

#Labour and Easter Week


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Labour and Easter Week
======================


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


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#### 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)
45. X. T. Zagladina, James Connolly [in Russian] (Moscow: Mysl Publishing House 1985)
**The edition used in the digital edition**2. James Connolly Labour and Easter Week in Collected works, Ed. Desmond Ryan. New Books Publications, Dublin, volume 2 (1987) page 25–178

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### Labour and Easter Week: Author: James Connolly


LABOUR AND EASTER WEEK
======================


A selection from the writings of JAMES CONNOLLY
===============================================


*We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire and to establish an Irish Republic. We believed that the call we then issued to the people of Ireland, was a nobler call in a holier cause

than any call issued to them . . .*


---

p.25


The Roots of modern War
-----------------------


The Cabinets who rule the destinies of nations from the various capitals of Europe are but the tools of the moneyed interest. Their quarrels are not dictated by sentiments of national pride or honour, but by the avarice and

lust of power on the part of the class to which they belong. The people

who fight under their banners in the various armies or navies do indeed

imagine they are fighting the battles of their country, but in what

country has it ever happened that the people have profited by foreign

conquest?


The influence which impels towards war to-day is the influence of capitalism. Every war now is a capitalist move for new markets, and it is a move capitalism must make or perish. The mad scramble for wealth which this century has witnessed, has resulted in lifting almost every European country into the circle of competition for trade. New machinery, new inventions, new discoveries in the scientific world have all been laid under contribution as aids to industry, until the wealth producing powers of society at large have far outstripped the demand for goods, and now those very powers we have

conjured up from the bosom of nature threaten to turn and rend us. . .. Every new labour-saving machine at one and the same

time, by reducing the number of workers needed, reduces the demand for

goods which the worker cannot buy, while increasing the power of

producing goods, and thus permanently increases the number of

unemployed, and shortens the period of industrial prosperity.

Competition between capitalists drives them to seek for newer and more

efficient wealth-producing machines, but as the home market is now no

longer able to dispose of their produce they are driven to foreign

markets. . .. So it is in China to-day. The great

industrial nations of the world 


---

p.26


 driven on by their

respective moneyed classes, themselves driven on by their own machinery,

now front each other in the far East, and, with swords in hand, threaten

to set the armed millions of Europe in terrible and bloody conflict, in

order to decide which shall have the right to force upon John Chinaman

the goods which his European brother produces, but may not enjoy.

Laveleye says somewhere that capitalism came into the world covered with

blood and tears and dirt. We might add that if this war cloud now

gathering in the East, does burst, as it will be the last capitalist

war, so the death of that baneful institution will be like its birth,

bloody, muddy and ignominious.[1](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note001.html'))Emile de Laveleye, (1822-1892), Belgian publicist,

economist, and critic of socialism.


- Workers' Republic , August 20, 1898.



---

p.27


The South African War (1899-1902)
---------------------------------


#### 1


At

the time of going to press it seems probable that in a few weeks at most

the British Government will have declared war against the South African

Republic. Ostensibly in pursuance of a chivalrous desire to obtain

political concessions in their adopted country for British citizens

anxious to renounce their citizenship, but in reality for the purpose of

enabling an unscrupulous gang of capitalists to get into their hands the

immense riches of the diamond fields. Such a war will undoubtedly take

rank as one of the most iniquitous wars of the century. Waged by a

mighty empire against a nation entirely incapable of replying in any

effective manner, by a government of financiers upon a nation of

farmers, by a nation of filibusterers upon a nation of workers, by a

capitalist ring, who will never see a shot fired during the war, upon a

people defending their homes and liberties—such is the war upon

which the people of England are criminally or stupidly, and criminally

even if stupidly, allowing their government to enter. No better

corroboration of the truth of the socialist maxim that the modern state

is but a committee of rich men administering public affairs in the

interest of the upper class, has been afforded of late years, than is

furnished by this spectacle of a gang of South African speculators

setting in motion the whole machinery of the British Empire in

furtherance of their own private ends. There is no pretence that the war

will benefit the English people, yet it is calmly assumed the people

will pay for the war, and, if necessary, fight in it.


It must be

admitted that the English people are at present doing their utmost to

justify the low estimate in which their 


---

p.28


 rulers hold them; a

people who for centuries have never heard a shot fired in anger upon

their shores, yet who encourage their government in its campaign of

robbery and murder against an unoffending nation; a people, who, secure

in their own homes, permit their rulers to carry devastation and death

into the homes of another people, assuredly deserve little respect no

matter how loudly they may boast of their liberty-loving spirit.


For the Irish worker the war will contain some valuable lessons. In

the first place it will serve to furnish a commentary upon the hopes of

those in our ranks who are so fond of dilating upon the ‘peaceful’ realisation of the aims of socialism. We do

not like to theorise upon the function of force as a midwife to

progress—that, as we have ere now pointed out, is a matter to be

settled by the enemies of progress—but we cannot afford to remain

blind to the signs of the time. If, then, we see a small section of the

possessing class prepared to launch two nations into war, to shed oceans

of blood and spend millions of treasure, in order to maintain intact a

*small portion* of their privileges, how can we

expect the entire propertied class to abstain from using the same

weapons, and to submit peacefully when called upon to *yield up for ever all their privileges*? Let the

working class democracy of Ireland note that lesson, and, whilst working

peacefully while they may, keep constantly before their minds the truth

that the capitalist class is a beast of prey, and cannot be moralised,

converted, or conciliated but must be extirpated.


One other

lesson is, that Ireland is apparently a negligible factor in the

calculations of the Imperial Government. In certain ‘advanced’ circles we hear much about the important

position of Ireland in international politics. The exact value of such

talk may be gauged by the fact that troops are being taken from Ireland

to be sent to the Transvaal. The British Government has no fears on the

score of Ireland; the Home 


---

p.29


 Rule Party, and their good

friends the Constabulary, may be trusted to keep this country quiet. But

if the working class of Ireland were only united and understood their

power sufficiently well, and had shaken off their backs the Home

Rule-Unionist twin brethren—keeping us apart that their class may

rob us— they would see in this complication a chance for making a

long step forward towards better conditions of life—and, seeing

it, act upon it in a manner that would ensure the absence from the

Transvaal of a considerable portion of the British army. The

class-conscious workers who chafe under our present impotence, and long

to remove it, will find the path pointed out to them in the ranks of the

Irish Socialist Republican Party.


- Workers' Republic. , August 19, 1899.

#### 2


. . .. And what about the war? Well, I think it is the

beginning of the end. This great, blustering British Empire; this Empire

of truculent bullies, is rushing headlong to its doom. Whether they

ultimately win or lose, the Boers have pricked the bubble of England's

fighting reputation. The world knows her weakness now. Have at her,

then everywhere and always and in every manner. And before the first

decade of the coming century will close, you and I, if we survive, will

be able to repeat to our children the tale of how this monstrous tyranny

sank in dishonour and disaster.


- Workers' Republic. , November 18, 1899.



---

p.30


### Resolution drafted by James Connolly and adopted at a Public Meeting to express

Sympathy with the Boer Republics, held in Foster Place, Dublin on August 27th, 1899


WHEREAS the

government of this country is maintained upon the bayonets of an

occupying army against the will of the people;


WHEREAS there were

in India, Egypt and other portions of the British Empire other and much

larger populations also kept down in forced subjection;


WHEREAS a

country that thus keeps down subject populations by the use of the

hangman, the bullet or the sword, has no right to preach to another

about its duties towards its population; THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that

this meeting denounces the interference of the British capitalist

government in the internal affairs of the Transvaal Republic as an act

of criminal aggression, wishes long life to the Republic, and trusts

that our fellow-countrymen will, if need be, take up arms in defence of

their adopted country.[2](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note002.html'))


### A Great Opportunity


The British Army is getting its hands full in South Africa. The defeated,

demoralised, disheartened, subjugated, routed, dispersed, conquered,

disarmed and humiliated Boers are still 


---

p.31


 toppling over

British battalions, capturing British convoys, cutting British lines of

communication, and keeping Lord Roberts and all his generals in a state

of almighty panic and unrest, and not a single soldier can be spared

from South Africa for a long time to come.


The Boxers in China

have developed a sudden aptitude for war, are prowling around on the

hunt for foreign devils, and with a smile that is child-like and bland

are offering to box all Europe, with Japan and America thrown in as

appetisers. Great Britain is in want of soldiers there also.


Now

it only wants a native rising in India, and then would come our Irish

opportunity.


With war in Africa, war in China, war in India, we

of the unconquered Celtic race would rise up in our millions from Malin

Head to Cape Clear, from Dublin to Galway, and—and well, pass ‘strong’ resolutions, and then go home and pray that

somebody else may beat the Sasanach.


The Boers are invulnerable

on kopjes, the Boxers are death on missionaries, but we are irresistible

on ‘resolutions’.


- Workers' Republic. , June 30, 1900.



---

p.32


British and Russian Imperialism
-------------------------------


#### 1


His Imperial Highness, the Czar of All the Russias, has issued a

manifesto in favour of universal disarmament. This is the silly

season. . .. His rule is founded on the sword, and can

only be maintained by the sword, and whatever seriousness there is in

his latest pronouncement may be translated into an appeal to his

brother despots throughout Europe to cease warring with each other in

order that their hands may be free to throttle the infant liberty in

their own dominions. Humanitarians indeed! Will Russia withdraw her

troops from Warsaw and depend only on the loyalty and affection of the

Poles. . .? The Czar, we repeat is having his little

joke. He speaks to-day of universal peace, in order that when, in the

near future, he hurls his armies across the frontier into China, India

or Constantinople, or whelms in blood the aspirations for freedom on the

part of his own subjects, he may be able to point to this action of his

as proof that the battle was not of his seeking. From the Cabinets of

every European Government all the other conspirators against the freedom

of the human race echo his cry, and even while they are ordering new

armaments and equipping new fleets, protest the intensity of their

desire for peace. 'Twas ever thus. . .. But universal

disarmament is not a dream. The day will come, and perhaps like a bolt

from the blue when the frontiers. . .will not be

sufficient to prevent the handclasp of friendship between the peoples.

But that day will come only when the kings and kaisers, queens and

czars, financiers and capitalists who now oppress humanity will be

hurled from their place and power, and the emancipated workers of the

earth, no longer the blind instruments of rich men's greed will found a

new society, a new civilisation, 


---

p.33


 whose corner stone will be

labour, whose inspiring principle will be justice, whose limits humanity

alone can bound.


- Workers' Republic*,*. September 3, 1898.

#### 2


When the Russian disarmament proposals were first mooted we, alone

among Irish journalists, characterised them as dishonest and the chorus

of praise they elicited throughout Europe as hypocritical. One short

week has sufficed to prove the truth of our contention. . .. There is scarcely a capital in Europe from which

Great Britain has not been complimented on the successful outcome of the

battle before Khartoum; complimented by the very men (and newspapers)

who a week ago were ostentatiously singing anthems of brotherly love

with all men, and deploring the cruel necessity of war. . .. The British occupation of Egypt, from the

bombardment of Alexandria down to this latest massacre at Omdurman has

been one prolonged criminal enterprise, conceived and executed entirely

in the interests of the holders of Egyptian bonds and speculating

capitalists.[3](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note003.html')) The enemy, as our Irish

newspapers call them, fought for home and freedom; the British carried

fire and sword and desolation into a land and upon a people who had

never injured them, a people who could not have disturbed their

conquest, even of lower Egypt, had they been ever so willing. But

Britain has triumphed. Glorious triumph!


- Workers' Republic. , September 10, 1898.



---

p.34


Socialism and Imperialism
-------------------------


As socialists—and

therefore anxious at all times to throw the full weight of whatever

influence we possess upon the side of the forces making most directly

for socialism—we have often been somewhat disturbed in our mind by

observing in the writings and speeches of some of our foreign comrades a

tendency to discriminate in favour of Great Britain in all the

international complications in which that country may be involved over

questions of territorial annexation, spheres of influence, etc., in

barbarous or semi-civilised portions of the globe. We are, we repeat,

disturbed in our mind because we ourselves do not at all sympathise with

this pro-British policy, but, on the contrary, would welcome the

humiliation of the British arms in any one of the conflicts in which it

is at present engaged, or with which it has been lately menaced. This we

freely avow. But the question then arises: is this hostility to the

British Empire due to the fact of our national and racial subjection by

that Power, or is it consistent with the doctrines we hold as adherents

of the Marxist propaganda, and believers in the Marxist economics?


. . .The English socialists are apparently divided

over the question of the war on the Transvaal; one section of the Social

Democratic Federation going strongly for the Boers and against the war;

another also declaring against the war, but equally denouncing the

Boers; and finally, one English socialist leader Mr. Robert

Blatchford[4](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note004.html')), editor of The Clarion and author of Merrie

England, coming out bluntly for the war and toasting the

health of the Queen, and the success of the British arms. On the other

hand, all the journals of the party on the continent of Europe and in

America, as far as we are aware, come out in this instance

wholeheartedly on the side of the Transvaal 


---

p.35


 and against what

the organ of our Austrian comrades fittingly terms England's act of

‘blood-thirsty piracy’. . .. Our esteemed comrade, H. M. Hyndman[5](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note005.html'))


---

p.37


. . .took the position that England

ought not to have given way to Russia at Port Arthur, but ought to have

fought her and asserted British supremacy in the Far East. His reason

for so contending being the greater freedom enjoyed under British than

under Russian rule. . .


. . .. That we may not be accused of criticising the

attitude of others without stating our own, we hereby place on record

our position on all questions of international policy: 
> 
> Scientific revolutionary socialism teaches us that socialism can only
> 
> be realised when capitalism has reached its zenith of development; that
> 
> consequently the advance of nations industrially undeveloped into the
> 
> capitalistic stage of industry is a thing highly to be desired, since
> 
> such an advance will breed a revolutionary proletariat in such countries
> 
> and force forward there the political freedom necessary for the speedy
> 
> success of the socialist movement; and finally, that as colonial
> 
> expansion and the conquest of new markets are necessary for the
> 
> prolongation of the life of capitalism, the prevention of colonial
> 
> expansion and the loss of markets to countries capitalistically
> 
> developed, such as England, precipitates economic crises there, and so
> 
> gives an impulse to revolutionary thought and helps to shorten the
> 
> period required to develop backward countries and thus prepare the
> 
> economic conditions needed for our triumph. . ..
> 
> 
> 




Comrade Hyndman claims that we should oppose

Russia because her people are ruled despotically, and favour England

because her people are politically free. But that is the reasoning of a

political radical, not the dispassionate analysis of contemporary

history we have a right to expect from an economist and a socialist of

Hyndman's reputation. . .. Russia is not yet a

capitalist country, therefore her people bow beneath the yoke of an

autocrat. . .. Drive the Russian out of Poland! 


---

p.36


 By all means! Prevent his extension towards Europe! Certainly!

But favour his extension and his acquisition of new markets in Asia (at

the expense of England if need be) if you would see capitalism hurry

forward to its death.


It may be argued that our Irish nationality

plays a large part in forming this conception of international politics.

We do not plead guilty, but even if it were so the objection would be

puerile. As socialists we base our political policy on the class

struggle of the workers, because we know that the self interest of the

workers lies our way. That the self-interest may sometimes be base does

not affect the correctness of our position. The mere fact that the

inherited (and often unreasoning) anti-British sentiment of a chauvinist

Irish patriot impels him to the same conclusion as we arrived at as the

result of our economic studies does not cause us to shrink from

proclaiming our position. It rather leads us to rejoice that our

propaganda is thus made all the easier by this none too common identity

of aim established as a consequence of what we esteem the strong and

irreconcilable hostility between English imperialism and socialism.


- Workers' Republic , November 4, 1899.



---

p.38


A Continental Revolution
------------------------


The outbreak of war on

the continent of Europe makes it impossible this week to write to Forward upon any other question. I

have no doubt that to most of my readers Ireland has ere now ceased to

be, in colloquial phraseology, the most important place on the map, and

that their thoughts are turning gravely to a consideration of the

position of the European socialist movement in the face of this

crisis.


Judging by developments up to the time of writing, such

considerations must fall far short of affording satisfying reflections

to the socialist thinker. For, what is the position of the socialist

movement in Europe to-day? Summed up briefly it is as follows:


For a generation at least the socialist movement in all the countries

now involved has progressed by leaps and bounds, and more satisfactory

still, by steady and continuous increase and development.


The

number of votes recorded for socialist candidates has increased at a

phenomenally rapid rate, the number of socialist representatives in all

legislative chambers has become more and more of a disturbing factor

in the calculations of governments. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets

and literature of all kinds teaching socialist ideas have been and are

daily distributed by the million amongst the masses; every army and navy

in Europe has seen a constantly increasing proportion of socialists

amongst its soldiers and sailors, and the industrial organisations of

the working class have more and more perfected their grasp over the

economic machinery of society, and more and more moved responsive to the

socialist conception of their duties. Along with this, hatred of

militarism has spread through every rank of society, making everywhere

its recruits, and 


---

p.39


 raising an aversion to war even amongst

those who in other things accepted the capitalist order of things.

Anti-militarist societies and anti-militarist campaigns of socialist

societies and parties, and anti-militarist resolutions of socialist and

international trade union conferences have become part of the order of

the day and are no longer phenomena to be wondered at. The whole working

class movement stands committed to war upon war—stands so com-

mitted at the very height of its strength and influence.


And now,

like the proverbial bolt from the blue, war is upon us, and war between

the most important, because the most socialist, nations of the earth.

