and

phrase-mongering rebels who seemed to dominate the scene at that

historic period sink into their proper place, as unconscious factors

in the British Imperial plan of conquest by famine. Cursed by the

fatal gift of eloquence, our Irish Girondins of the Confederation

enthralled the Irish people and intoxicated themselves out of the

possibility of serious thinking; drunken with words they failed to

realise that the ideas originating with Fintan Lalor, and in part

adopted and expounded with such dramatic power by Mitchel, were a more

serious menace to the hated power of England than any that the dream

of a union of classes could ever materialise on Irish soil;


---

p.166




the bones of the famine victims, whitening on every Irish

hill and valley, or tossing on every wave of the Atlantic, were the

price Ireland paid for the eloquence of its rebels, and their scornful

rejection of the Socialistic teachings of its thinkers.




---

p.167


Chapter XV


Some More Irish Pioneers Of The Socialist Movement
---------------------------------------------------------------


*Either the Sermon on the Mount can rule this world

or it cannot. The Devil has a right to rule if we let him, but he has

no right to call his rule Christian Civilisation’’—*John Boyle O'Reilly*.*
Looking backward to that eventful period (after '48) we can now see

that all hopes of a revolutionary movement had perished for that

generation, had been strangled in the love embraces of our Girondins;

but that fact naturally was not so apparent to the men of the time.

Hence it is not to be wondered at that journalistic activity on the

part of the revolutionists did not cease with the suppression of The United Irishman, The Irish Tribune, or The Irish Felon. A small fugitive

publication entitled the Irish National Guard, published apparently by a body of courageous

Dublin workingmen of advanced opinions, also led a chequered existence

championing the cause of revolution, and in January, 1849, another

paper, The Irishman, was set on

foot by Bernard Fullam, who had been business manager of The Nation. Fullam also started a

new organisation, the Democratic

Association, which is described as ‘an association with aims

almost entirely socialistic and revolutionary’. This association

also spread amongst the Irish workers in Great Britain, and had the

cordial support and endorsement of Fergus O'Connor, who saw in it the

realisation of his long-hoped for dream of a common programme uniting

the democracies of Ireland and Great Britain. But the era of

revolution was past for that generation in both countries, and it was

too late for the working-class revolutionists to repair


---

p.168




the harm the middle-class doctrinaires had done. The paper

died in May, 1850, after an existence of seventeen months. Among its

contributors was Thomas Clarke Luby, afterwards one of the chief

writers on the staff of The Irish

People, organ of the Fenian Brotherhood, a fact that

explains much of the advanced doctrine advocated by that journal.

Another of the staff of The

Irishman in those days was Joseph Brennan, whom we have

already quoted as writing in The Irish

Tribune. Brennan finally emigrated to America and

contributed largely to the pages of the New Orleans Delta, many of his poems in that

journal showing the effects of his early association with the currents

of social-revolutionary thought in Ireland.


Before leaving this period a few words should be said of the

impress left upon the labour movement of Great Britain by the working

class Irish exiles. An English writer, H. S. Foxwell, has said that

‘Socialist propagandism has been mainly carried on by men of Celtic

or Semitic blood’, and, however true that may be, as a general

statement, it is at least certain that to the men of Celtic blood the

English-speaking countries are indebted for the greater part of the

early propaganda of the Socialist conception of society. We have

already referred to Fergus O'Connor; another Irishman who carved his

name deep on the early structures of the labour and socialist movement

in England as an author and Chartist leader was James Bronterre

O'Brien. Among his best known works are:— Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery: How it came into the world, and how it may be made to go out of it, published in 1830; Address to the Oppressed and Mystified People of Great Britain, 1851; European Letters; and the pages of the National Reformer, which he founded in 1837. At first an advocate of physical force, he in his later days gave himself almost exclusively to the development of a system of land banks, in which he believed he had found a way to circumvent the


---

p.169




political and military power of the capitalist class.

Bronterre O'Brien is stated to have been the first to coin in English

the distinctive title of ‘social democrat’, as

an appellation for the adherents of the new order.