And we are helpless!!


What then becomes of all our resolutions;

all our protests of fraternisation; all our threats of general

strikes; all our carefully-built machinery of internationalism; all our

hopes for the future? Were they all as sound and fury, signifying

nothing? When the German artilleryman, a socialist serving in the German

army of invasion, sends a shell into the ranks of the French army,

blowing off their heads; tearing out their bowels, and mangling the

limbs of dozens of socialist comrades in that force, will the fact that

he, before leaving for the front, ‘demonstrated’

against the war be of any value to the widows and orphans made by the

shell he sent upon its mission of murder? Or, when the French rifleman

pours his murderous rifle fire into the ranks of the German line of

attack, will he be able to derive any comfort from the probability that

his bullets are murdering or maiming comrades who last year joined in

thundering ‘hochs’ and cheers of greeting to the

eloquent Jaurès, when in Berlin he pleaded for international

solidarity? When the socialist pressed into the army of the Austrian

Kaiser, sticks a long, cruel bayonet-knife into the stomach of the

socialist conscript in the army of the Russian Czar, and gives it a

twist so that when pulled out it will pull the entrails out along with

it, will the terrible act lose any of 


---

p.40


 its fiendish cruelty

by the fact of their common theoretical adhesion to an anti-war

propaganda in times of peace? When the socialist soldier from the Baltic

provinces of Russia is sent forward into Prussian Poland to bombard

towns and villages until a red trail of blood and fire covers the homes

of the unwilling Polish subjects of Prussia, as he gazes upon the

corpses of those he has slaughtered and the homes he has destroyed, will

he in his turn be comforted by the thought that the Czar whom he

serves sent other soldiers a few years ago to carry the same devastation

and murder into his own home by the Baltic Sea?


But why go on? Is

*it* not as clear as the fact of life

itself that no insurrection of the working class; no general strike; no

general uprising of the forces of Labour in Europe, could possibly carry

with it, or entail a greater slaughter of socialists, than will their

participation as soldiers in the campaigns of the armies of their

respective countries? Every shell which explodes in the midst of a

German battalion will slaughter some socialists; every Austrian cavalry

charge will leave the gashed and hacked bodies of Serbian or Russian

socialists squirming and twisting in agony upon the ground; every

Russian, Austrian, or German ship sent to the bottom or blown sky-high

will mean sorrow and mourning in the homes of some socialist comrades of

ours. If these men must die, would it not be better to die in their own

country fighting for freedom for their class, and for the abolition of

war, than to go forth to strange countries and die slaughtering and

slaughtered by their brothers that tyrants and profiteers might

live?


Civilisation is being destroyed before our eves; the

results of generations of propaganda and patient heroic plodding and

self-sacrifice are being blown into annihilation from a hundred cannon

mouths; thousands of comrades with whose souls we have lived in

fraternal communion are about to be done to death; they whose one hope

it was to be spared to co-operate 


---

p.41


 in building the perfect

society of the future are being driven to fratricidal slaughter in

shambles where that hope will be buried under a sea of blood.


I

am not writing in captious criticism of my continental comrades. We know

too little about what is happening on the continent, and events have

moved too quickly for any of us to be in a position to criticise at all.

But believing as I do that any action would be justified which would put

a stop to this colossal crime now being perpetrated, I feel compelled to

express the hope that ere long we may read of the paralysing of the

internal transport service on the continent, even should the act of

paralysing necessitate the erection of socialist barricades and acts of

rioting by socialist soldiers and sailors, as happened in Russia in

1905. Even an unsuccessful attempt at social revolution by force of

arms, following the paralysis of the economic life of militarism,

would be less disastrous to the socialist cause than the act of

socialists allowing themselves to be used in the slaughter of their

brothers in the cause.[6](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note006.html'))


A great continental

uprising of the working class would stop the war; a universal protest at

public meetings will not save a single life from being wantonly

slaughtered.


I make no war upon patriotism; never have done. But

against the patriotism of capitalism—the patriotism which makes

the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and

right—I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism

which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those

who toil. That which is good for the working class I esteem patriotic,

but that party or movement is the most perfect embodiment of patriotism

which most successfully works for the conquest by the working class of

the control of the destinies of the land wherein they labour.


To

me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as

the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy. I regard each

nation as the possessor of a definite contribution 


---

p.42


 to the

common stock of civilisation, and I regard the capitalist class of each

nation as being the logical and natural enemy of the national culture

which constitutes that definite contribution.


Therefore, the

stronger I am in my a section for national tradition, literature,

language, and sympathies, the more firmly rooted I am in my opposition

to that capitalist class which in its soulless lust for power and gold

would bray the nations as in a mortar.


Reasoning from such

premises, therefore, this war appears to me as the most fearful crime of

the centuries. In it the working class are to be sacrificed that a small

clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and

their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped,

and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.


- Forward , August 15, 1914.



---

p.43


A Martyr for Conscience Sake
----------------------------


As I am writing this the news

appears in the press that our comrade, Dr. Karl Liebknecht, has been

shot in Germany for refusing to accept military service in the war. The

news is unconfirmed, and will, I trust, be found later to be untrue, but

I propose to take it this week as a text for my article.[7](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note007.html'))


Supposing, then, that it was

true, what would be the socialist attitude toward the martyrdom of our

beloved comrade? There can be little hesitation in avowing that all

socialists would endorse his act, and look upon his death as a martyrdom

for our cause. And yet if his attitude was correct, what can be said of

the attitude of all those socialists who have gone to the front, and

still more of all those socialists who from press and platform are

urging that nothing should be done now that might disturb the harmony

that ought to exist at home, or spoil the wonderful solidarity of the

nation in this great crisis?


As far as I can understand these

latter, their argument seems to be that they did their whole duty when

they protested against the war, but that now that war has been declared

it is right that they also should arm in defence of their common

country, and act in all things along with their fellow sub-

jects—those same fellow subjects whose senseless clamour brought

on this awful outburst of murder. We are told, for instance, that the

same policy is being pursued by all socialist parties. That the French

socialists protested against the war—and then went to the front,

headed by Gustave Hervé[8](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note008.html')), the great anti-militarist; the German

socialists protested against the war— and then, in the Reichstag,

unanimously voted 250 millions to carry it on; the Austrians issued a

manifesto against the war—and are now on the frontier doing great

deeds of heroism against the foreign enemy; and the Russians erected

barricades 


---

p.44


 in the streets of St. Petersburg against the

cossacks, but immediately war was declared went off to the front arm in

arm with their cossack brothers. And so on. Now, if all this is true,

what does it mean? It means that the socialist parties of the various

countries mutually cancel each other, and that as a consequence

socialism ceases to exist as a world force, and drops out of history

in the greatest crisis of the history of the world, in the very moment

when courageous action will most influence history.


We know that

not more than a score of men in the various Cabinets of the world have

brought about this war, that no European people was consulted upon the

question, that preparations for it have been going on for years, and

that all the alleged ‘reasons’ for it are so many

afterthoughts invented to hide from us the fact that the intrigues and

schemes of our rulers had brought the world to this pass. All socialists

are agreed upon this. Being so agreed, are we now to forget it all: to

forget all our ideas of human brotherhood, and because some twenty

highly-placed criminals say our country requires us to slaughter our

brothers beyond the seas or the frontiers, are we bound to accept their

statement, and proceed to *slaughter old comrades

abroad at the dictate of old enemies at home*. The idea outrages my

every sense of justice and fraternity. I may be only a voice crying in

the wilderness, a crank amongst a community of the wise, but whoever I

be, I must, in deference to my own self-respect, and to the sanctity of

my own soul, protest against the doctrine that any decree of theirs of

national honour can excuse a socialist who serves in a war which he has

denounced as a needless war, can absolve from the guilt of murder any

socialist who at the dictate of a capitalist Government draws the

trigger of a rifle upon or sends a shot from a gun into the breasts of

people with whom he has no quarrel, and who are his fellow labourers in

the useful work of civilisation.


We have for years informed the

world that we were in revolt 


---

p.45


 against the iniquities of

modern civilisation, but now we hear socialists informing us that it is

our duty to become accomplices of the rulers of modern civilisation in

the greatest of all iniquities, the slaughter of man by his fellow man.

And that as long as we make our formal protest we have done our whole

duty, and can cheerfully proceed to take life, burn peaceful homes, and

lay waste fields smiling with food!


Our comrade, Dr. Liebknecht,

if he has died rather than admit this new doctrine, has died the

happiest death that man can die, has put to eternal shame the thousands

of ‘comrades’ in every European land, who, with the

cant of brotherhood upon their lips, have gone forth in the armies of

the capitalist rulers—murdering and to murder. The old veteran

leader of German social democracy, his father, Wilhelm Liebknecht, said

in one of his pamphlets:


‘The working class of the world has

but one enemy—the capitalist class of the world, those of their

own country at the head of the list.’


Well and truly has the

son lived up to the truly revolutionary doctrine of the father: lived

and died for its eternal truth and wisdom.


Now we are hearing a

new excuse for the complicity of socialists in this war. It is that this

war will be the last war, its horrors will be so great that humanity

will refuse to allow another.


The homely Irish proverb has it

that ‘far off cows have long horns’, or that ‘far away hills are always green’. It must have been in

some such spirit that this latest argument was evolved. For what can

happen in the future that is not more applicable now! In the future this

militarist spirit will probably be in the ascendant, new national

prejudices will have been born, new international hatreds called forth.

There will be memories of recent defeats to wipe out, fresh frontiers


---

p.46




 to conserve or to obliterate, and the military caste will

have acquired an ascendancy over the popular imagination because the

large numbers of the various armies will have given rise to widespread

solicitude for their welfare and consequent hopes for their success. If

you have friends or relatives whom you dearly love serving in the army,

you cannot help wishing for the success of that army, and the defeat of

its immediate opponents, and from such a state of feeling to the most

intense jingoism is but a small and easy transition. The large armies of

to-day draw upon the whole population, all are interested in the fate of

their friends or relatives, and we may all be sure that the lying press

can be depended upon to convert solicitude for our friends into pas-

sionate hatred for those whom war makes their opponents.


No; we

cannot draw upon the future for a draft to pay our present duties. There

is no moratorium to postpone the payment of the debt the socialists owe

to the cause; it can only be paid now. Paid it may be in martyrdom, but

a few hundred such martyrdoms would be but a small price to pay to avert

the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. If our German comrade,

Liebknecht, has paid the price, perhaps the others may yet nerve

themselves for that sacrifice. On what conception of national honour can

we blame them, before what fetish of national dignity can we prostrate

ourselves in abasement to atone for their act?


The war of a

subject nation for independence, for the right to live out its own life

in its own way may and can be justified as holy and righteous; the war

of a subject class to free itself from the debasing conditions of

economic and political slavery should at all times choose its own

weapons, and hold and esteem all as sacred instruments of righteousness.

But the war of nation against nation in the interest of royal

freebooters and cosmopolitan thieves is a thing accursed.


All

hail, then, to our continental comrade, who, in a world 


---

p.47


 of

imperial and financial brigands and cowardly trimmers and compromisers

showed mankind that men still know how to die for the holiest of all

causes—the sanctity of the human soul, the practical brotherhood

of the human race!


- Forward , August 22, 1914.



---

p.48


Connolly's Speech on War's Outbreak
-----------------------------------


Speaking at a meeting in Dublin, Sunday, August 30, 1914, to commemorate the deaths of

James Nolan, John Byrne and Alice Brady, killed during the Dublin

Lockout, 1913-14, Connolly said:


He was glad to see so large a

gathering to commemorate their comrades, because they were murdered for

the sake of great principles. It had not been a mere casual murder, but

a cold-blooded and premeditated one, deliberately planned with the idea

in mind that as they went to their graves, so went the hopes for which

they fought. That when they were murdered all the hopes of the Irish

workers would be slain with them; when they were foully done to death

all our aspirations for a cleaner, better city and grander nation would

be murdered, too. ‘Where do we stand to-day’? he continued.


> 
> The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the
> 
> hopes of the Irish working class, and that class itself stands erect and
> 
> resolute, fearing no man, and the British Government is down on its
> 
> knees praying for the Russians to come and save them. Our fight of last
> 
> year was not for added wages and reduction of hours; it was for an
> 
> opportunity of building up in our midst men and women, a chance to
> 
> develop nobility and grandeur of character for men and women, a time to
> 
> realise the nobility of life, to study the history of Ireland, to study
> 
> our rights as well as our duties; time to develop men and women for the
> 
> coming crisis, so that they might take advantage of it when it came.
> 
> Abject servility there is in Ireland; whatever of the spirit of a slave
> 
> that in you lies, lies with those who served to cripple the grandest
> 
> movement ever started. If labour controlled your destinies, conjure the
> 
> picture of what might have happened when after Grey and 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.49
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Asquith had plunged England into war, there arose a clamour for Redmond.
> 
> And Redmond, without consulting you, the people of Ireland, pledged us
> 
> to war with as kindly, gracious a nation as God ever put the breath of
> 
> life into—what happened then? Redmond when they shouted for him
> 
> might have sat still and let them shout, then before another sun rose
> 
> got a measure greater than Grattan dreamed of. Redmond, as spokesman of
> 
> the majority of the Irish people might have risen and said: ‘I and my
> 
> colleagues will go to Ireland and consult the Irish Nation.’ Then
> 
> would Ireland be a nation in reality. ‘We have waited
> 
> and now Germany has come, and we will start our own Parliament. Stop us
> 
> if you can.’ Help would have come from all sides. Why the R.I.C.
> 
> would have acted as a guard of honour!
> 
> 
> These men have sold you.
> 
> Sold you? No, by God, given you away. Whether my speech is pro-German or
> 
> pro-Irish, I don't know. As an Irish worker I owe a duty to our class;
> 
> counting no allegiance to the Empire; I'd be glad to see it back in the
> 
> bottomless pit. The Irish workers hold themselves ready to bargain with
> 
> whoever can make a bargain. England has been fighting Germany. If it
> 
> were not for the Russians, French and Japanese, the British would not
> 
> have made a mouthful for the Germans. The Germans are in Boulogne, where
> 
> Napoleon projected an invasion of Britain. To Ireland is only a twelve
> 
> hours' run. If you are itching for a rifle, itching to fight, have a
> 
> country of your own; better to fight for our own country than for the
> 
> robber empire. If ever you shoulder a rifle, let it be for Ireland.
> 
> Conscription or no conscription, they will never get me or mine. You
> 
> have been told you are not strong, that you have no rifles. Revolutions
> 
> do not start with rifles; start first and get your rifles after. Our
> 
> curse is our belief in our weakness. We are not weak, we are strong.
> 
> Make up your mind to strike before your opportunity goes.
> 
> 
> 




- Irish Worker , September 5, 1914.



---

p.50


Can Warfare be Civilised?
-------------------------


The progress of

the great war and the many extraordinary developments accompanying it

are rapidly tending to bring home to the minds of the general public the

truth of the socialist contention that all war is an atrocity, and that

the attempt to single out any particular phase of it as more atrocious

than another is simply an attempt to confuse the public mind.


We

in this journal and in our predecessor, the Irish Worker, have consistently stood

upon that principle. We have held, and do hold, that war is a relic of

barbarism only possible because we are governed by a ruling class with

barbaric ideas; we have held and do hold that the working class of all

countries cannot hope to escape the horrors of war until in all

countries that barbaric ruling class is thrown from power; and we have

held, and do hold that the lust for power on the part of that ruling

class is so deeply rooted in the nature and instinct of its members,

that it is more than probable that nothing less than superior force will

ever induce them to abandon their throttling grasp upon the lives and

liberties of mankind.


Holding such views we have at all times

combatted the idea of war; held that we have no foreign enemies outside

of our own ruling class; held that if we are compelled to go to war we

had much rather fight that ruling class than any other, and taught in

season and out of season that it is the duty of the working class in

self-protection to organise its own force to resist the force of the

master class. The force available to the working class is two-fold,

industrial and political, which latter includes military organisation to

protect political and industrial rights. ‘Those who live by the

sword shall perish by the sword’ say the Scriptures, and it may well

be that in the progress of events the working class of Ireland may be

called upon to 


---

p.51


 face the stern necessity of taking the sword

(or rifle) against the class whose rule has brought upon them and upon

the world the hellish horror of the present European war. Should that

necessity arise it would be well to realise that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilised warfare’, and all such homage to

the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only

intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane

methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilised warfare; all

warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the

bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human

progress.


A few illustrations will suffice to drive home these

points. One concerns the outcry over the alleged use of what are known

as dum-dum bullets. It is alleged by both sides that the others are

using those bullets and that they inflict a most grievous wound, and as

they inflict such a serious wound they are opposed to the rules of ‘civilised and humane warfare’. The same persons who

raise this cry will calmly read of the firing of shrapnel into a body of

troops and will exult in the result. Yet a shrapnel shell contains 340

bullets which scatter in all directions, tearing off legs and arms,

rending and bursting the human bodies, and in general creating wounds

which no surgical science can hope to cure. How hypocritical, then, is

the pretence of horror over the grievous wound inflicted by a dum-dum

bullet!


Of like character is the outcry over the bombardment of

undefended towns. One would think to read such diatribes that it was not

a recognised practice of all naval warfare. For generations the public

of these islands have been reading of Great Britain sending punitive

expeditions against native tribes in Africa, the islands of the ocean,

or parts of Asia. It may be that some benighted native has stolen a cask

of rum from the compound of a missionary, and thrown a stone at the 


---

p.52


 holy man of God when the latter demanded the return of the cask

in question. Immediately a British man-of-war is ordered to that coast,

opens fire upon and destroys the whole town, indiscriminately massacring

the majority of its inhabitants, women and old men, and babes yet

unborn, all to punish one or two persons for a slight upon a British

subject. That thousands of British subjects are subjected to worse

slights at home every day of their lives is a matter of not enough

consequence to move a policeman, let alone a battleship. Yet up and down

the world the British fleet has gone carrying out such orders, and

bombarding such undefended places without ever moving the inkslingers of

the jingo press to protest.


It all depends, it appears, upon

whose houses are being bombarded, whose people are being massacred,

whose limbs are torn from the body, whose bodies are blown to a ghastly

mass of mangled flesh and blood and bones. The crime of the Germans

seems to consist in believing that what is sauce for the goose is sauce

for the gander.


But what is the theory of the matter? We have

before us the work of M. Bloch on Modern

weapons and modern war, the famous work in which the

methods and results of modern warfare were analysed and foretold long

before they had been brought to the test of practical trial on modern

battlefields. This author, a Pole but a Russian subject, foretold most

of the phenomena accompanying modern campaigns, and has lived to see the

results he predicted in a large measure embodied in the practice of

armies actually in conflict.


To arrive at such a wonderful

accuracy in prediction he was compelled to undertake a systematic

investigation of all the conditions of modern warfare on land and sea

with modern weapons. On the question of undefended towns he has this to

say, and all who have read his works bear witness to his scrupulous

impartiality and freedom from national bias: 
> 
> It must be
> 
> remembered that, as is shown by the practice 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.53
> 
> 
>  of manoeuvres,
> 
> the principle that undefended towns are not subject to bombardment is
> 
> not acknowledged, and in a future war no towns will be spared. As evi-
> 
> dence of this the following case may be cited. On
> 
> August 24th, 1889, the following letter was addressed by the
> 
> commander of the *Collingwood* to the Mayor of
> 
> Peterhead: 
> > 
> > By order of the Vice-Admiral commanding the
> > 
> > 11th Division of the Fleet, I have to demand from your town a
> > 
> > contribution of £150,000 sterling. . .. I must
> > 
> > add that in case the officers who deliver this letter do not return
> > 
> > within the course of two hours the town will be burnt, the shipping
> > 
> > destroyed, and factories ruined.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This letter
> 
> was printed in all the newspapers and called forth no protest. . .. It is evident then that England will not refrain
> 
> from such action when convenient, and as her voice is the most impor-
> 
> tant in naval matters, the other Powers will certainly follow her
> 
> example.
> 
> 
> 




M. Bloch here cites as an example the

course taken by a British fleet in the course of naval manoeuvres, and

as such manoeuvres are always carried out strictly according to official

handbooks it is safe to assume that in the bombardment of undefended

towns we have a practice authorised by the British Admiralty. Yet

whether authorised by British or German practice or theory, how brutal,

how repulsive, how murderous it is.


Up to the present no such

bombardment has yet taken place, for, of course, the East Coast towns

bombarded were all defended by entrenchments and garrison artillery, but

what lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of

this ruthless destruction of human life.


Yet this is war: war for

which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the

world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge

a mad world. 


---

p.54


 No, there is no such thing as humane or

civilised war! War may be forced upon a subject race or subject class to

put an end to subjection of race, of class, or sex. When so waged it

must be waged thoroughly and relentlessly, but with no delusions as to

its elevating nature, or civilising methods.


- The Worker , January 30, 1915.



---

p.55


Revolutionary Unionism and War
------------------------------


Since the war broke out

in Europe, and since the socialist forces in the various countries

failed so signally to prevent or even delay the outbreak, I have been

reading everything in American socialist papers or magazines that came

to hand; to see if that failure and the reasons therefor, were properly

understood among my old comrades in the United States.


But either

I have not seen the proper publications, or else the dramatic side of

the military campaigns has taken too firm a hold upon the imagination of

socialist writers to allow them to estimate properly the inner meaning

of that debacle of political socialism witnessed in Europe when the

bugles of war rang out upon our ears.


I am going then to try, in

all calmness, to relate the matter as it appears to us who believe that

*the signal of war ought also to have been the signal

for rebellion*, that when the bugles sounded the first note for

actual war, their notes should have been taken as the tocsin for social

revolution. And I am going to try to explain why such results did not

follow such actions. My explanation may not be palatable to some; I hope

it will be at least interesting to all.


In the first place let me

be perfectly frank with my readers as to my own position, now that that

possibility has receded out of sight. As the reader will have gathered

from my opening remarks, I believe that the socialist proletariat of

Europe in *all* the belligerent countries ought to

have refused to march against their brothers across the frontiers, and

that such refusal would have prevented the war and all its horrors even

though it might have led to civil war. Such a civil war would not, could

not possibly have resulted in such a loss of socialist life as this

international war has entailed, and each socialist who fell in such 


---

p.56


 a civil war would have fallen knowing that he was battling for

the cause he had worked for in days of peace, and there was no

possibility of the bullet or shell that laid him low having been sent on

its murderous way by one to whom he had pledged the ‘life-long love of

comrades’ in the international army of labour.


But seeing that

the socialist movement did not so put the faith of its adherents to the

test, seeing that the nations are now locked in this death grapple, and

the issue is knit, I do not wish to disguise from anyone my belief that

there is no hope of peaceful development for the industrial nations of

continental Europe whilst Britain holds the dominance of the sea. The

British fleet is a knife held permanently at the throat of Europe;

should any nation evince an ability to emerge from the position of a

mere customer for British products, and to become a successful

competitor of Britain in the markets of the world, that knife is set in

operation to cut that throat.


By days and by nights the British

Government watches and works to isolate its competitor from the comity

of nations, to ring it around with hostile foes. When the time is

propitious, the blow is struck, the allies of Britain encompass its

rival by land and the fleet of Britain swoops upon its commerce by sea.

In one short month the commerce-raiding fleet of Great Britain destroys

a trade built up in forty years of slow, peaceful industry, as it has

just done in the case of Germany.


Examining the history of the

foreign relations of Great Britain since the rise of the capitalist

class to power in that country, the continuity of this policy becomes

obvious and as marvellous as it is obvious.


Neither religion nor

race affinity nor diversity of political or social institutions availed

to save a competitor of England. The list of commercial rivals or

would-be rivals is fairly large, and gives the economic key to the

reasons for the great wars of Britain. In that list we find Spain,

Holland, France, Denmark 


---

p.57


 and now Germany. Britain must rule

the waves, and when the continental nations wished to make at the Hague

a law forbidding the capture of merchant vessels during war, Britain

refused her assent. Naturally! It is her power to capture merchant ships

during war that enables Britain to cut the throat of a commercial

rival at her own sweet will.


If she had not that power she would

need to depend upon her superiority in technical equipment and

efficiency; and the uprise in other countries of industrial enterprises

able to challenge and defeat her in this world market has amply

demonstrated that she has not that superiority any longer.


The

United States and Germany lead in crowding Britain industrially; the

former cannot be made a target for the guns of militarist continental

Europe, therefore escapes for the time being as Britain never fights a

white power single-handed. But Germany is caught within the net and has

to suffer for her industrial achievements.


The right to capture

merchant ships for which Britain stood out against the public opinion of

all Europe is thus seen to be the trump card of Britain against the

industrial development of the world outside her shores—against

that complete freedom of the seas by which alone the nations of the

world can develop that industrial status which socialists maintain to

be an indispensable condition for socialist triumph.


I have been

thus frank with my readers in order that they may perfectly understand

my position and the reasons therefor, and thus anticipate some of the

insinuations that are sure to be levelled against me as one who

sympathises nether with the anti-German hysteria of such comrades as

Professor George D. Herron nor with the suddenly developed belief in the

good faith of Czars shown by Prince Peter Kropotkin.[9](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note009.html'))


I believe the war could have been prevented by

the socialists; as it was not prevented and as the issues are knit, I

want to see England beaten so thoroughly that the commerce of the seas


---

p.58




 will henceforth be free to all nations—to the smallest

equally with the greatest.


But *how could this

war have been prevented*, which is another way of saying how and why

did the socialist movement fail to prevent it?


The full answer to

that question can only be grasped by those who are familiar with the

propaganda that from 1905 onwards has been known as ‘industrialist’ in the United States and, though not so

accurately, has been called ‘syndicalist’ in

Europe.


The essence of that propaganda lay in two principles. To

take them in the order of their immediate effectiveness these were:

First, that labour could only enforce its wishes by organising its

strength at the point of production, i.e., the farms, factories,

workshops, railways, docks, ships—where the work of the world is

carried on, the effectiveness of the political vote depending primarily

upon the economic power of the workers organised behind it. Secondly,

that the process of organising that economic power would also build the

industrial fabric of the socialist republic, build the new society

within the old.


It is upon the first of these two principles I

wish my reader to concentrate their attention in order to find the

answer to the question we are asking.


In all the belligerent

countries of western and central Europe the socialist vote was very

large; in none of these belligerent countries was there an organised

revolutionary industrial organisation directing the socialist vote nor a

socialist political party directing a revolutionary industrial

organisation.


The socialist voters having cast their ballots were

helpless, as voters, until the next election; as workers, they were

indeed in control of the forces of production and distribution, and by

exercising that control over the transport service could have made the

war impossible. But the idea of thus coordinating 


---

p.59


 their

two spheres of activity had not gained sufficient lodgment to be effec-

tive in the emergency.


No socialist party in Europe could say

that rather than go to war it would call out the entire transport

service of the country and thus prevent mobilisation. No socialist party

could say so, because no socialist party could have the slightest

reasonable prospect of having such a call obeyed.


The executive

committee of the socialist movement was not in control of the

labour-force of the men who voted for the socialist representatives in

the legislative chambers of Europe, nor were the men in control of the

supply of labour-force in control of the socialist representatives. In

either case there would have been an organised power immediately

available against war. Lacking either, the socialist parties of Europe

when they had protested against war, had also *fired

their last shot* against militarism and were left like ‘children crying in the night’.


Had the

socialist party of France been able to declare that rather than be

dragged into war to save the Russian Czar from the revolutionary

consequences which would have followed his certain defeat by Germany,

they would declare a railway strike, there would have been no war

between France and Germany, as the latter country saved from the dread

of an attack in the west whilst defending itself in the east could not

have coerced its socialist population into consenting to take the

offensive against France.


But the French government knows, the

German government knows, all cool observers in Europe know, that the

socialist and syndicalist organisation of France could not have carried

out such a threat even had they made it. Both politically and

industrially the revolutionary organisations of France are mere skeleton

frameworks, not solid bodies.


Politically large numbers roll

together at elections around the faithful few who keep the machinery of

the party together; 


---

p.60


 industrially, more or less, large

numbers roll together during strikes or lock-outs. But the numbers of

either are shifting, uncertain and of shadowy allegiance. From such no

revolutionary action of value in face of modern conditions of warfare

and state organisation could be expected. And none came.


Hence

the pathetic failure of French socialism—the socialist battalion

occupying the position of the most tactical importance on the European

battlefield. For neither Russia nor Britain could have fought had France

held aloof; Russia because of the fear of internal convulsions; Britain,

because Britain never fights unless the odds against her foe are

overwhelming. And Britain needed the aid of the French fleet.


To

sum up then, the failure of European socialism to avert the war is

primarily due to the divorce between the industrial and political

movements of labour. The socialist voter, as such, is helpless between

elections. He requires to organise power to enforce the mandate of the

elections and the *only power he can so organise is

economic power*—the power to stop the wheels of commerce, to

control the heart that sends the life blood pulsating through the social

organism.


- International Socialist Review , March, 1915.



---

p.61


James Keir Hardie
-----------------


By the death of Comrade James Keir Hardie labour has

lost one of its most fearless and incorruptible champions, and the world

one of its highest minded and purest souls.


It is not easy for us

who knew him long and personally to convey to the reader how much of a

loss his taking away is to the labour movement. We feel it with the

keenness of a personal loss.


James Keir Hardie was to the labour

movement a prophetic anticipation of its own possibilities. He was a

worker, with all the limitations from which no worker ever completely

escapes, and with potentialities and achievements such as few workers

aspire after, but of which each worker may be the embodiment.


James Keir Hardie himself was ever too modest to say, but we who were

his comrades often thought, that he was a living proof of the truth of

the idea that labour could furnish in its own ranks all that was needed

to achieve its own emancipation, the proof that labour needed no

heaven-sent saviour from the ranks of other classes. He had been denied

the ordinary chances of education, he was sent to earn his living at the

age of seven, he had to educate himself in the few hours he could snatch

from work and sleep, he was blacklisted by the employers as soon as he

gave vent to the voice of labour in his district, he had to face

unemployment and starvation in his early manhood, and when he began to

champion politically the rights of his class he found every prostitute

journalist in these islands throwing mud at his character, and defaming

his associates.


Yet he rose through it all, and above it all,

never faltered in the fight, never failed to stand up for truth and

justice as he saw it, and as the world will yet see it.




---

p.62


When the vultures of capital descended upon Dublin, resolved to make

Dublin the grave of the new unionism, James Keir Hardie was one of the

first to take his stand in the gap of danger by our sides. And when many

of our friends weakened or were led astray, in the midst of the clamour

of reviling tongues, and rising above it, we could always catch the

encouraging accents of James Keir Hardie bidding the Dublin fighters to

stand fast.


And when the latest great iniquity was being rushed

upon the world, and the contending hosts of Europe were being marshalled

by their masters for the work of murder, James Keir Hardie stood

resolutely for peace and brotherhood among the nations—refusing to

sanction the claim of the capitalist class of any nation to be the voice

of the best interests of that nation.


May the earth rest lightly

over his bosom.


- Workers' Republic , October 2, 1915.
[10](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note010.html'))


---

p.63


A Labour Day Speech in Dublin
-----------------------------


Mr. James Connolly said that, despite the doubts, the

fears, and the hints of some people, we had this year a magnificent turn

out. He found some difficulty in speaking to them that day. To make

himself heard he would require to have the lungs of a bull, and to steer

clear of the Defence of the Realm Act required the subtlety of a lawyer,

so they would understand his position. We were living in strange and

moving times. The powers that be had seized upon Seán McDermott,

Seán Milroy and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington for saying what had

already been said a thousand times. He, at least, had no desire to go to

gaol. They had powers that they used to think were oppressive and

tyrannical fighting for liberty and the freedom of small nations. ‘And

when I’, continued Mr. Connolly, ‘who have been all my life

fighting, in my own way, for these same objects, see such a great change

come to pass why should I want to go to prison’? (Laughter and

applause). He was therefore going to give them good advice. He advised

them all to join the army (Cries of ‘what army’? ‘Is it the

Citizen Army’?) ‘Well, I won't insult your intelligence by saying

which army, but if I am charged for anything I may say here to-day I

will call you all as witnesses (if I am allowed) to prove that I advised

you all to join the army’ (Laughter and applause). His advice then

was, ‘join the army’. ‘fight for freedom’, ‘defend

yourselves’. He had spent a good deal of his life in decrying force

as between man and man, but if force was to be the sole arbiter, then

let those who have right on their side gather all the force they can to

help them. His complaint with the resolutions was that they did not go

far enough. They asked the Government to rebuild the slums, but there

was more spent every day on the continent 


---

p.64


 than would rebuild

all Ireland. All Governments were doing this, and would continue doing

it until the workers took the world into their own hands, and ran it for

the benefit of those who alone did the world's work—the workers.

Sir Thomas More had well expressed the position when he wrote ‘I can

see nothing in the Governments of the world but a conspiracy of the rich

for the purpose of robbing the poor’. He was beheaded, and was it any

wonder that they cut off a head that gave utterance to so much wisdom?

Peace was a virtue they were told, and for forty years the Home Rule

party had been preaching peace, and had got very little for their pains.

On the other hand Sir Edward Carson had preached force for a few short

months, and had got all he demanded; and after Carson had poured

contempt on the law, and had on a hundred platforms urged defiance of

the law, he was now Attorney-General, having supreme charge of the

enforcement of the law (laughter). I am a law-abiding citizen

(laughter). I believe in the law—when it's big enough (laughter).

Why had not the Government squelched Carson as they had always been

prepared to squelch the labour men? As the result of all this law-

breaking Carson was now in the Cabinet, and Home Rule was indefinitely

shelved. If they turned to the ranks of labour they would see the only

class that never sold Ireland (loud applause). When you stand for labour

you stand for Ireland. Join your union and help in the fight to win back

your own land for labour. Join in the fight for a free and regenerated

Ireland, which will emancipate not alone yourselves but your children

and your children's children (loud applause).


- Workers' Republic , June 5, 1915.



---

p.65


Our disappearing Liberties
--------------------------


One of the commonplaces of the

political orator is the saying that ‘the price of liberty is eternal

vigilance’, a saying which implies that the liberties of mankind are

continually endangered from the inroads of unscrupulous enemies against

whose attacks we must ever be on the alert. It implies also that the

normal state of society is a state of war; that mankind, even amongst

the most progressive nations, is ever in danger of seeing its painfully

acquired liberties wrested from it and fresh chains substituted, and

that consequently they who wish to see progress maintained and the

bounds of freedom enlarged must be ever on the watch lest upon some

specious excuse they lost in a day what their fathers agonised for

generations to win.