An earlier Irish apostle of the Socialist movement of the working

class, John Doherty, is much less known to the present generation than

O'Brien, yet his methods bore more of the marks of constructive

revolutionary statesmanship, and his message was equally clear. He

appears to have been an almost dominant figure in the labour movement

of England and Ireland between the years 1830 and 1840, spent little

time in the development of Socialist theories, but devoted all his

energies to organizing the working-class and teaching it to act on its

own initiative. He was General Secretary of the Federation of Spinning Societies, which aimed to

unite all the textile industries in one great national industrial

union and was widespread throughout Great Britain and Ireland; he

founded a National Association for the Protection

of Labour, which directed its efforts towards building up a union

of the working class, effective alike for economic and political ends,

and reached to 100,000 members, the Belfast trades applying in a body

for affiliation; he founded and edited a paper, The Voice of the People, in 1831,

which, although sevenpence per copy, attained to a circulation of

30,000, and is described as ‘giving great attention to Radical

politics, and the progress of revolution on the Continent’. In his

 History of Trades Unionism,

Sidney Webb quotes Francis Place—the best informed man in the

labour movement in the England of his day—as declaring that,

during the English Reform Bill crisis in 1832, Doherty, instead of

being led astray, as many labour leaders were, to rally to the side of

the middle class reformers, was ‘advising the working class to use

the occasion for a Social Revolution’. This was indeed the keynote

of Doherty's message: whatever was to be done was to be done by the

working class. He is summed up as of ‘wide


---

p.170




information, great natural shrewdness, and far-reaching

aims’. He was born in Larne in 1799.


Another Doherty, Hugh, attained to some prominence in Socialistic

circles in England, and we find him in 1841 in London editing a

Socialist paper, The Phalanx,

which devoted itself to the propagation of the views of the French

Socialist, Fournier. It had little influence on the labour movement

owing to its extremely doctrinaire attitude, but appears to have had

circulation and correspondents in the United States. It was one of the

first journals to be set up by a type-setting machine, and one of its

numbers contains a minute description of the machine, which forms

curious reading to-day.


In general, the effect upon the English labour movement of the

great influx of Irish workers, seems to us to have been beneficial. It

is true that their competition for employment had at first a seriously

evil effect upon wages, but, on the other hand, a study of the

fugitive literature of the movement of that time shows that the

working-class Irish exiles were present and active in the ranks of

militant labour in numbers out of all proportion to the ratio they

bore to the population at large. And always they were the advanced,

the least compromising, the most irreconcilable element in the

movement. Of course the Socialist sectarians and philosophers did not

love the Irish —Charles Kingsley, that curious combination of

Prelate, Socialist, Chauvinist and Virulent Bigot, can scarcely remain

within the bounds of decent language when he brings an Irishman into

the thread of his narrative—but the aversion was born out of

their fear of the Irish workers' impatience of compromise and

eagerness for action. And hence, the very qualities which endeared the

Irish worker to the earnest rebel against capitalist iniquity,

estranged him from the affections of those whose social position

enabled them to become the historians of his movements.




---

p.171


Chapter XVI


The Working Class: The Inheritors Of The Irish Ideals Of The Past—The Repository Of The Hopes Of The Future
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


*> 1. ‘‘Is a Christian to starve, to submit, to bow down
>   
> As at some high consecrated behest,
>   
> Hugging close the old maxims, that ‘Weakness is strength’,
>   
> And ‘Whatsoever is is the best?’
>   
> O, texts of debasement! O, creed of deep shame!
>   
> O, Gospel of infamy treble.
>   
> Who strikes when he's struck, and takes when he starves,
>   
> In the eyes of the Lord is no rebel.’’
> 

—*J. F. O'Donnell*.*
This book does not aspire to be a history of labour in Ireland; it

is rather a record of labour in Irish History. For that reason the

plan of the book has precluded any attempt to deal in detail with the

growth, development, or decay of industry in Ireland, except as it

affected our general argument. That argument called for an explanation

of the position of labour in the great epochs of our modern history,

and with the attitude of Irish leaders towards the hopes, aspirations,

and necessities of those who live by labour. Occasionally, as when

analysing the ‘prosperity’ of Grattan's

Parliament, and the decay of Irish trade following the Legislative

Union of 1800, we have been constrained to examine the fundamental

causes which make for the progress, industrially or commercially, of

some nations and the retrogression of others. For this apparent

digression no apology is made, and none is called for; it was

impossible to present our readers with a clear idea of the historical

position of labour


---

p.172




at any given moment, without explaining the economic and

political causes which contributed to make possible or necessary its

attitude. For the same reason it has been necessary sometimes to

retrace our footsteps over some period already covered, in order to

draw attention to a phase of the subject, the introduction of which in

the previous narrative would have marred the view of the question then

under examination. Thus the origin of trade unionism in Ireland has

not been dealt with, although in the course of our study we have shown

that the Irish trades were well organised. Nor are we now prepared to

enter upon that subject. Perhaps at some more propitious moment we

will be enabled to examine the materials bearing upon the matter, and

trace the growth of the institution in Ireland. Sufficient for the

present to state that Trades Guilds existed in Ireland as upon the

Continent and England, during Roman Catholic, pre-Reformation days;