This political proverb we seem in peril of

forgetting in these troublous times. On every side we see fresh inroads

made upon our liberties, but no Irish voice is raised in protest,

perhaps no Irish voice dare be raised. But no matter what the risk be,

we who essay to voice the hopes and defend the cause of Labour dare not

be silent. The needs of the multitude call for expression—it shall

not be said they called in vain. If fresh chains are forged for the

workers it shall not be said that we by our silence allowed those who

trusted us to remain ignorant of the fact that the chains were in

preparation.


In the first place we direct attention to the fact

that the meanest and cruellest form of conscription is already in active

operation in this country. Without consulting anyone as to their

opinions upon the justification or otherwise of this war employers are

every day giving to their employees the intimation that they must choose

between enlistment and starvation. It matters not that the employer may

himself be young or 


---

p.66


 vigorous, or have sons young and

vigorous, whilst the workman may have a family of little children

depending upon him, that employer sits smoking in his office chair and

orders the helpless wage-slave to don a uniform he hates, or suffer

dismissal and starvation. No greater violation of the right of the

individual has ever been known to history. When a man is ordered to take

a deadly weapon and proceed to kill a human being with whom he believes

he has no grounds of quarrel, personal or national, if the fear of

starvation makes him obey that order, then the person issuing that

command is guilty of the foulest crime known to humanity—the

murder of a human soul. Against such an attack upon the liberty of the

individual we protest, and call upon all to protest. Conscription is

bad, we hate the thought of it, but conscription is at least openly

brutal; this conscription by starvation is foul with the foulness of

Hell. We are not alone in this belief. There are thousands who believe

in the justness of this war who are sickened with loathing of the means

taken to obtain soldiers to carry it on.


Throughout Ireland every

day we read of prosecutions under the Defence of the Realm Act in which

the triviality of the charges are such as are calculated to bring more

contempt than respect upon those responsible. For that we do not repine,

nor pretend to repine. But when it appears that the liberty of the most

respectable man or woman in this country is absolutely at the mercy of

the most disreputable and drunken soldier that ever disgraced a uniform,

it is time to call a halt. In many cases we have seen drunken soldiers

deliberately pick quarrels with respectable civilians, and after abusing

and ill-treating them call upon the police to arrest those whom they had

abused and ill-treated. The police always obey, and the magistrates

always convict. On the tram, in the streets, in places of amusement or

refreshment, nowadays it is a positive danger to be in the proximity of

a soldier. Many of these are decent, *clearly* enough, but at any time the lowest amongst


---

p.67




 them may elect to force his gross conversation upon you, and

should you resent, the services of the police are called in and a term

of imprisonment is certain.


On Sunday whilst the Dublin Labour

Day procession was going to the Phoenix Park one of those rowdies

attempted to ride a bicycle right through the thickest ranks of the

processionists; others on the ground in the Park endeavoured by ribald

language and horseplay to stir up trouble wherever they saw groups of

policemen convenient to their activities, but fortunately the

demonstrators strong in the consciousness of their own power were not

moved to active hostility.


We wonder if the governing authorities

are really aware of all this. Surely no one can be so fatuous as to

imagine that the British Army can be popularised by such methods. If

we did believe that this kind of thing had really the support of the

government we should not waste our space in chronicling it; it is

because we realise that it may spread upward that we speak ere it be too

late. Magistrates, and soldiers and policemen and Coalition Cabinets

must be made to understand that they all exist in theory for the sake of

serving the civilian. If the contrary obtains, if, as seems to be the

danger in Ireland, the civilian subordinated to the soldier, and becomes

a dog for all those we have named to kick and abuse, then it will become

very difficult indeed to understand wherein lies that constitutional

freedom we have lately heard so much about.


The liberty of public

meeting is also rapidly becoming a thing of the past in Ireland, as far

as it is or may be used for the criticism of the activities of the

government or its functionaries; and yet it is this very right of the

subject to criticise the governing bodies which is the very essence of

freedom in a constitutionally governed country. Without the freedom of

the press and the right of public meeting there is no citizenship; there

are only the relations of subject and rulers, of slaves and

slave-drivers. The question of whether the press is or is not 


---

p.68


 wrong in its criticisms, or whether the public meeting does or

does not advocate wise measures or use wise language has no bearing

upon the matter. The press criticisms are subject to the judgment of the

readers; the public meeting stands or falls with the justice of its

cause. To allow either to be judged or punished by those against whom

they are directed, is to abolish all constitutional guarantees and to

establish the naked rule of force. Against that we protest with all our

strength. It is idle to speak of great national emergencies requiring

such suppression of liberties. Great national emergencies can only be

met by calling upon the reserves of good in our national character, by

invoking the aid of all that is best and ennobling. Whatever cause seeks

to flourish by stifling criticism and imprisoning thought is a hateful

cause, and can only rely upon the support of those natures who turn

instinctively to darkness and obscurity.


For all who love the

light for the help it brings to the cause of progress the duty is plain.

Every one of the liberties our fathers won must be fought for

tenaciously! War or no war one of our hard won rights should be, or will

be, surrendered without a struggle.


- Workers' Republic , June 5, 1915.



---

p.69


Why the Citizen Army honours Rossa
----------------------------------


In honouring O'Donovan Rossa the

workers of Ireland are doing more than merely paying homage to an

unconquerable fighter. They are signifying their adhesion to the

principle of which Rossa till his latest days was a living

embodiment—the principle that the freedom of a people must in the

last analysis rest in the hands of that people—that there is no

outside force capable of enforcing slavery upon a people really resolved

to be free, and valuing freedom more than life. We in Ireland have often

forgotten that truth, indeed it may be even asserted that only an

insignificant minority of the nation ever learned it. And yet, that

truth once properly adopted as the creed of a nation would become the

salvation of the nation.


For slavery is a thing of the soul,

before it embodies itself in the material things of the world. I assert

that before a nation can be reduced to slavery its soul must have been

cowed, intimidated or corrupted by the oppressor. Only when so cowed,

intimidated or corrupted does the soul of a nation cease to urge forward

its body to resist the imposition of the shackles of slavery; only when

the soul so surrenders does any part of the body consent to make truce

with the foe of its national existence.


When the soul is

conquered the articulate expression of the voice of the nation loses its

defiant accent, and taking on the whining colour of compromise, begins

to plead for the body. The unconquered soul asserts itself, and declares

its sanctity to be more important than the interests of the body; the

conquered soul ever pleads first that the body may be saved even if the

soul is damned.


For generations this conflict between the

sanctity of the soul and the interests of the body has been waged in

Ireland. 


---

p.70


 The soul of Ireland preached revolution, declared

that no blood-letting could be as disastrous as a cowardly acceptance of

the rule of the conqueror, nay, that the rule of the conqueror would

necessarily entail more blood-letting than revolt against the rule. In

fitful moments of spiritual exaltation Ireland accepted that idea, and

such men as O'Donovan Rossa becoming possessed of it became thenceforth

the living embodiment of that gospel. But such supreme moments passed

for the multitude, and the nation as a nation sank again into its

slavery, and its sole articulate expression to reach the ears of the

world were couched in the fitful accents of the discontented, but

spiritless slave—blatant in his discontent, spiritless in his

acceptance of subjection as part of the changeless order of things.


The burial of the remains of O'Donovan Rossa in Irish soil, and the

functions attendant thereon must inevitably raise in the mind of every

worker the question of his or her own mental attitude to the powers

against which the departed hero was in revolt. That involves the

question whether those who accept that which Rossa rejected have any

right to take part in honour paid to a man whose only title to honour

lies in his continued rejection of that which they have accepted. It is

a question each must answer for himself or herself. But it can neither

be answered carelessly, nor evaded.


The Irish Citizen Army in its

constitution pledges its members to fight for a Republican Freedom for

Ireland. Its members are, therefore, of the number who believe that at

the call of duty they may have to lay down their lives for Ireland, and

have so trained themselves that at the worst the laying down of their

lives shall constitute the starting point of another glorious tradi-

tion—a tradition that will keep alive the soul of the nation.


We are, therefore, present to honour O'Donovan Rossa by right of our

faith in the separate destiny of our country, and our faith in the

ability of the Irish workers to achieve that destiny.


- Rossa Souvenir , July, 1915.



---

p.71


The Man and the Cause!
----------------------


On

Sunday, August First, we propose to pay

public homage in Dublin to the remains and memory of Jeremiah O'Donovan

Rossa. It is well then that we strive to make clear not only to the

public, but to ourselves, upon what grounds that homage is paid. We

belong to the working class of Ireland, and strive to express the

working class point of view. Always and ever the working class movement

seeks after clearness of thought, as a means to the accomplishment of

working class aims. The middle class may and does deceive itself with

finely turned phrases, and vague generalising of still vaguer

aspirations, but the working class can think and speak only in language

hard and definite, as hard and definite as the conditions of working

class life. We have no room in our struggle for illusions—least of

all for illusions about freedom.[11](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note011.html'))


O'Donovan Rossa

represents to us a revolutionary movement the least aristocratic and the

most plebeian that ever raised itself to national dignity in Ireland. It

was a movement that resting upon the masses of people in Ireland, and

drawing its inspirations from the hearts of that people, was suc-

cessful in inspiring its followers with such a belief in their own

ability to conquer and master the future, that it nerved them to

conspire for a revolt against the British Empire at a time when that

Empire was at peace with all the world. The mere conception of such a

struggle, the stark naked fact that such a project was ever even mooted,

in itself stamps as heroes all who cherished and suffered for it. Grand

indeed must have been the souls, magnificent must have been the

courage, splendid the idealism of the men and women who with the awful

horror of the famine of Black '47, and inglorious '48, still in their

minds were not capable of rising to the spiritual level of challenging

the power 


---

p.72


 of England in 1865 or 1867. There were giants in

those days! Are we pigmies in these?


These men realised that no

nation is conquered until its mind is conquered, until it accepts

defeat. No nation capable of, however futilely and impotently, denying

with arms in the hands of even a few of its sons that it is conquered

and submerged in its conqueror, can be considered as having lost its

existence. In the present European hell-broth the diplomats, writers and

speakers of the world freely discuss the chances of re-establishing many

nations long subdued and banished from the roll of nations, but in no

one of these discussions does the name of Ireland figure. Because

Ireland has surrendered its separate national identity—Ireland

has become a mere geographical expression. To the world Ireland speaks

through its elected representatives, through its press, through its

great organs of public opinion, and so speaking has announced itself a

local province of the British Empire.


The sons of Ireland who are

in arms are in arms for England, the blood of Ireland that flows in

torrents every day flows for England, the Irish men who die fighting

like heroes and demigods die fighting for England. Ireland knows them

not, can never number them amongst her possessions, can never tell the

tale of their sufferings and exploits as sufferings and exploits for

her.


And yet Ireland dare not blame them! The least of these, our

brothers, would have fought for Ireland if those who spoke in Ireland's

name had but had the courage to call them, to summon them to the

sacrifice. But all, all failed in the supreme moment of destiny. And it

seems to us that when the eternal reckoning is made, God in His infinite

wisdom will deal less harshly with the Irish Tommies in the English

service than He will with the unscrupulous politicians, or blatant

revolutionaries, who stood by in silence and let our poor brothers march

out to their fruitless martyrdom in Flanders or the Dardanelles. 


---

p.73


 They shrank from the responsibility of giving the word not

realising that they thereby took on the more shameful responsibility of

failing to give the word.


Rossa was one of the men who in the

clays of another generation assumed the responsibility from which these

men shrank, and assumed it amid greater difficulties. He had to face

not only the possibility of defeat at the hands of a foreign tyrant, but

he had also to face the certainty of odium and hatred from those he was

prepared to die to liberate. Every ‘respectable’

class in the country was against the Fenians, all the press was against

them, most of the clergy denounced them from the altar, all the members

of parliament hated them with a fierce and malevolent hatred. They were

accused of conspiracy to destroy religion, a priest refused to solemnise

the marriage of Rossa himself, alleging that he was outside the pale of

the Church, every conceivable wickedness was imputed them, they were

said to be enemies of the family, of society, of morals.[12](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note012.html'))


Against such enemies they held their own, and if they failed to

emancipate their country or win for it a place amongst the nations of

the earth, they at least succeeded in establishing in the mind of the

world the fact of the independent existence of Ireland. Their greatest

enemies were those of their own race. They failed, but it was a failure

more glorious than many a victory. But its glory consisted in the fact

that against all odds, and in spite of the calculations of the trimmers

and wiseacres there were proven to be in Ireland thousands of men and

women who were prepared to affirm with their lives that Ireland was a

nation with an independent destiny of its own. Neither terrified nor

corrupted, the Fenians redeemed the honour of their nation, and we of

the working class are proud to remember that those heroes were of our

own class.


When we honour Rossa we honour in him the fearless

representative of a great movement—a movement that accomplished


---

p.74




 great things. We honour the latest of those who in days of

darkness pledged their faith to an Irish Republic, and kept that faith

unsullied to the last.


We on our part affirm that we march behind

the remains because we are prepared to fight for the same ideals. And we

shall be all the more nerved for fight when we remember that the banner

of Fenianism was upheld by the stalwart hands of the Irish working class

of that day, as the militant organisation of the same class to-day is

the only body that without reservation unhesitatingly announces its

loyalty to the republican principle of national freedom for which the

Fenians stood. We are here because this is our place!


- Workers' Republic , July 31, 1915.



---

p.75


Ireland's Travail and Ireland's Resurrection
--------------------------------------------


Never did

Ireland see a more soul-stirring outpouring of the Gael than was

witnessed on last Sunday, August 1,

1915.


We do not know whether the McManus Funeral—to

name the occasion with which it is most customary to draw

comparisons—was or was not more imposing in point of numbers than

the turn-out in honour of O'Donovan Rossa, but we do know that in all

other respects this latter called for a greater exercise of courage and

faith in the future than either the McManus or any other demonstration

ever seen in Ireland. Let us set forth the position clearly to our own

minds.[13](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note013.html'))


The McManus Funeral was the first sign of the

uprising of Irish Nationality after the shameful, sorrowful days of

1847-48 and 1849. Ireland, in the words of James Fintan Lalor, ‘sank

and surrendered to the famine’, and with no resistance of the

importance even of a riot had gone down before the blows of the enemy.

So completely had she gone down that many of her rebels formally gave up

the struggle, and announced their belief that the cause of Ireland's

separate existence was a lost cause. The case of M. J. Barry, the gifted

author of that splendid revolutionary song, all too seldom sung

nowadays, Bide Your Time, may be

cited as a notable example. But this surrender of Ireland, this defeat

of Ireland, was a surrender and defeat inflicted by the enemy against

the protests and vain struggles of the representatives of the Irish

people.


All the organised life of Ireland protested against the

means by which the potato blight was used to create a famine, against

the methods employed to make that famine subservient to English policy.

Their protests were ineffectual, they who were 


---

p.76


 willing to

let the case go to the arbitrament of battle waited too long and lost

their chance, and they who were not so willing were equally unable to

stem the tide of demoralisation. ‘The soul of Ireland sank where that

of other nations would soar’, and the cause was lost. But the issues

were left clear in the public mind. It was still the existence of

Ireland against the public policy of England.


For the year

preceding the Rossa Funeral the conditions of Ireland were entirely

different. The cause of Ireland as a separate nation, as a nation with a

separate life, history, and individuality of its own, was again looked

upon as a lost cause, and the fate of Ireland was again accepted as

being irrevocably and finally blended with that of the British

Empire.


But unlike the days of '48 the days of the past twelve

months were remarkable for the fact that the abandonment of the cause

of Ireland as a separate nationality, the merging of the hopes of

Ireland in the success of England, the definite declaration that the

British Empire could count Ireland as finally conquered and made ‘loyal’—all this came not from without, not

imposed upon us in the hour of our weakness, but from within, and

accepted in the moment of our greatest tactical strength by the leaders

trusted by the majority of our people. For twelve months—twelve

long dreary agonising months—we have seen war in Ireland, war upon

the soul of the Irish people, war upon the traditions, the religious

spirit, the holiest aspirations, the centuried hopes of the martyred men

and women who had made Ireland famed and respected wherever there are

gathered men and women capable of honouring fortitude in disaster, and

sublimity of soul in the midst of defeat.


Never has a nation

suffered such an onslaught. Belgium in its agonies under the heel of the

invaders, nor Poland in its awful travail, cannot claim to have suffered

as Ireland has suffered since war was declared. Betrayed and deserted by

all but a faithful few, Ireland was attacked by every poisonous 


---

p.77


 agency ever brought to bear upon the mind and soul of a people.

Her religion, her love of nationality, her strict sexual morality, her

natural affection for the weak, her sympathy for suffering and

distress—every high and noble instinct implanted in her by ages of

suffering, was appealed to that her children might deny the past of

their country, and surrender their hopes of moulding its future.

Ireland was asked, nay, was ordered, to deny all that her martyrs had

affirmed, to affirm all that her martyrs had denied. And this assault

upon the soul of the country was planned and carried out in all its

minutest and most revolting details by the men whom a cruel fate had

allowed to become the leaders and guides of Irish public opinion.


The fight in Belgium and in Poland are fights for the material

possession of towns and cities, the fight in Ireland has been one for

the soul of a race—that Irish race which with seven centuries of

defeat behind it still battled for the sanctity of its dwelling

place.


Old mediaeval legends tell us how in the critical moments

of the struggle of an army, or the travail of a nation, some angel or

deliveror was sent from above to save those favoured by the Most High.