that after the Reformation those Trade Guilds became exclusively

Protestant, and even anti-Catholic, within the English Pale; that they

continued to refuse admission to Catholics even after the passage of

the Catholic Emancipation Act, and that these old Trade Guilds were

formally abolished by law in 1840. But the Catholic and Protestant

workmen who were excluded from guild membership (Episcopalians only

being eligible) did nevertheless organise themselves, and it was their

trade unions which dominated the labour world to the wrath of the

capitalists and landlords, and the chagrin of the Governments. One

remarkable and instructive feature of their organisation in town and

country was the circumstance that every attempt at political rebellion

in Ireland was always preceded by a remarkable development of unrest,

discontent, and class consciousness amongst their members,

demonstrating clearly that, to the mind of the thoughtful Irish worker

political and social subjection were very nearly related. In The Dublin Chronicle, January 28, 1792, there is a record of a

great strike of the journeymen


---

p.173




tailors of Dublin, in the course of which, it is stated,

armed tailors went to the workrooms of Messrs. Miller, Ross Lane;

Leet, Merchant's Quay; Walsh, Castle Street; and Ward, Cope Street,

attacked certain scabs who were working there, cut off the hands of

two, and threw others in the river. In another

nd later issue of the

same journal there is a record of how a few coal porters (dock

labourers) were seized by His Majesty's press-gang with the intention

of compelling them to serve in the navy, and how the organised quay

labourers, on hearing of it, summoned their members, and marching upon

the guard-house where the men were detained, attacked it, defeated the

guard and released their comrades. In the same paper, January 3, 1793, there is a letter from a

gentleman resident at Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, describing how an

armed party of Defenders paraded through that town on its way to

Ardee, how the army was brought out to attack them and a number were

killed. On January 24, 1793, another

correspondent tells how a battle took place between Bailieborough and

Kingscourt, Co. Cavan, ‘between those deluded persons styling

themselves Defenders and a part of the army’, when eighteen

labourers were killed, five badly wounded, and thirty taken prisoners

‘and lodged in Cavan gaol’. There is also on July 23, 1793, the following account of a battle at

Limerick:—


Last night we hear that an express arrived from Limerick with

the following intelligence—that on Saturday night a mob of 7 or

8,000 attacked that city and attempted to burn it; that the army,

militia and citizens were obliged to join to repel these daring

offenders, and to bring the artillery into the streets, and that after

a severe and obstinate resistance the insurgents were dispersed with a

loss of 140 killed and several wounded’’

. Similar battles between

the peasantry and the soldiery, aided by the local landlords, occurred

in the county Wexford.
In the Reports of the Secret Committee of the House of


---

p.174




Lords, 1793, speaking of the Defenders (who, as we have

stated before, were the organised labourers striving to better their

condition by the only means open to them), it says ‘they first

appeared in the county Louth’, ‘soon spread through the counties

of Meath, Cavan, Monaghan and parts adjacent’, and ‘their

measures appear to have been concerted and conducted with the utmost

secrecy and a degree of regularity and system not usual to people in

such mean condition, and as if directed by men of a superior

rank’.


All this, be it noted, was on the eve of the revolutionary struggle

of 1798, and shows how the class struggle of the Irish workers formed

the preparatory school for the insurrectionary effort.


The long-drawn-out struggle of the fight against tithes and the

militant spirit of the Irish trades and Ribbonmen we have already

spoken of, as providing the revolutionary material for 1848, which

Smith O'Brien and his followers were unfit to use. For the next

revolutionary period, that known as the Fenian Conspiracy, the same

coincidence of militant class feeling and revolutionary nationalism is

deeply marked. Indeed it is no wonder that the real nationalists of

Ireland, the Separatists, have always been men of broad human

sympathies and intense democracy, for it has ever been in the heart of

the working class at home that they found their most loyal support,

and in the working class abroad their most resolute defenders.


The Fenian Brotherhood was established in 1857, according to the

statement of John O'Mahony, one of its two chiefs, James Stephens

being the other. Of O'Mahony, John O'Leary says, in his Recollections of Fenians and

Fenianism, that he was an advanced democrat of

Socialistic opinions, and W. A. O'Connor, in his History of the Irish People,

declares that both O'Mahony and Stephens had entered into the secret

societies of France, O'Mahony ‘from mere sympathy’. A further

confirmation of this view of the character of the men


---

p.175




responsible for the Fenian Society is found in a passage

in a journal established in the interests of Fenianism, and published

in London after the suppression of the organ of the Brotherhood, The Irish People, in Dublin, in

1865. This journal, The Flag of

Ireland, quoting from the Paris correspondent of The Irishman, says on October,

1868:—


> 
> It took its rise in the Latin Quarter of this city when John
> 
> O'Mahony, Michael Doheny, and James Stephens were here in exile after
> 
> '48.
> 
> 
> This was the triumvirate from whose plotting brains the idea of
> 
> Fenianism sprung. O'Mahony, deep in lore of Ireland and loving her
> 
> traditions, found its name for the new society; Doheny, with his
> 
> dogged, acute and vigorous character, stamped it with much of the
> 
> force that helped it into life, but to Stephens is due the direction
> 
> it took in line of sympathy with the movements of the Revolution on
> 
> the Continent. He saw that the Irish question was no longer a question
> 
> of religion; his common sense was too large to permit him to consider
> 
> it a question of race even; he felt it was the old struggle which
> 
> agitated France at the end of last century, transferred to new ground;
> 
> the opposing forces were the same, with this difference, that in
> 
> Ireland the people had not the consolation in all cases of saluting
> 
> their tyrants as their countrymen.
> 
> 
> 




The circumstances that the general chosen by Stephens to be the

Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Republican army was no less a

character than General Cluseret, afterwards Commander-in-chief of the

Federals during the Commune of Paris, says more for the principles of

the men who were the brains of the Fenian movement than any testimony

of subordinates.


Coincident with the inception of Fenianism, 1857, commenced in

Ireland a determined labour agitation which culminated in a vigorous

movement amongst the baker journeymen against night labour and in

favour of a reduction of the working hours. Great meetings were held

all over the country during the years


---

p.176




1858-60, in which the rights of labour were most

vehemently asserted and the tyranny of the Irish employers exposed and

denounced. In Wexford, Kilkenny, Clonmel and Waterford night-work was

abolished and day labour established. The movement was considered so

serious that a Parliamentary Committee sat to investigate it; from its

report, as quoted by Karl Marx in his great work on ‘Capital’, we take the following excerpts:—


> 
> In Limerick, where the grievances of the journeymen are
> 
> demonstrated to be excessive, the movement had been defeated by the
> 
> opposition of the master bakers, the miller bakers being the greatest
> 
> opponents. The example of Limerick led to a retrogression in Ennis and
> 
> Tipperary. In Cork, *where the strongest possible
> 
> demonstration of feeling took place*, the masters by exercising
> 
> their power of turning men out of employment, have defeated the
> 
> movement. In *Dublin the master bakers have offered
> 
> the most determined opposition* to the movement, and, by
> 
> discountenancing as much as possible the journeymen promoting it, have
> 
> succeeded in leading the men into acquiescence in Sunday work and
> 
> night work, contrary to the convictions of the men.
> 
> 
> The Committee believe that the hours of labour are limited by
> 
> natural laws which cannot be violated with impunity. That for master
> 
> bakers to induce their workmen by the fear of losing employment, to
> 
> violate their religious convictions and their better feelings, to
> 
> disobey the laws of the land, and to disregard public opinion, is
> 
> calculated to provoke ill-feeling between workmen and
> 
> masters—and affords an example dangerous to religion, morality
> 
> *and social order*. The Committee believe that
> 
> any constant work beyond twelve hours a day encroaches on the domestic
> 
> and private life of the working man, and leads to disastrous moral
> 
> results, interfering with each man's home, and the discharge of his
> 
> family duties as son, brother, husband, or father. That work beyond
> 
> twelve hours
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.177
> 
> 
> 
> 
> has a tendency to undermine the health of the working man,
> 
> and so leads to premature old age and death, to the great injury of
> 
> families of working men, thus deprived of the care and support of the
> 
> head of the family when most required.
> 
> 
> 