To many people to-day it seems that the funeral of O'Donovan Rossa came

to Ireland in such a moment of national agony—came on such a

mission of divine uplifting and deliverance. The mists and doubts, the

corruption and poisons, the distrust and the treacheries, were blown

away, and the true men and women of Ireland saw with pleasure the rally

of the nation to the olden ideas—saw the real people of the

country solemnly bearing witness to the faith and wisdom of those who

had ‘fought a good fight, and kept the faith’.


The McManus

Funeral rallied the people of Ireland after their defeat by the enemy;

the Rossa funeral rallied the people of Ireland after the onslaught of

her faithless leaders.




---

p.78


Will the rallied Irish people

stand fast as well as they whom they honoured?


- Workers' Republic , August 7, 1915.



---

p.79


The Party versus the People
---------------------------


On Monday, August 30th, the Freeman's Journal[14](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note014.html')) devoted a long

leading article to telling of the many changes for the better that have

been wrought in Ireland for the past forty years. The political changes,

the changes in the laws governing the owning and occupying of land, the

various ameliorations of the condition of the poor in the country

districts, the increase of public control in affairs of local

government—all these things were gone into with a wealth of detail

and at the same time with a florid style and boastfulness of descrip-

tion that the mere parliamentarian has made us all familiar with to the

point of nausea. And why are we treated to this story? We are treated to

this story in an attempt to silence the critics of the Home Rule Party

by representing that all the great and beneficent changes mentioned in

the Freeman are due to the

activities of that Party, and that therefore the critics of the Party

are foolish and ignorant, or are basely ungrateful.


Readers of

the Freeman's Journal if they can

be deceived by such rubbish are surely unfit to be entrusted with the

franchise, or, indeed, with any power over the destinies of their

country. The benefits that have been gained, and some of them are

undoubted, have been gained by the heroic fighting and sacrifices of the

Irish *people*, and a political party was only one,

and not the most important one, of the many weapons forged and used by

the Irish people during that fighting, and as a result of their

sacrifices. Landlordism in its worst phases was not abolished, the right

of a tenant to security in his tenure was not secured, the purchase of

proprietary rights by the tenantry was not accomplished by the mere

presence of eighty-five spouters in the British House of Commons. On the

contrary, these vain glorious gentlemen were only able to secure a

hearing 


---

p.80


 by virtue of the fact that the Land League by its

fighting in Ireland had brought this country into civil war, and had so

utterly destroyed the value of Irish landed property that not a

moneylender in Europe would then loan money upon its security. The Home

Rule Party were merely the ambassadors at a Foreign

Court—ambassadors who remained powerless until the popular armies

in Ireland had struck down landlordism in spite of evictions, battering

rams, imprisonment and death. The extent of our indebtedness to the Home

Rule Party can be gauged by measuring the relative achievements of the

people who fought and won the fight on the land question—a fight

fought and won outside Parliament—and the people who fought and

lost the battle of Home Rule—a purely parliamentary battle.


The people met all the combined forces of landlordism and the British

Crown, broke up the social system they had imposed upon the agricultural

population, and tore a measure of social freedom and economic security

from their reluctant grasp. The Irish parliamentarians met the British

politicians on their own chosen field of battle—and lost every

move of the game. Every time the astute British politicians called for a

sacrifice on the part of the Irish Home Rule Party that party yielded

the point and sacrificed their principles. They yielded to sacrifice

Ulster and divide their country, they yielded the control of taxation,

they yielded control over the Post Office, Customs and Excise; in short,

they yielded everything that gives *life* and power to a nation. And finally, when their

grandest opportunity came in the breath of war they yielded up countless

thousands of the lives of their trusting fellow-countrymen.


And

in return they achieved—NOTHING. Home Rule, pitiful abortion as it

is, is hung up, and side by side with the law suspending it is framed

the declaration of the English Prime Minister that it would in his

opinion be unthinkable to force Home Rule upon Orange Ulster. So that

the politicians 


---

p.81


 as a result of their forty years babbling in

the wilderness at Westminster can only record their failure to achieve

that which was to them as the breath of their nostrils, whereas the

Irish people fighting in Ireland upon the battleground of their farms,

leagues, and trade unions, have compelled an unwilling legislature to

pass measure after measure enacting as law that which the power of the

people had already won as rights.


As servants of England the

members of the Home Rule Party are perhaps entitled to their salaries,

but if their claim to £400 per year is based upon achievements for

Ireland the claim is but an impudent attempt to obtain money under false

pretences.


- Workers' Republic , September 4, 1915.



---

p.82


God Help the poor Irish
-----------------------


To all thoughtful labour men and women the recent

meeting of the British Trade Union Congress presented a rather sorrowful

spectacle. Time was when that Congress was regarded as embodying all the

bright hopes and aspirations of a working class rapidly freeing itself

from the mental and political fetters inherited from ages of

servitude. Time was when the most beloved spokesmen of that Congress

were those who most passionately declared that it was the duty of the

workers to overthrow all the social, political and military tyrannies

rooted in the capitalist system of which the British Empire is the per-

fected fruit. Time was when the unanimous voice of that Congress

declared that the working class had no enemy except the capitalist

class—that of its own country at the head of the list. Time was

when the orators at all the meetings attendant upon that Congress

declaimed their love of human brotherhood, and their contempt for all

the racial, religious and national catchcries that were used to keep the

peoples separate and warring.


But now! Alas, how have the mighty

fallen! Gone are all the bright hopes of a class fighting to free itself

from fetters, and scornfully contemptuous of the interests or ambitions

of its masters. Instead, we have a Congress deliberately putting aside

the hopes of the workers in order to help the schemes of murder set on

foot by the capitalist state. We have a Congress where a leader like

George N. Barnes uses his position to attack his own Union for insisting

upon its Trade Union rights; where a leader like the President of the

Congress advises his hearers not to read literature presenting a dif-

ferent view on the war to that popularised by the capitalist newspapers;

where a leader like Ben Tillett foams at the mouth against those who 


---

p.83


 desire peace as a few months ago he foamed at the mouth against

those who desired war; where every voice belched forth hatred of their

brothers under a different government, and where the quarrels fomented

by the capitalist class were made more important as standards of worth

than services in the interests of Labour, or aspirations for a world

where men can live guiltless of plotting the murder of their fellow men.

A Congress which declared against compulsory service or conscription,

but in the same breath declared it would accept it if its rulers

declared it to be necessary.


We have ere now looked hopefully to

the British Trade Union Congress, but our hopes are gone. The British

Empire is ruled by the most astute ruling class in the world; the

British working class is the most easily fooled working class in the

world.


God help the poor Irish as long as they remain yoked to

such a combination.


- Workers' Republic , September 18, 1915.



---

p.84


In Praise of the Empire
-----------------------


We want to say a few words in praise of the Empire.

Now, do not get startled, or shocked, nor yet think that we are only

sarcastic. We are not abandoning our principles, nor forgetting our

wrongs, nor giving up as hopeless the fight for our rights, nor yet

exercising the slave's last privilege—that of sneering at his

masters.


We do not love the Empire; we hate it with an

unqualified hatred, but, nevertheless, we admire it. Why should we

not!


Consider well what this Empire is doing to-day, and then see

if you can withhold your admiration.


At the present moment this

Empire has dominions spread all over the seven seas. Everywhere it holds

down races and nations, that it might use them as its slaves, that it

might use their territories as sources of rent and interest for its

aristocratic rulers, that it might prevent their development as

self-supporting entities and compel them to remain dependent customers

of English produce, that it might be able to strangle every race or

nation that would enter the field as a competitor against British

capitalism or assert its independence of the British capitalist.


To do this it stifles the ancient culture of India, strangles in its

birth the new-born liberty of Egypt, smothers in the blood of ten

thousand women and children the republics of South Africa, betrays into

the hands of Russian despotism the trusting nationalists of Persia,

connives at the partition of China, and plans the partition of

Ireland.


North, south, east and west it has set its foot upon the

neck of peoples, plundering and murdering, and mocking as it outraged.

In the name of a superior civilization it has crushed the development

of native genius, and in the name of superior 


---

p.85


 capitalist

development it has destroyed the native industries of a sixth of the

human race.


In the name of liberty it hangs and imprisons

patriots, and whilst calling High Heaven to witness its horror of

militarism it sends the shadow of its swords between countless millions

and their hopes of freedom.


Despite all this, despite the fact

that every day the winds of the earth are laden with the curses which

its unwilling subjects in countless millions pray upon its flag, yet

that flag flies triumphantly over every one of its possessions, even

whilst its soldiers are reeling discomfited and beaten before the

trenches of Turk and German.


The British Empire never fought a

white European foe single-handed, never dared yet to confront an equal

unaided, yet it has laid upon its subjects everywhere from Ireland to

India and from India to Africa, the witchcraft of belief in its luck, so

that even whilst they see it beaten to its knees they are possessed with

the conviction that it will pull through in some fashion. The Devil's

children have their father's luck!


Without that belief, without

that conviction of the slaves that their master must remain in

possession of his mastership, the British Empire would to-day be

everywhere lit up with the fires of mutiny and insurrection.


In

the labour movement we have long ago learned that it is the worker who

is convinced of the power of the capitalist, who believes that ‘the big fellows are sure to win’, it is he who really

keeps labour in subjection, defeats strikes and destroys Trade Unions.

The problem before the labour movement is always to find out how this

hopeless feeling can be destroyed, and confidence implanted in the bosom

where despair usually reigns.


The moment the worker no longer

believes in the all-conquering strength of the employer is the moment

when the way opens out to the emancipation of our class. 


---

p.86





The master class realise this, and hence all their agencies bend

their energies towards drugging, stupefying and poisoning the minds of

the workers—sowing distrust and fear amongst them.


The

ruling class of the British Empire also know it, and hence they also

utilise every agency to spread amongst the subject races a belief in the

luck of England, in the strength of England, in the omnipotence of

England. That belief is worth more to the British Empire than ten army

corps; when it goes, when it is lost, there will be an uprising of

resurgent nationalities—and a crash of falling Empires.


Should we not therefore admire the Empire that in face of danger can

yet fascinate and enthral the minds of its slaves and keep them in

mental as well as physical subjection. . .?


- Workers' Republic , October 9, 1915.



---

p.87


A War for Civilisation
----------------------


We are hearing and reading a lot just now

about a war for civilisation. In some vague, ill-defined manner we are

led to believe that the great empires of Europe have suddenly been

seized with a chivalrous desire to right the wrongs of mankind, and have

sallied forth to war, giving their noblest blood and greatest measures

to the task of furthering the cause of civilisation.


It seems

unreal, but it may be possible. Great emotions sometimes master the most

cold and calculating individuals, pushing them on to do that which in

their colder moments they would have sneered at. In like manner great

emotions sometimes master whole communities of men and women, and

nations have gone mad, as in the Crusades, over matters that did not

enter into any scheme of selfish calculation.


But in such cases

the great emotions manifested themselves in at least an appropriate

manner. Their actions under the influence of great emotions had a

relation to the cause or the ideal for which they were ostensibly

warring.


In the case of the war for civilisation, however, we

look in vain for any action which in itself bears the mark of

civilisation. As we count civilisation it means the ascendancy of

industry and the arts of industry over the reign of violence and

pillage. Civilisation means the conquest by ordered law and peaceful

discussion of the forces of evil, it means the exaltation of those whose

strength is only in the righteousness of their cause over those whose

power is gained by a ruthless seizing of domination founded on

force.


Civilisation necessarily connotes the gradual supplanting

of the reign of chance and muddling by the forces of order and careful

provision for the future; it means the levelling up of 


---

p.88




classes, and the initiation of the people into a knowledge and enjoyment

of all that tends to soften the natural hardships of life and to make

that life refined and beautiful.


But the war for civilisation has

done none of those things—aspires to do none of these things. It

is primarily a war upon a nation whose chief crime is that it refuses to

accept a position of dependence, but insists instead upon organising its

forces so that its people can co-operate with nature in making their

lives independent of chance, and independent of the goodwill of

others.


The war for civilisation is a war upon a nation which

insists upon organising its intellect so as to produce the highest and

best in science, in art, in music, in industry; and insists moreover

upon so co-ordinating and linking up all these that the final result

shall be a perfectly educated nation of men and women.


In the

past civilisation has been a heritage enjoyed by a few upon a basis of

the brutalisation of the vast multitude; that nation aims at a

civilisation of the whole resting upon the whole, and only made possible

by the educated co-operation of an educated whole.


The war for

civilisation is waged by a nation like Russia, which has the greatest

proportion of illiterates of any European power, and which strives

sedulously to prevent education where it is possible, and to poison it

where prohibition is impossible.


The war for civilisation is

waged by a nation like Britain which holds in thrall a sixth of the

human race, and holds as a cardinal doctrine of its faith that none of

its subject races may, under penalty of imprisonment and death, dream of

ruling their own territories. A nation which believes that all races are

subject to purchase, and which brands as perfidy the act of any nation

which, like Bulgaria, chooses to carry its wares and its arms to any

other than a British market.


This war for civilisation in the

name of neutrality, and small 


---

p.89


 nationalities invades Persia

and Greece, and in the name of the interests of commerce seizes the

cargo of neutral ships, and flaunts its defiance of neutral flags.


In the name of freedom from militarism it establishes military rule

in Ireland, battling for progress it abolishes trial by jury, and waging

war for enlightened rule it tramples the freedom of the press under the

heel of a military despot.


Is it any wonder then that that

particular war for civilisation arouses no enthusiasm in the ranks of

the toiling masses of the Irish nation?


But there is another war

for civilisation in which these masses are interested. That war is

being waged by the forces of organised labour.


Civilisation

cannot be built upon slaves; civilisation cannot be secured if the

producers are sinking into misery; civilisation is lost if they whose

labour makes it possible share so little of its fruits that its fall can

leave them no worse than its security.


The workers are at the

bottom of civilised society. That civilisation may endure they ought to

push upward from their poverty and misery until they emerge into the

full sunlight of freedom. When the fruits of civilisation, created by

all, are enjoyed in common by all, then civilisation is secure. Not till

then.


Since this European war started the workers as a whole have

been sinking. It is not merely that they have lost in comfort—have

lost a certain standard of food and clothing by reason of the increase

of prices—but they have lost in a great measure, in Britain at

least, all those hard won rights of combination and freedom of action,

the possession of which was the foundation upon which they hoped to

build the greater freedom of the future.


From being citizens with

rights the workers were being driven and betrayed into the position of

slaves with duties. Some of them may have been well-paid slaves, but

slavery 


---

p.90


 is not measured by the amount of oats in the feeding

trough to which the slave is tied. It is measured by his loss of control

of the conditions under which he labours.


We here in Ireland,

particularly those who follow the example of the Irish Transport and

General Workers' Union, have been battling to preserve those rights

which others have surrendered; we have fought to keep up our standards

of life, to force up our wages, to better our conditions.


To that

extent we have been truly engaged in a war for civilisation. Every

victory we have gained has gone to increase the security of life amongst

our class, has gone to put bread on the tables, coals in the fires,

clothes on the backs of those to whom food and warmth and clothing are

things of ever pressing moment.


Some of our class have fought

in Flanders and the Dardanelles; the greatest achievement of them all

combined will weigh but a feather in the balance for good compared with

the achievements of those who stayed at home and fought to secure the

rights of the working class against invasion.


The carnival of

murder on the continent will be remembered as a nightmare in the future,

will not have the slightest effect in deciding for good the fate of our

homes, our wages, our hours, our conditions. But the victories of labour

in Ireland will be as footholds, secure and firm, in the upward climb

our class to the fulness and enjoyment of all that labour creates, and

organised society can provide.


Truly, labour alone in these days

is fighting the real *war for civilisation*.


- Workers' Republic , October 30, 1915.



---

p.91


For the Citizen Army
--------------------


The Irish Citizen Army was

founded during the great Dublin Lock-Out of 1913-14, for the purpose of

protecting the working class, and of preserving its right of public

meeting and free association. The streets of Dublin had been covered by

the bodies of helpless men, women, boys and girls brutally batoned by

the uniformed bullies of the British Government.


Three men had

been killed, and one young Irish girl murdered by a scab, and nothing

was done to bring the assassins to justice.[15](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note015.html')) So since justice did not exist for

us, since the law instead of protecting the rights of the workers was

an open enemy, and since the armed forces of the Crown were unreservedly

at the disposal of the enemies of labour, it was resolved to create our

own army to secure our rights, to protect our members, and to be a

guarantee of our own free progress.


The Irish Citizen Army was

the first publicly organised armed citizen force south of the Boyne. Its

constitution pledged and still pledges its members to work for an Irish

Republic, and for the emancipation of labour. It has ever been foremost

in all national work, and whilst never neglecting its own special

function has always been at the disposal of the forces of Irish nation-

ality for the ends common to all.


Its influence and presence has

kept the peace at all labour meetings since its foundation, and the

knowledge of its existence and of the spirit of its members has

contributed to prevent the employers and the government from pro-

ceeding to extremes against the fighting unions. It has in a true and

real sense added many shillings per week to the pay of the union

members, since it and it alone has prevented the Government doing in

Dublin what it has done in Barry, namely, send soldiers in to 


---

p.92


 do dockers' work during a strike. Nationally it has done much

more.


When the great betrayal was perpetrated on Ireland, and

John Redmond and his followers, aided by all the capitalist press of the

country, joined in a conspiracy to rush the young men of Ireland into

the ranks of the British Army, the first stirring blow struck against

that betrayal was the historic meeting in Stephen's Green on the night

of Redmond's Mansion House fiasco.


Who took the field that night

in spite of the massed battalions the British Army, waiting the word in

every barrack square Dublin? It was the Irish Citizen Army sprang into

the gap, and by its fearless presence gave new heart and hope to the

dismayed and betrayed people of Ireland.