The reader will observe that the cities where this movement was

strongest, where the workers had made the strongest fight and class-feeling was highest, were the places where Fenianism developed the

most; it is a matter of historical record that Dublin, Cork, Wexford,

Clonmel, Kilkenny, Waterford and Ennis and their respective counties

were the most responsive to the message of Fenianism. Richard Pigott,

who, before he succumbed to the influence of the gold offered by the

London Times, had a long and

useful career as responsible figurehead for advanced journals in

Ireland, and who in that capacity acquired a thorough knowledge of the

men and movements for whom he was sponsor, gives in his Recollections of an Irish Journalist, this testimony as to the *personnel* of Fenianism, a testimony, it will be

observed, fully bearing out our analysis of the relation between the

revolutionary movement and the working class:—


It is notorious that Fenianism was regarded with unconcealed

aversion, not to say deadly hatred, not merely by the landlords and

the ruling class, but by the Catholic clergy, the middle-class

Catholics, and the great majority of the farming classes. *It was in fact only amongst the youngest and most intelligent of the labouring class, of the young men of the large towns and cities engaged in the humbler walks of mercantile life, of the artisan and working classes, that it found favour*’’

.
Karl Marx quotes from Reports of the Poor Law Inspectors on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin,

1870, to show that between the years 1849 and 1869, while

wages in Ireland had risen fifty or sixty per cent, the prices of all

necessaries had more than doubled. He gives the following extract from

the official accounts of an Irish workhouse:—


---

p.178





| Year ended | Provisions and

Necessaries | Clothing | Total |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 29th Sept.,

1849 | 1*s*. 3[frac14]*d* | 3*d* | 1*s*. 6[frac14]*d*. |
| ''

1869 | 2*s*. 7[frac14]*d*. | 6*d*. | 3*s*. 1[frac14]*d*. |






These facts demonstrate, that in the period during which the Fenian

movement obtained its hold upon the Irish masses in the cities, the

workers were engaged in fierce struggles with their employers, and the

price of all necessaries of life had increased twofold—two

causes sufficient to produce revolutionary ferment, even in a country

without the historical justification for revolution possessed by

Ireland. Great Britain was also in the throes of a fierce agitation as

a result of the terrible suffering of the working class resultant from

the industrial crisis of 1866-7. The Morning

Star, London paper, stated that in six districts of

London 15,000 workmen were in a state of destitution with their

families; Reynolds' Newspaper,

on January 20, 1867, quoted from a

large poster, which it says was placarded all over London, the words

‘Fat Oxen, Starving Men—the fat oxen from their palaces of

glass, have gone to feed the rich in their luxurious abode, while the

starving poor are left to rot and die in their wretched dens’, and

commented that ‘this reminds one of the secret revolutionary

associations which prepared the French people for the events of 1789.

At this moment, while English workmen with their wives and children

are dying of cold and hunger, there are millions of English

gold—the produce of English labour— being invested in

Russian, Spanish, Italian and other foreign enterprises’. And the


---

p.179




London Standard of

April 5, 1866, stated: A frightful

spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis.

Although the unemployed thousands of the East End did not parade with

their black flags en masse the human torrent

was imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They

are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are

40,000 of them. In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful

metropolis, are packed—next door to the most enormous

accumulation of wealth the world ever saw—cheek by jowl with

this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These thousands are now

breaking in upon the other quarters’’

.
This state of hunger and revolt in Great Britain offers an

explanation of the curious phenomenon mentioned by A. M. Sullivan in

 New Ireland, that the Home

Rule or constitutional journals held their own easily in Ireland

itself against The Irish People,

but in Great Britain the Fenian journal simply swept the field clear

of its Irish competitors. The Irish working-class exiles in Great

Britain saw that the nationalist aspirations of their race pointed to

the same conclusion, called for the same action, as the material

interests of their class—viz., the

complete overthrow of the capitalist government and the national and

social tyranny upon which it rested. Any thoughtful reader of the

poems of J. F. O'Donnell—such, for instance, as An Artisan's Garret, depicting in words that

burn, the state of mind of an unemployed Fenian artisan of Dublin,

beside the bedside of his wife dying of hunger—or the sweetly

pleading poetry of J. K. Casey (Leo), cannot wonder at the warm

reception journals containing such teaching met in Great Britain

amidst the men and women of Irish race and of a subject class.