When the first

deportation order was issued to the first victim, Captain Robert

Monteith, who leaped to arms and invited the people of Dublin to hurl

their defiance in the teeth of the Government? Who rallied to the

meeting despite torrents of rain, and in face of the open demonstration

of armed force by the Dublin garrison? Again it was the Irish Citizen

Army.[16](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note016.html'))


Who on

every occasion on which the enemy has struck his blow at those who stood

for freedom has ever hastened to the side of the victims declaring their

cause to be its own? THE IRISH CITIZEN ARMY!


Who, when the

protest meeting was held in the Phoenix Park under directions of the

Volunteer Committee, were the only armed body to attend and declare

their adhesion to the cause of their imprisoned brothers in arms? THE

IRISH CITIZEN ARMY!


An armed organisation of the Irish working

class is a phenomenon in Ireland. Hitherto the workers of Ireland have

fought as parts of the armies led by their masters, never as members of

an army officered, trained, and inspired by men 


---

p.93


 of their own

class. Now, with arms in their hands, they propose to steer their own

course, to carve their own future.


Neither Home Rule, nor the

lack of Home Rule, will make them lay down their arms.


However it

may be for others, for us of the Citizen Army there is but one

ideal—an Ireland ruled, and owned, by Irish men and women,

sovereign and independent from the centre to the sea, and flying its own

flag outward over all the oceans.


We cannot be swerved from our

course by honeyed words, lulled into carelessness by freedom to parade

and strut in uniforms, nor betrayed by high-sounding phrases.


The Irish Citizen Army will only co-operate in a forward movement.

The moment that forward movement ceases it reserves to itself the right

to step out of the alignment, and advance by itself if needs be, in an

effort to plant the banner of freedom one reach further towards its

goal. . ..


- Workers' Republic , October 30, 1915.



---

p.94


Diplomacy
---------


What is diplomacy? It is the name for the business of conducting the

relations between governments. Whatever has to do with the conduct of

international relations is diplomatic, and the art of conducting the

correspondence and of adjusting those relations is diplomacy.


Now, do you understand? The language in which all diplomats carry on

the business throughout the world is French, just as the predominant

language in which trade was conducted internationally until recently was

English.


The nations, that is to say, robbed each other in

English, and fooled each other in French.


The English have

acquired somehow the reputation of being blunt, business-like people,

with a frank, open nature, whereas the history of their dealings with

other people show them to have been the shrewdest masters of the

diplomatic game the world has ever seen.


In Ireland, as their own

State Papers frankly declare, they employed forgery, bribery, and

murder as part of their daily weapons for the subjugation of the

country; in India their own chief apologist, Lord Macaulay, records that

Lord Clive, the founder of their Indian Empire, forged the name of an

Indian patriot to serve the interests of the Empire, and Warren

Hastings, when put on trial for extortion, blackmail, bribery torture,

wholesale plunder, invasion and conquest of neutral states, was proven

guilty but let off scot free on the grounds that he had indulged in

those crimes *for the good of the Empire*.


In Europe the same guileless John Bull has assiduously kept stirring

the pot of international hatreds and jealousies, pitting nations against

nations, and ever fanning the embers of war into consuming flames.

Sometimes he supported subject nations 


---

p.95


 against their

tyrants, sometimes despots against their struggling subjects, sometimes

preached the doctrine of national rights, sometimes (as at the Con-

gress of Vienna, 1815) acted the part of the chief criminal in dividing

and parcelling out ancient nations. Ready to fly to arms to defend the

rights of neutrals, still more ready to trample roughshod over neutral

rights when it served his purpose; ever appealing to God and the Bible,

and always convinced that crimes committed by John Bull became virtues,

and virtuous acts by his enemies became blasphemous mockeries of the

Most High.


British Diplomacy is hypocrisy incarnate, but as every

false prophet comes in odd moments to believe in the truth of his false

doctrine, so John Bull finds Englishmen to honestly believe that which

their rulers unctuously pretend. Hence we have the phenomenon of the

same section of the English people which honestly denounced their

Government's action in betraying Persia to the Russians, quite as

honestly believing in the action of the same Government when it cries

out against the invasion of Belgium.


Cynical onlookers might say

that the rape and betrayal of Persia was regarded as a harmless joke

because it was done by England's ally, but the invasion of Belgium was a

monstrous crime because it was done by England's enemy.


Even if

that were true it would not affect the case. Diplomacy has a code of

honour of its own, has a standard by which it tests all things. That

code has no necessary relation to the moral code, that standard has

nothing to do with the righteousness of any cause.


The diplomat

holds all acts honourable which bring him success, all things are

righteous which serve his ends. If cheating is necessary, he will cheat;

if lying is useful, he will lie; if bribery helps, he will bribe; if

murder serves, he will order murder; if burglary, seduction, arson or

forgery brings success nearer, all and each of these will be done.




---

p.96


And through it all the diplomat will remain the soul of

honour—a perfect English gentleman.


You remember the

Morocco case. England, France, and Spain were engaged in a sweet little

plundering expedition to Morocco. Germany thought her interests were

being over-looked, and sent a gunboat. There was nearly a war. Then

England, France and Spain made a treaty, oh, a fine chivalrous, noble

treaty! They agreed to maintain, respect and guarantee the independence

of Morocco. And they showed that treaty to Germany, and Germany was

satisfied.


But there were secret clauses of that treaty which

they did not show to Germany. These secret clauses bound the signatories

to the treaty to divide up and annex the country whose independence the

public clauses of the treaty had pledged them to safeguard. They did not

show these secret clauses to Germany. Oh, no! But Germany found out

about them, and there would have been war but for the fact that the

Germans, though great soldiers, are rotten diplomats.


Just

imagine the situation. When your grocer sells you sand over the counter

for sugar he is a swindler, and you send him to jail unless he escapes

into the Corporation and becomes an Alderman.


But when the

representatives of certain European countries sit down at the table with

those of another, show them the text of a treaty, solemnly assuring them

that it is a correct copy, whilst all the time they have in their

pockets a totally different treaty with clauses entirely opposed to the

copy shown, the swindling representatives are held in high honour by

their governments because it is good diplomacy.


We had the same

game here in Ireland. The Irish public have been shown a copy of a Home

Rule Bill, and Sir Edward Carson has in his pocket a copy of an Amending

Bill which will destroy the Home Rule Bill—said Amending Bill

having been agreed upon by the same English statesmen who prepared the

Bill it is to destroy.




---

p.97


That is diplomacy. And the act

of those who pin their faith to the Home Rule Act and ignore the

Amending Bill is—well, foolery.


We have said the Germans

are rotten diplomats. It sounds strong, and in view of the espousal of

their cause by so many nations in Europe it may seem foolish. But it is

cold fact. The German victories, not excepting the adhesion of Turkey

and Bulgaria, have been military victories, or due to their unques-

tioned military superiority on the field of battle.


Every

dispassionate onlooker in Europe recognises certain facts. They see that

no one of the Allies could stand up a day against Germany, if isolated

from the others.


To put it in the language of a labour dispute:

If Germany struck against Russia the strike would only last a day, and

work would be resumed the next morning on German terms; if Germany

struck against France the dispute might drag out till dinner time, but

if the strike was only against Great Britain the fight would be over by

breakfast time, and the German workmen would be able to finish a

three-quarter day after the row was over.


Now observe. The

onlookers know that the alliance against Germany cannot last, but must

break up as it is made up of so many discordant elements. It is

unnatural, and whether it last a year, or three years, or ten years is

immaterial, break up it will.


On the other hand, Germany is the

one solid factor that must last, which cannot break up, which nature

will hold together. *Victorious or defeated, Germany

will keep together; victorious or defeated, the Allies will break

up*—and probably quarrel amongst themselves.


Common

sense then sends the neutral nations to Germany's side, and despite the

magnificent left wing of the daily press there they will remain. Or to

put it in another way. The most magnificent military force ill the war

is the one that by nature 


---

p.98


 will remain a constant undivided

factor in the future, and on the other side is an impotent military

force under different commands, with divided allegiances, and with

divergent interests.


Who could hesitate? No, the victories of

Germany are military victories, not diplomatic ones. If Germany had to

depend on her diplomacy she would be defeated. She had one great chance

to declare war with the public opinion of Europe on her side, and with

the sympathies of Ireland so enlisted, that not all the lying press nor

crawling parliamentarians could have turned this country against

her.


That chance came when the Mail boats for America ceased to

call at Queenstown. Certain patriotic Irishmen persuaded a German

steamship company—The Hamburg-America line we believe—to

announce that it was about to make Queenstown a port of call so that

Ireland would still maintain her communication with America. Everything

was ready, and all Ireland was excited over the prospect. But British

diplomacy stepped in and intimated to the German government that it

would consider it an unfriendly act if the company in question sent in

its boats to Ireland.


The German Government gave orders for the

arrangements to be cancelled, and Ireland was once more shut out from

all regular foreign intercourse, and its people restricted to the

necessity of going to England when they wanted to go somewhere

else—of going east when they wanted to go west, north, or

south.


If Germany had not been a bungling fool at diplomacy it

would have fought on that question—fought on the right to assist

the people of Ireland, to trade with the people of Ireland, to carry

goods to and from the people of Ireland. But the peace-loving German

Emperor shrank from the quarrel, not realising that from that moment

every agency in the British Government was alert to seize every

opportunity to precipitate 


---

p.99


 a quarrel upon some point not so

dangerously appealing to Irish sympathies for German arms as a quarrel

over Queenstown would have been.


The pretext for this war is a

real humiliation for German diplomacy, as real as the war itself is a

triumph for German arms. German arms will win this war, but we would not

be surprised to see British diplomacy pluck the fruits of victory from

the dust of military defeat. Ireland and Ireland alone could prevent

that, but Ireland has the brand of the slave on her brow—numbing

fear of the tyrant in her soul. ‘The British Ambassadors at Paris’,

said Andrew Jackson after the war of 1812, ‘threw dust in the eyes of

our United States envoys, but they could not throw dust in the eyes of

my Texas riflemen at New Orleans’.


Can Ireland burst through

the wiles of British diplomacy in like manner? Who shall answer?


- Workers' Republic , November 6, 1915.



---

p.100


Recruiting the Irish Citizen Army
---------------------------------


*During a dispute between the shipping companies and their men

at the Dublin Docks in the autumn of 1915 a large number of workers were

locked out. Connolly in the Workers' Repub-

lic, November 6, 1915,

showed how this was turned to the advantage of the Irish Citizen

Army:* 
> 
> A large section has been formed for drill,
> 
> and every day the men are instructed in military exercises. We are thus
> 
> rapidly becoming the best drilled body of men in Ireland. For a time it
> 
> was difficult to get our men trained, as dock work keeps men employed
> 
> always in the evenings, but the employers are kindly helping us to get
> 
> over that difficulty. Company after company locks out its men, and then
> 
> we bring them up to Liberty Hall and take advantage of the opportunity
> 
> to drill and train them. When each dispute is settled that squad of men
> 
> goes back to work, and some other squad gets locked out, and we get a
> 
> chance to train *them*.
> 
> 
> Thus the whole quay
> 
> is getting drilled, and the Irish Citizen Army has a larger reserve of
> 
> drilled fighting men than any force in Dublin. It is a great game! And
> 
> all these men are ready to fight—in Ireland. Perhaps that is not
> 
> what the employers are aiming at. Perhaps. But every musketry instructor
> 
> can tell you that people often hit what they did not aim at. The great
> 
> danger is that the dispute may be over before the men are thoroughly
> 
> drilled. And when it is over the men will be back to work at the same
> 
> rates of pay as their brothers have been conceded. And not a penny
> 
> less.
> 
> 
> 




- Workers' Republic , November 6, 1915.



---

p.101


Ireland disaffected or revolutionary?
-------------------------------------


* Youth of

Ireland, stand prepared,
  
Revolution's dread abyss
  
Burns

beneath us all but bared. . ..


So sang Clarence Mangan in the days of '48. But he sang in vain. The

music of his verse charmed the cultured intellect of the leaders, but

could not break through their refined distrust of the mob, nor inspire

them with a confidence in its willingness to respond to the call. And

the verse of Mangan never appealed to the emotions of the mob

itself.[17](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note017.html'))


---

p.105





The revolutionary position was there, the

people were ready, but the leaders were lacking in dash and

recklessness. As another writer has it of another body of leaders

similarly situated: 
> 
> Having all their lives sung of the
> 
> glories of the Revolution, when it rose up before them they ran away
> 
> appalled.
> 
> 
> 




These reflections are inspired by

the fact that Ireland is at present in the midst of a number of

anniversaries of the great days of its patriot dead. On all hands

celebrations are being or have been arranged, much oratory is on tap,

many verses of more or less merit are pouring forth, and all sorts of

men and women are drawing lessons and pointing morals for the

edification of the Irish reading public.


It is felt that we are

now in stirring times, and many people dare even to hope that we are in

a revolutionary epoch. It is well then that we of the Irish working

class should try and understand the position of the revolutionists of

the past, that we may the better realise our position in the

present.


We do not believe that this is a revolutionary epoch, no

more than the days of Mitchel were revolutionary in Ireland, 


---

p.102


 nor the days of Allen, Larkin and O'Brien. An epoch, to be

truly revolutionary, must have a dominating number of men with the

revolutionary spirit—ready to dare all, and take all risks for the

sake of their ideals.


In 1848, as later, there were men who

talked much of revolution, but when the spirit of the times called upon

them to strike they all began to make excuses, to murmur about the

danger of premature insurrection, of incomplete preparations, of the

awful responsibility of giving the word for insurrection, etc., etc.


In 1848, as later, the real revolutionary sentiment was in the hearts

of the people, but for the most part they who undertook to give it

articulate expression were wanting in the essential ability to translate

sentiment into action. They would have been good historians of a

revolutionary movement, but were unable to take that leap in the dark

which all men must take who plunge into insurrection. For, be it well

understood, an insurrection is always doubtful, a thousand to one chance

always exists in favour of the established order and against the

insurgents.


Despite all seeming to the contrary we assert that

Ireland is not a really revolutionary country. Ireland is a disaffected

country which has long been accustomed to conduct constitutional

agitations in revolutionary language, and what is worse, to conduct

revolutionary movements with a due regard to law and order.


Our

constitutionalists have been ready to defy the law; our revolutionists

shine only in legal quirks to evade the letter of the law. The

constitutional agitation of the Land League was one prolonged riot of

illegality; the revolutionary movement of our own day shrinks from an

openly illegal act as nervously as a coy maiden shrinks from a desired

lover.


It is this paradoxical state of affairs that makes Irish

politics so puzzling to the outsider. He listens to the politician

appealing to the people to cling to constitutional methods, and at the

same time exulting in the agrarian reforms gained by trampling 


---

p.103


 law and order under foot. He hears the revolutionists telling

that England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity, and then, when her

greatest difficulty comes, postponing action on the opportunity in order

to see if the politician cannot yet succeed by legal agitation.[18](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note018.html'))


In his brilliant lecture on John Mitchel

in the Antient Concert Rooms, on Thursday, November 4th, our friend Mr. P. H. Pearse

treated his audience to a splendid review of the tendencies of opinions

and movement of currents of thought, that applied so well to our own

days that many of the audience forgot that it was an analysis of '48 to

which they were listening or supposed to be listening. It is that very

similarity which enables us to so clearly understand the nature of the

forces that destroyed Mitchel.


The British Government would not

wait until the plans of the revolutionists were ready. It has not held

Ireland down for 700 years by any such foolish waiting. It struck in its

own time, and its blow paralysed the people. The leaders of the people

would not follow Mitchel's lead but held the people back by talk about

‘premature insurrection’, and ‘the desire of the Government to

provoke us to act before we are ready’, and such like phrases

repeated glibly, with the solemnity of fools and the foolishness of

idiots, until the golden moment of hot wrath was passed, and the

paraders and the strutters had lost the confidence and destroyed the

hopes of the nation.


In vain for Clarence Mangan to call to such

a people to prepare for revolution. Revolutionists who shrink from

giving blow for blow until the great day has arrived, and they have

every shoe-string in its place, and every man has got his gun, and the

enemy has kindly consented to postpone action in order not to needlessly

hurry the revolutionists nor disarrange their plans—such

revolutionists only exist in two places—the comic opera stage, and

the stage of Irish national politics. We prefer the comic opera brand.

It at least serves its purpose.




---

p.104


John Mitchel was not

defeated by the British Government. He was defeated by his own

associates. There are no John Mitchels left in Ireland, but of such as

those who held lack the hands of the people who would have rescued him

there are still a goodly brood—all of them as legally seditious,

as peacefully revolutionary, and as fatal to the hopes of a nation as

ever were their fore-runners.


O, we latter-day Irish are great

orators, and great singers, and great reciters, and great at cheering

heroic sentiments about revolution. But we are not revolutionists. Not

by a thousand miles![19](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note019.html')) Soldiers of a regular army

we can be, soldiers with a well-secured base from which our provisions

can come up with clock-like regularity, soldiers with our relatives and

dependents securely drawing separation allowances, soldiers with an

ambulance service working automatically according to railway time table,

soldiers with unlimited reserves of ammunition, arms, and uniforms. For

that kind of war we are ready, aye, ready.


But no revolution in

history ever had any of these things. None ever will have. Hence we

strictly confine ourselves to killing John Bull with our mouths.


We have opened this week with a quotation from our own Irish

poet—an impassioned, soul-felt appeal to the heart of a nation

whose heart was greater than the spirit of its leaders. We shall close

with the words of another poet, an American, a trumpet call to his

people on the occasion of a crisis in his nation's history. It would be

well if it were laid to heart in Ireland to-day: 
> 
> Once to
> 
> every man and nation comes the moment to decide. . ..
> 
> 
> 




- Workers' Republic , November 13, 1915.



---

p.106


The Manchester Martyrs
----------------------


This week we are celebrating another anniversary. But

it is of a different order to the anniversary of which we spoke of in

our last number. That anniversary was of one of Ireland's

thinkers—a defiant rebel and preacher of rebellion, but one whose

rebellion never got further than the spoken or written word. A thinker

and initiator amidst mindless slaves—a scorner and hater of

orthodox formulae amidst men who could not think even of rebellion

except according to formula, and who refused to rebel because some of

the ingredients of their formula were lacking.


This week our

Anniversary is not of thinkers, but of doers, of men who when a duty was

to be done did not stop to think, but acted, and by their action

violated every rule of prudence, sanity, and caution, and in violating

them all obeyed the highest dictates of wisdom and achieved

immortality.


THE MANCHESTER MARTYRS! Who were they? A few words

will tell.


Two members of the Fenian organisation—Kelly and

Deasy—were trapped in Manchester, and lay awaiting trial in an

English prison. The Fenians in that city resolved to rescue them. This

they did by stopping the prison van upon the road between Manchester and

Salford, breaking open the van, shooting a policeman in the act, and

carrying off their comrades under the very eyes of the English

authorities.


Out of a number of men arrested for complicity in

the deed, three were hanged. These three were ALLEN, LARKIN and

O'BRIEN—the three Manchester Martyrs whose memory we honour

to-day. Why do we honour them?


We honour them because of their

heroic souls. Let us remember that by every test by which parties in

Ireland to-day measure 


---

p.107


 political wisdom, or personal

prudence, the act of these men ought to be condemned. They were in a

hostile city, surrounded by a hostile population; they were playing into

the hands of the Government by bringing all the Fenians out in broad

daylight to be spotted and remembered; they were discouraging the Irish

people by giving them another failure to record; they had no hopes of

foreign help even if their brothers in Ireland took the field spurred by

their action; at the most their action would only be an Irish riot in an

English city; and finally, they were imperilling the whole organisation

for the sake of two men. These were all the sound sensible arguments of

the prudent, practical politicians and theoretical revolutionists. But

‘how beggarly appear words before a defiant deed’!


The

Fenians of Manchester rose superior to all the whines about prudence,

caution and restraint, and saw only two of their countrymen struck at

for loyalty to freedom, and seeing this, struck back at the enemy with

blows that are still resounding through the heart of the world. The echo

of those blows has for a generation been as a baptismal dedication to

the soul and life of thousands of Irish men and women, consecrating them

to the service of freedom.


Had Kelly and Deasy been struck at

in our time, we would not have startled the world by the vehemence of

our blow in return; we would not have sent out the call for a muster of

our hosts to peril all in their rescue. No, we would simply have

instructed our typist to look up the office files and see if they had

paid up their subscription in the **Cumann

Cosanta**,[20](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note020.html')) and were entitled to their insurance

benefit.


Thus we have progressed in the path of civilised

methods, far, far away from the undisciplined hatred and reckless

fighting of the '67 men. MORYAH!


ALLEN, LARKIN and O'BRIEN died

that the right of their small nationality to independence might be

attested by 


---

p.108


 their blood died that some day an Irish

Republic might live. The song of their martyrdom was written by a man

who had laboured hard to prevent the fruition of their hopes; the prayer

of their last moments has become the hackneyed catch-word of every

political Judas seeking to betray their cause. Everything associated

with them has been stolen or corrupted, except the imperishable example

of their ‘defiant deed’. Of that neither men,

devils, nor doubters can deprive us.


Oh, the British Empire is

great and strong and powerful compared with Ireland. 'Tis true that

compared with Germany the Empire is a doddering old miser confronted

with a lusty youth—a miser whose only hope is to purchase the

limbs and bodies of others to protect her stolen properties. 'Tis true

that the Empire cannot stand up alone to *any*

European power, that she must have allies or perish. 'Tis true that

even with allies her military and financial system is cracking at every

point, sweating blood in fear at every pore. But still all the stolen

property that England possesses our Irish forefathers have helped to

steal, and we are helping to defend.


Was it wise then, or

commendable, for the men of '67 to rebel against the Empire that their

and our fathers have helped to build or steal? There are thousands of

answers to that question, but let the European battlefields of to-day

provide the one all-sufficient answer.


All these mountains of

Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these

arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering

putrefying bodies and portion of bodies—once warm living and

tender parts of Irish men and youths—all these horrors buried in

Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland

pays for being part the British Empire. All these widows whose husbands

were torn from their sides and forced to go to war, their prayers, and

tears for the ones who will return no more, are another part of the

price of Empire. All those fatherless orphans, who 


---

p.109


 for the

last time have heard the cheery laugh of an affectionate father, and who

must for years suffer all the bitter hardships of a childhood poorly

provided for against want and hunger—all those and their misery

are part of the price Ireland pays for Empire. All those shattered,

maimed and diseased wrecks of humanity who for years will crowd our

poorhouses and asylums, or crawl along our roads and streets affronting

our health by their wounds, and our comfort by their appeals for

charity—all, all are part of the price Ireland pays for the glory

of being an integral part of the British Empire.


And for what do

we pay this price? Answer, ye practical ones! Ye men of sense, of

prudence, of moderation, of business capacity!


Ireland is rotten

with slums, a legacy of Empire. The debt of this war will prevent us

from getting money to replace them with sound clean, healthy homes.

Every big gun fired in the Dardanelles fired away at every shot the cost

of building a home for a working class family. Ireland has the most

inefficient educational system, and the poorest schools in Europe.

Empire compels us to pay pounds for blowing out the brains of others for

every farthing it allows us with which to train our own.


An

Empire on which the sun never sets cannot guarantee its men and women as

much comfort as is enjoyed by the every-day citizen of the smallest,

least military nation in Europe. Nations that know not the power and

possessions of Empire have happier, better educated*,* better housed, better equipped, men and women than

Ireland has ever known, or can ever know as an integral part of the

British Empire.


The British Empire is a piratical enterprise in

which the valour of slaves fights for the glory and profit of their

masters. The Home Rule Party aspire to be trusted accomplices of that

conspiracy, the Manchester Martyrs were its unyielding foes even to the

dungeon and the scaffold. Therefore we honour 


---

p.110


 the memory of

the Manchester Martyrs. As future generations shall honour them.


- Workers' Republic , November 20, 1915.



---

p.111


Conscription
------------


We see that the time is now here

when it may be very dangerous to talk of opposing conscription in

Ireland, and yet that opposition must be organised, and to be organised

it must be discussed.


It is to be hoped that whatever discussion

takes place now, those taking part in it will recognise that the time

has gone past for smooth-sounding generalities, or mere political

make-believe. We are now living in an era of ruthless brute force of

blood and iron. Whatever effect public opinion may have in times of

peace it has little practical effect in time of war. In times of peace

human life weighs heavily in the balance, and the most brutal of our

rulers shrink from too readily shedding human blood. But in time of war

all such considerations vanish, and the spilling of a torrent of blood

in the city streets would cause the ruling class no more compunction

than the slaughter of game on their estates.


Indeed that lesson

has been all too tardily learned by the people and their leaders. One

great source of the strength of the ruling class has ever been their

willingness to kill in defence of their power and privileges. Let their

power be once attacked either by foreign foes, or domestic

revolutionists, and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill, and

kill, and kill. The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the

small value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked

contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionists to shed blood.


The French Reign of Terror is spoken of with horror and execration by

the people who talk in joyful praise about the mad adventure of the

Dardanelles. And yet in any one day of battle at the Dardanelles there

were more lives lost than in all the nine months of the Reign of

Terror.




---

p.112


Should the day ever come when revolutionary

leaders are prepared to sacrifice the lives of those under them as

recklessly as the ruling class do in every war, there will not be a

throne or despotic government left in the world. Our rulers reign by

virtue of their readiness to destroy human life in order to reign; their

reign will end on the day their discontented subjects care as little for

the destruction of human life as they do.


Hence they who now

would oppose conscription must not delude themselves into the belief

that they are simply embarking upon a new form of political agitation,

with no other risks than attend political agitation in times of

peace.


We will not be asked to accept conscription by the British

Government unless the British ruling class has made up its mind that

only conscription can save the Empire. If it does make up its mind to

that measure it will enforce conscription though every river in Ireland

ran red with blood.


The people of Ireland have been so long

accustomed to temporising, and evading straight issues, that there is

great danger that they may fail to recognise the gravity of their

action, and attempt to fight conscription as they would attempt a cattle

drive, or the making of poteen. That is to say in the spirit of a joke

at the expense of the police.


Such an attempt in such a spirit

would fare badly against a drastic resolve of the military to ‘make an example’ of the first conscripts who refused

to obey. A round dozen corpses of young Irishmen would strike terror

into thousands, but would not affect the appetites of those who daily

order to their death thousands of young men in the prime of life and

vigour.


Oppose conscription, by all means, but let us not teach

those who look to us for leadership that such opposition can be

conducted on the lines of dodging the police, or any such high jinks

of constitutional agitation. Those who oppose it take their lives in

their hands. Let them be made to realise that in advance. A fool, and

ten thousand times worse than a fool, 


---

p.113


 is he who would teach

them otherwise. Our rulers will ‘stop at nothing’

to attain their ends. They will continue to rule and rob until

confronted by men who will stop at nothing to overthrow them.


- Workers' Republic , November 27, 1915.



---

p.114


‘Trust Your Leaders’!
---------------------


Trust your leaders! Recently we have been treated to a homily upon the above text.

Trust your leaders; what do you know of their plans and resources, or

what amount of confidential information they may possess that is denied

to the rank and file? That is good advice. We endorse it thoroughly;

agree with it in every essential. Your leaders have a right to your

confidence. Let them know that you will obey them—that is one kind

of confidence. Let them know what the rank and file are thinking and

saying—that is another sign of your confidence.[21](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note021.html'))


The last is the

most sacred kind of confidence. It is the confidence you only give to a

loved friend, a friend whom you love so much that even at the risk of

wounding his feelings you are prepared, for his sake as well as your

own, to challenge his judgment and impeach his wisdom. That is the

highest kind of confidence—the most sacred kind of trust.


If you are adventuring under a leader of proven judgment in the task

you both have set out to perform, do not question his judgment rashly.

But if his experience is no more than yours—his judgment untested,

and his experience nil, do not leave him to flounder along without

that saving criticism which must in peace provide the only possible

substitute for the terrible punishment with which mistaken judgment is

visited in war. If you do, you are untrue to him, to yourself, and above

all to the common cause. ‘Teach them, O Lord’, said a French

writer, ‘that in the haven of Liberty there are neither heroes nor

great men’.


In Ireland, however, we have ever seized upon

mediocrities and made them our leaders; invested them in our minds with

all the qualities we idealised, and then when we discovered 


---

p.115




that our leaders were not heroes but only common mortals, mediocrities,

we abused them, or killed them, for failing to be any better than God

made them.


Their failure dragged us down along with them because

we had insisted that they were wiser than we were, and had stoned

whoever declared them to be common mortals, and not all-wise geniuses.

Our real geniuses and inspired apostles we never recognised, nor did we

honour them. We killed them by neglect, or stoned them whilst they

lived, and then went in reverent procession to their graves when they

were dead.


We are raising our voice, or using our pen, to insist

upon taking the military leaders of the Irish people into our

confidence; to ask our readers to insist likewise that if the rank and

file must obey, so also is it true that the leaders must listen. We see

neither heroes nor great men amongst these leaders, and we are devoutly

thankful that it is so. Being common mortals like ourselves we shall

refuse to invest them with the super-sanctity of gods or the wisdom and

foresight of prophets. And above all we refuse, and we counsel all

others to refuse, to assume that our policies for Ireland in this crisis

are identical until we know that they are. At a time when all they hold

dear trembles in the balance, should the armed citizens of Ireland fall

in behind leaders without questioning what are the policies of those

leaders, or what their outlook upon the immediate future?


We do

not call for public pronouncements from them, but every man is the

guardian of his own conscience and responsible to that conscience if he

shirks his duty to his country and its cause. By your choice of a leader

now you make your choice of the part you shall play in the hour of

destiny. How can you make that choice wisely if you do not *know* what that leader's policy for the future is?


Do not be deceived, nor deceive yourself by words. For instance, when

you hear that some one will ‘fight conscription’,


---

p.116




 push the question until you find out what he means by ‘fighting’ conscription.


The Quakers in England

will fight conscription, the Dukhobors of Russia will fight

conscription, the ‘No Conscription Fellowship’ is

already fighting conscription. But no blows are or will be struck by

them—indeed their ‘fighting’ consists in

refusing to strike blows. Is that your method, or that of your leaders?

Or do you prefer the method of that Catholic priest who recently

advised his people to send a deputation of their ten best shots to meet

the conscriptors? Words are said to be the medium by which we express

our ideas, but in Ireland words are generally the means by which we

conceal our ideas. Do not let them be so used in this great game now

being played.


It is poor quibbling to say that the Workers' Republic stands for reckless

fighting and ill-considered action. It does not. The Workers' Republic holds that at any

time since the war broke out the British Government could have been

halted in its inroads upon public liberties in Ireland by a flat refusal

on the part of the majority of its armed citizens to allow their rights

as citizens to be interfered with.


It needed no insurrection, no

flying to arms, no storming of jails, it only needed that the armed

Volunteers who claimed to stand for Ireland should mobilise and speak

for Ireland. And so speaking should declare that they would not

demobilise until all orders of deportation were withdrawn, and full

liberty accorded to the Irish Volunteers to organise under their own

chosen officers. Not a troop would have been moved against them, nor a

shot fired. The competent military authority would have been repudiated

as readily as was the gentleman responsible for ordering out the

military on Howth Sunday.


Does anyone imagine that at that period

of Captain Robert Monteith's deportation, when everything was going

wrong with England, that she would have hesitated to sacrifice her 


---

p.117


 dignity or swallow an affront, rather than provoke in Ireland a

conflict that she knew would have tested severely the loyalty of the

reserves newly recalled to the colours? Just as Redmond could have

gained Home Rule by refusing to speak in the House of Commons until he

had called a Convention in Ireland upon the outbreak of the war, so the

leaders of the Irish Volunteers could have prevented the flowing over

this island of the wave of military despotism by quietly challenging its

force when first it broke upon us. But neither had the requisite

imagination. Both essayed to grapple a revolutionary situation with the

weapons of a constitutional agitation.


The tyranny we have since

suffered under has been progressive in its virulence. At first it was

only Government employees like Captain Monteith who were arrested or

deported, now it is any civilian under any conceivable circumstance.

Tyranny grows with what it feeds upon.


We are told that the

arrest of our leaders would justify action. Our leaders would have

been arrested long ago were it not for the fact that at the protest

meeting held by the Citizen Army against the deportation of Captain

Monteith it was declared by the chief speaker that the arrest of the

Volunteer leaders would be a proof to their followers that the British

had been defeated at sea, or that the Germans had landed. Fear lest the

people of Ireland should so interpret their arrest has spared them to us

up till now.[22](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note022.html'))


---

p.119





We believe in

constitutional action in normal times; we believe in revolutionary

action in exceptional times. These are exceptional times.


When

General Friend took down the sign from over Liberty Hall he did not do

so in order to provoke us to insurrection. He calculated that a body of

100 armed men would scarcely spring to arms at such an insult after a

body of 5,000 armed men had submitted meekly to a greater one in the

same city. His calculation was right. Had the numbers been changed 


---

p.118


 his calculation might have missed. We acquit the competent

military authority of any intention to provoke a revolt. But we are glad

that it was not a Labour paper that pointed out to him that he could at

any time provoke a revolt by seizing the leaders of the Volunteers. We

are sure that he is grateful for the suggestion, but we do not believe

that he needed it.[23](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note023.html'))


What do you think of the

wisdom of those who tell you to be patient and trust your leaders whose

plans you do not understand, but if those leaders are arrested, fly to

arms? If your leaders who alone have plans are arrested your flying to

arms will be that of a leaderless mob in a planless insurrection. And

you know, don't you, that the same voices who talk thus of flying to

arms, would then talk of waiting until your new leaders would have made

new plans to meet the new situation? Finally: think over this chunk of

wisdom. A revolutionist who surrenders the initiative to the enemy is

already defeated before a blow is struck. It is a fine day if it wasn't

for the rain.


- Workers' Republic , December 4, 1915.



---

p.120


Economic Conscription
---------------------


#### 1


Of late we have been

getting accustomed to this new phrase, economic conscription, or the

policy of forcing men into the army by depriving them of the means of

earning a livelihood. In Canada it is called hunger-scription. In

essence it consists of a recognition of the fact that the working class

fight the battles of the rich, that the rich control the jobs or means

of existence of the working class, and that therefore if the rich desire

to dismiss men eligible for military service they can compel these men

to enlist—or starve.


Looking still deeper into the question

it is a recognition of the truth that the control of the means of life

by private individuals is the root of all tyranny, national, political,

militaristic, and that therefore they who control the jobs control the

world. Fighting at the front to-day there are many thousands whose whole

soul revolts against what they are doing, but who must nevertheless

continue fighting and murdering because they were deprived of a living

at home, and compelled to enlist that those dear to them may not

starve.