Just as '98 was an Irish expression of the tendencies embodied in

the first French Revolution, as '48 throbbed in sympathy with the

democratic and social upheavals on the Continent of Europe and

England, so Fenianism was a responsive throb in


---

p.180




the Irish heart to those pulsations in the heart of the

European working class which elsewhere produced the International

Working Men's Association. Branches of that Association flourished in

Dublin and Cork until after the Paris Commune, and it is an

interesting study to trace the analogy between the course of

development of the Socialist movement of Europe after the Commune and

that of the Irish revolutionary cause after the failure of '67. In

both cases we witness the abandonment of insurrectionism and the

initiation of a struggle in which the revolting class, while aiming at

revolution, consistently refuse the arbitrament of an armed struggle.

When the revolutionary nationalists threw in their lot with the Irish

Land League, and made the land struggle the basis of their warfare,

they were not only placing themselves in touch once more with those

inexhaustible quarries of material interests from which all the great

Irish statesmen from St. Laurence O'Toole to Wolfe Tone drew the

stones upon which they built their edifice of a militant patriotic

Irish organisation, but they were also, consciously or unconsciously,

placing themselves in accord with the principles which underlie and

inspire the modern movement of labour. This fact was recognised at the

time by most dispassionate onlookers. Thus, in a rather amusing book

published in France in 1887, under the title of Chez Paddy, Englished as Paddy at Home,

the author, a French aristocrat, Baron E. de Mandat-Grancey giving an

account of a tour in Ireland in 1886, in the course of which he made

the acquaintance of many of the Land League leaders, as well as

visited at the mansions of a number of the landlords, makes this

comment:—


For in fact, however they may try to dissimulate it, the Irish

claims, if they do not yet amount to Communism as their avowed

object—and they may still retain a few illusions upon that

point—still it is quite certain that the methods employed by the

Land League would not be disowned by the most advanced

Communists’’

.


---

p.181


It was a recognition of this fact which induced The Irish World, the chief advocate

of the Land League in America, to carry the sub-title of American Industrial Liberator,

and to be the mouthpiece of the nascent labour movement of those days,

as it was also a recognition of this fact which prompted the Irish

middle-class leaders to abandon the land fight, and to lend their

energies to an attempt to focus the whole interest of Ireland upon a

Parliamentary struggle as soon as ever a temporary set back gave them

an opportunity to counsel a change of tactics.


They feared to call into existence a spirit of inquiry into the

rights of property which would not halt at a negation of the

sacredness of fortunes founded upon rent, but might also challenge the

rightfulness of fortunes drawn from profit and interest. They

instinctively realized that such an inquiry would reveal that there

was no fundamental difference between such fortunes: that they were

made, not from land in the one case nor workshops in the other, but

from the social subjection of the non-possessing class, compelled to

toil as tenants on the land or as employees in workshop or

factory.


For the same reason the Land League (which was founded in 1879 at

Irishtown, Co. Mayo, at a meeting held to denounce the exactions of a

certain priest in his capacity as a rackrenting landlord) had had at

the outset to make headway in Ireland against the opposition of all

the official Home Rule Press, and in Great Britain amongst the Irish

exiles to depend entirely upon the championship of poor labourers and

English and Scottish Socialists. In fact those latter were, for years,

the principal exponents and interpreters of Land League principles to

the British masses, and they performed their task unflinchingly at a

time when the ‘respectable’ moneyed men of the

Irish communities in Great Britain cowered in dread of the displeasure

of their wealthy British neighbours.


Afterwards, when the rising tide of victorious revolt in


---

p.182




Ireland compelled the Liberal Party to give a half-hearted

acquiescence to the demands of the Irish peasantry, and the Home Rule-Liberal alliance was consummated, the Irish business men in Great

Britain came to the front and succeeded in worming themselves into all

the places of trust and leadership in the Irish organisations. One of

the first and most bitter fruits of that alliance was the use of the

Irish vote against the candidates of the Socialist and Labour Parties.

Despite the horrified and energetic protests of such men as Michael

Davitt, the solid phalanx of Irish voters was again and again hurled

against the men who had fought and endured suffering, ostracism and

abuse for Ireland, at a time when the Liberal Government was packing

Irish jails with unconvicted Irish men and women. In so manoeuvring to

wean the Irish masses in Great Britain away from their old friends,

the Socialist and Labour Clubs, and to throw them into the arms of

their old enemies the Liberal capitalists, the Irish bourgeois

politicians were very astutely following their class interests, even

while they cloaked their action under the name of patriotism.

Obviously a union of Irish patriotism and Socialist activity, if

furthered and endorsed by Irish organisations in Great Britain, could

not long be kept out of, or if introduced could not well be fought in,

Ireland. Hence their frantic and illogical endeavour to twist and

distort the significance of Irish history, and to put the question of

property, its ownership and development, out of order in all

discussions on Irish nationality.


But that question so dreaded rises again; it will not lie down, and

cannot be suppressed. The partial success of the Land League has

effected a change in Ireland, the portent of which but few realise.

Stated briefly, it means that the recent Land Acts, acting

contemporaneously with the development of trans-Atlantic traffic, are

converting Ireland from a country governed according to the conception

of feudalism into a country shaping itself after capitalistic laws of

trade. To-day the competition of the trust-owned


---

p.183




 farms of the United States and the Argentine Republic is

a more deadly enemy to the Irish agriculturist than the lingering

remnants of landlordism or the bureaucratic officialism of the British

Empire. Capitalism is now the enemy, it reaches across the ocean; and,

after the Irish agriculturist has gathered his harvest and brought it

to market, he finds that a competitor living three thousand miles away

under a friendly flag has undersold and beggared him. The merely

political heresy under which middle class *doctrinaires* have for nearly 250 years cloaked the

Irish fight for freedom has thus run its its course. The fight made by

the Irish septs against the English pale and all it stood for; the

struggle of the peasants and labourers of the 18th and 19th centuries;

the great social struggle of all the ages will again arise and reshape itself to suit the new conditions. The war which the Land League

fought, and then abandoned, before it was either lost or won, will be

taken up by the Irish toilers on a broader field the sharper weapons,

and a more comprehensive knowledge of all the essentials of permanent

victory. As the Irish septs of the past were accounted Irish or English according as they rejected or accepted the native or foreign

social order, as they measured their oppression or freedom by their

loss or recovery of the collective ownership of their lands, so the

Irish toilers henceforward will base their fight for freedom, not upon

the winning or losing the right to talk in an Irish Parliament, but

upon their progress towards the mastery of those factories, workshops

and farms upon which a people's bread and liberties depend.


As we have again and again pointed out, the Irish question is a

social question, the whole age-long fight of the Irish people against

their oppressors resolves itself, in the last analysis into a fight

for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in

Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people or the

invaders; and if the invaders, which set of them—the most recent

swarm of land-thieves, or the sons of the


---

p.184




thieves of a former generation? These were the bottom

questions of Irish politics, and all other questions were valued or

deprecated in the proportion to which they contributed to serve the

interests of some of the factions who had already taken their stand in

this fight around property interests. Without this key to the meaning

of events, this clue to unravel the actions of ‘great men’, Irish history is but a welter of

unrelated facts, a hopeless chaos of sporadic outbreaks, treacheries,

intrigues, massacres, murders, and purposeless warfare. With this key

all things become understandable and traceable to their primary

origin; without this key the lost opportunities of Ireland seem such

as to bring a blush to the cheek of the Irish worker; with this key

Irish history is a lamp to his feet in the stormy paths of to-day. Yet

plain as this is to us to-day, it is undeniable that for two hundred

years at least all Irish political movements ignored this fact, and

were conducted by men who did not look below the political surface.

These men, to arouse the passions of the people, invoked the memory of

social wrongs, such as evictions and famines, but for these wrongs

proposed only political remedies, such as changes in taxation or

transference of the seat of Government (class rule) from one country

to another. Hence they accomplished nothing, because the political

remedies proposed were unrelated to the social subjection at the root

of the matter. The revolutionists of the past were wiser, the Irish

Socialists are wiser to-day. In their movement the North and the South

will again clasp hands, again will it be demonstrated, as in '98, that

the pressure of a common exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out

of a Protestant working class, earnest champions of civil and

religious liberty out of Catholics, and out of both a united Social

democracy.