Thus under the forms of political freedom the souls of

men are subjected to the cruellest tyranny in the world—recruiting

has become a great hunting party which the souls and bodies of men as

the game to be hunted and trapped.


Every day sees upon the

platform the political representatives of the Irish people, busily

engaged in destroying the souls, that they might be successful in

hunting and capturing the bodies of Irishmen for sale to the English

armies. And every day we feel all around us in the workshop, in the

yard, at the docks, in the stables, wherever men are employed, the same


---

p.121




 economic pressure, the same unyielding relentless force,

driving, driving, driving men out from home and home life to fight

abroad that the exploiters may rule and rob at home. The downward path

to hell is easy once you take the first step.


The first step in

the economic conscription of Irishmen was taken when the employers of

Dublin locked their workpeople out in 1913 for daring to belong to the

Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. Does that statement astonish

you? Well, consider it. In 1913 the employers of Dublin used the weapons

of starvation to try and compel men and women to act against their

conscience. In 1915 the employers of Dublin and Ireland in general are

employing the weapon of starvation in order to compel men to act

against their conscience. The same weapon, the same power derived from

the same source.


At the first anti-conscription meeting in the

City Hall of Dublin we heard an employer declaim loudly against the

iniquity of compelling men to act against their conscience. And yet in

1913 the same employer had been an active spirit in encouraging his

fellow-employers to starve a whole countryside in order to compel men

and women to act against their conscience.


The great lock-out in

1913-14 was an apprenticeship in brutality—a hardening of the

heart of the Irish employing class—whose full acts we are only

reaping to-day in the persistent use of the weapon of hunger to compel

men to fight for a power they hate, and to abandon a land that they

love.


If here and there we find an occasional employer who fought

us in 1913 agreeing with our national policy in 1915 it is not because

he has become converted, or is ashamed of the unjust use of his

powers, but simply that he does not see in economic conscription the

profit he fancied he saw in denying to his labourers the right to

organise in their own way in 1913.


Do we find fault with the

employer for following his own interests? We do not. But neither are we

under any illusion 


---

p.122


 as to his motives. In the same manner we

take our stand with our own class, nakedly upon our class interests, but

believing that these interests are the highest interests of the

race.


We cannot conceive of a free Ireland with a subject working

class; we cannot conceive of a subject Ireland with a free working

class. But we can conceive of a free Ireland with a working class

guaranteed the power of freely and peacefully working out its own

salvation.


We do not believe that the existence of the British

Empire is compatible with either the freedom or security of the Irish

working class. That freedom and that security can only come as a result

of complete absence of foreign domination. Freedom to control all its

own resources is as essential to a community as to an individual. No

individual can develop all his powers if he is even partially under the

control of another, even if that other sincerely wishes him well. The

powers of the individual can only be developed properly when he has to

bear the responsibility of all his own actions, to suffer for his

mistakes, and to profit by his achievements.


Man, as man, only

arrived at the point at which he is to-day as a result of thousands of

years of strivings with nature. In his stumblings forward along the ages

he was punished for every mistake. Nature whipped him with cold, with

heat, with hunger, with disease, and each whipping helped him to know

what to avoid, and what to preserve.


The first great forward step

of man was made when he understood the relation between cause and

effect—understood that a given action produced and must produce a

given result. That no action could possibly be without an effect, that

the problem of his life was to find out the causes which produced the

effects injurious to him, and having found them out to overcome or make

provision against them.


Just as the whippings of nature produced

the improvements in the life habits of man, so the whippings naturally

following 


---

p.123


 upon social or political errors are the only

proper safeguards for the proper development of nationhood.


No

nation is worthy of independence until it is independent. No nation is

fit to be free until it is free. No man can swim until he has entered

the water and failed and been half drowned several times in the attempt

to swim.


A free Ireland would make dozens of mistakes, and every

mistake would cost it dear, and strengthen it for future efforts. But

every time it, by virtue of its own strength, remedied a mistake it

would take a long step forward towards security. For security can only

come to a nation by a knowledge of some power within itself, some

difficulty overcome by a strength which no robber can take away.


What is that of which no robber can deprive us The answer is,

experience. Experience in freedom would strengthen us in power to attain

security. Security would strengthen us in our progress towards greater

freedom.


Ireland is not the Empire, the Empire is not Ireland.

Anything in Ireland that depends upon the Empire depends upon that which

the fortunes of war *may* destroy at any moment,

depends upon that which the progress of enlightenment *must* destroy in the near future. The people of India,

of Egypt, cannot be forever enslaved.


Anything in Ireland that

depends upon the internal resources of Ireland has a basis and

foundation which no disaster to the British Empire can destroy, which

disasters to the British Empire may conceivably cause to flourish.


The security of the working class of Ireland then has the same roots

as the security of the people of Ireland as a whole. The roots are in

Ireland, and can only grow and function properly in an atmosphere of

national freedom. And the security of the people of Ireland has the same

roots as the security of the Irish working class. In the closely linked

modern world no nation can be free which can nationally connive at the

enslavement 


---

p.124


 of any section of that nation. Had the

misguided people of Ireland not stood so callously by when the forces of

economic conscription were endeavouring to destroy the Irish Transport

and General Workers' Union in 1913, the Irish trade unionists would now

be in a better position to fight the economic conscription against

Irish nationalists in 1915.


The sympathetic strike with its

slogan, ‘an injury to one is the concern of all’, was then the

universal object of hatred. It is now recognised that only the

sympathetic strike could be powerful enough to save the victims of

economic conscription from being forced into the army.


Out of

that experience is growing that feeling of identity of interests between

the forces of real nationalism and labour which we have long worked and

hoped for in Ireland. Labour recognises daily more clearly that its real

well-being is linked and bound up with the hope of growth of Irish

resources within Ireland, and nationalists realise that the real

progress of a nation towards freedom must be measured by the progress of

its most subject class.


We want and must have economic

conscription in Ireland for Ireland. Not the conscription of men by

hunger to compel them to fight for the power that denies them the right

to govern their own country, but the conscription by an Irish nation of

all the resources of the nation—its land, its railways, its

canals, its workshops, its docks, its mines, its mountains, its rivers

and streams, its factories and machinery, its horses, its cattle, *and* its men and women, all co-operating together

under one common direction that Ireland may live and bear upon her

fruitful bosom the greatest number of the freest people she has ever

known.


- Workers' Republic. , December 18, 1915.



---

p.125


#### 2


Conscription means the enforced utilising of all the

manhood of a country in order to fight its battles. Economic

conscription would mean the enforced use of all the economic powers of a

country in order to fight its battles. If it is right to take the

manhood it is doubly right to take the necessary property in order to

strengthen the manhood in its warfare. An army, according to Napoleon,

travels on its stomach, and that being so, all the things that are

necessary for the stomach ought to be taken by a national government for

the purpose of strengthening its army. Free access to the railways are

vital to the very existence of a modern army. For that reason the

railways ought to be taken possession of by the Government on the same

principle and by the same business method as it takes possession of a

conscript. The Government does not pay the mother of a conscript for the

long and weary years she has spent in rearing the son of which it takes

possession. No, it simply pays him a few pence a day, feeds him, clothes

him, and sends him out to be shot. If he is shot she gets nothing for

the loss of her son, as she gets nothing for all the love and care and

anxiety she spent in giving him life and rearing him to manhood.


The same principle, the same business method, ought to apply to the

railways. All the railways ought at once to be confiscated and made

public property, no compensation being given to the shareholders any

more than is to be given to the fathers and mothers of conscripts.


All ships come under the same general law. The Empire cannot live as

an Empire without ships; the troops cannot be transported, provisioned

and kept supplied with the materials of war without ships, therefore as

sons are to be taken from their mothers all necessary vessels ought at

once be taken from their owners, without compensation and without

apology.




---

p.126


#### 2


No matter how much the ships cost. They did

not cost their owners as much as the bearing of sons cost the mothers.

Take the ships.


Factories also for the production of clothes for

the army. The Government should take them; of course you cannot expect

soldiers to fight unless they are properly clothed, and you cannot

clothe them unless you have the factories to make the clothing. So

factories are as important as soldiers. Government is going to take the

soldiers from their homes, therefore let it take the factories from

the manufacturers. Let it be conscription all round.


There is a

grave danger of a famine in this country as the food is limited in

quantity owing to the export of so much food to feed the armies abroad.

At the same time there is an enormous quantity of splendid land lying

idle in demesnes and private estates of the nobility and gentry. This

land produces no crops, feeds nobody, and serves no useful purpose

whatever. By the same law of necessity upon which the Government stands

when it proposes conscription of men it ought also to immediately

confiscate all this idle land, and put labourers upon it to grow crops

to feed the multitude now in danger of starvation during the coming

year.


Will the Government do these things? Will it take the land,

will it take the factories, will it take the ships, will it take the

railways—as it proposes to take the manhood? It will not. Should

it need those things as it does and will, it will hire them at an

exorbitant rate of interest, paying their owners as much for the use of

them that those owners will pray for the war to continue for ever and

ever, amen.


But the human bodies, earthly tenements of human

souls, it will take as ruthlessly and hold as cheaply as possible. For

that is the way of governments. Flesh and blood are ever the cheapest

things in their eyes.


While we are establishing the Irish

Republic we shall need 


---

p.127


 to reverse that process of valuing

things. We must imitate those who have so long been our masters, but

with a difference.


We must also conscript. We shall not need to

conscript our soldiers—enough have already volunteered to carry on

the job, and tens of thousands more but await the word. But we shall

need to conscript the material; and as the propertied classes have so

shamelessly sold themselves to the enemy, the economic conscription of

their property will cause few qualms to whomsoever shall administer the

Irish Government in the first days of freedom.


All the material

of distribution—the railways, the canals, and all their equipment

will at once become the national property of the Irish state. All the

land stolen from the Irish people in the past, and not since restored in

some manner to the actual tillers of the soil, ought at once to be con-

fiscated and made the property of the Irish state. Taken in hand

energetically and cultivated under scientific methods such land would go

far to make this country independent of the ocean-borne commerce of

Great Britain. All factories and workshops owned by people who do not

yield allegiance to the Irish Government immediately upon its

proclamation should at once be confiscated, and their productive powers

applied to the service of the community loyal to Ireland, and to the

army in its service.


The conscription of the natural powers of

the land and the conscription of the mechanical forces having been

accomplished, the question of the conscription of the men to defend

their new-won property and national rights may follow should it be

necessary. But as the Irish state will then be in a position to

guarantee economic security and individual freedom to its citizens there

will be no lack of recruits to take up arms to safeguard that national

independence which they will see to be necessary for the perpetuation

of both.


England calls upon its citizens to surrender their

manhood to fight for an Empire that cares nothing for their rights as


---

p.128




 toilers. Ireland should commence by guaranteeing the rights

of its workers to life and liberty, and having guaranteed those rights

should then call upon her manhood to protect them with arms in their

hands.


Whosoever in future speaks for Ireland, calls Irishmen to

arms, should remember that the first duty of Irishmen is to reconquer

their country—to take it back from those whose sole right to its

ownership is based upon conquest.


If the arms of the Irish

Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army is the military weapon of, the

economic conscription of its land and wealth is the material basis for,

that reconquest.


- Workers' Republic. , January 15, 1916.



---

p.129


Two fateful Christmas Weeks
---------------------------


On the 21st December,

1796, a French Fleet entered Bantry Bay bearing on board arms,

ammunition, and an army of fifteen thousand men for the liberation of

Ireland. The French army commander had been separated from the fleet in

a storm, and his successor hesitated about taking the responsibility of

landing his troops. For days the fleet rocked in perfect security in the

bay, until another storm arising caused the French commander to raise

his anchors and put again to sea, headed for France—and the

Empire's danger was over.


Consider it, friends! One hundred and

nineteen years ago the freedom of Ireland lay in the power of one man to

grasp, had he but had the decision of character necessary to cause him

to act. Two years afterwards it took over thirty thousand English

soldiers to conquer the one county of Wexford, and that county was one

of those which had been most foolish in surrendering its arms at the

demand of a government proclamation. Had Wexford risen, had any part of

Ireland risen in December, 1796, even General Grouchy could not have

refused to land, and with the diversion his force would have caused the

success of the insurrection must have been certain. But the French

commander would not risk his troops amongst and for a people who were

apparently risking nothing for themselves. The leaders of the United

Irishmen hesitated—their arrangements were not complete. The

French commander hesitated, everybody hesitated, except the English

Government.


One hundred and nineteen years ago. And again Ireland

looks across the sea, and perhaps those across the sea look over to

Ireland, and wonder.




---

p.130


The doubters

asked Christ in His day for a sign. In our day they still ask for a

sign. And in both cases it is the same answer 
> 
> The Kingdom of Heaven [Freedom] is within you. The Kingdom of Heaven can
> 
> only be taken by violence.
> 
> 
> 




Heavenly words with an earthly meaning. Christmas week, 1796; Christmas week, 1915—*still hesitating*.


- Workers' Republic , December 25, 1915.
[24](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note024.html'))[25](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note025.html'))


---

p.131


The Volunteers of '82
---------------------


A correspondent has written to us

asking whether there is not a great similarity between the position and

actions of the Irish Volunteers of our day, and that of the Volunteers

of '82. He points out that the Volunteers of '82, despite the eulogies

lavished upon them by the writers of Irish history, were a ghastly and

inglorious failure, and that they were so because they lacked the

revolutionary quality. They had England at their mercy, and feared to

strike, but when England had them at her mercy she struck without

hesitation and without scruple.


The comparison is good, but not

perfect. Indeed, no comparison is ever perfect. All comparisons and

analogies from history fail in some degree, or at some point. If the

circumstances are the same the characters of the actors are different;

if the characters of the actors are the same the circumstances are

different. Usually there is alike a blending and a dissimilarity on both

essentials.


A great socialist writer, Karl Marx, has said that

history repeats itself—once as tragedy, and once as farce. We

suppose that the real explanation of the supposed tendency of history to

repeat itself lies in the tendency of human beings to imitate whatever

action has impressed itself much upon the imagination, just as in a

company of individuals we generally find some persons almost

unconsciously imitating the mannerisms of any obtrusive personality in

the group.[26](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note026.html'))


---

p.135





Take any great historical crisis, and you

will find that whenever a similar crisis arises thereafter there will

develop amongst the minor actors in the latter a tendency to pattern

themselves after the outstanding figures in the first. And a still

greater tendency amongst the unthinking multitude to insist upon all 


---

p.132


 the actors in the second crisis being invested with all the

merits and demerits of their forerunners.


In the case we are

considering it is indubitable that the Irish Volunteers of our day

deliberately patterned themselves after the Volunteers of Grattan's

time, adopted their name, and many of their traditions. It is also true

that the great international crisis that has since developed has given

to the experience of our own Volunteers a great similarity to the

experience of the Volunteers of '82.


The Volunteers of Grattan's

time were betrayed by their leaders, as the Volunteers of our time were

betrayed by the Parliamentary Party. The Volunteers of Grattan's time

broke up without having consolidated their legislative victory, owing

to their leaders' faith in the promises of English statesmen just as the

Volunteers of our time were disorganised by the fact of their *leaders'* trust in the promises of

English statesmen.


Despite their enthusiasm for Ireland the

greatest section of Grattan's Volunteers became active members of the

yeomanry who afterwards achieved notoriety for their crimes against

Ireland, just as a considerable section of the Volunteers of our day

have become soldiers of the English army—active agents of the

military army of the oppressors of their country.


A poem written

at the time of Grattan's Volunteers and the United Irishmen somewhat

scathingly refers to them in the following manner:[27](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note027.html'))



> 1. What did the Volunteers?
>   
> They mustered
> 
> and paraded,
>   
> Until their laurels faded,
>   
> This did the
> 
> Volunteers!
> * [*gap: ellipsis*]
> * How died the
> 
> Volunteers?
>   
> The death that's fit for slaves,
>   
> They slunk
> 
> into their graves,
>   
> Thus died the Volunteers!
> 




---

p.133






And our correspondent seems to infer

that in this respect history is again about to repeat itself. We

respectfully differ with him. We can see no real analogy between the

Volunteers of Grattan's time, and the Irish Volunteers since the split.

Up till that period the analogy was perfect. Up till that time the stage

was set for just such another betrayal, for at least just such another

fiasco. But we cannot see that the present leaders of the Irish

Volunteers can at all be compared to the crowd of aristocratic, clerical

and capitalist reactionaries who steered the Volunteers of '82 to their

destruction.


Nor, and this is even more important, is it at all

conceivable that the rank and file of the Irish Volunteer movement could

be betrayed as were their forerunners. These Volunteers of '82 were in

reality English colonists with a distinctly anti-Irish upbringing and

mental outlook. Their enthusiasm for Ireland was the enthusiasm of

settlers for their new home, against the government in the home they had

left. If they were hostile to English influence they were still more

hostile to the vast mass of the natives of Ireland. They considered

themselves as British subjects in the first place, and only as Irishmen

in the second place. Their appeal was to the traditions of the British

Empire, and to the memory of the ‘glorious

Revolution’ of 1688—the Revolution that set King William III

upon his Irish throne. Irish traditions, Irish heroes, Irish martyrs for

freedom, all, all were alien to them, and therefore their betrayal by

their leaders was not in their eyes a national betrayal, but only an

aristocratic defection in a struggle of two parties within the British

Empire. If you grasp that fact clearly enough you will understand why,

despite our own criticism of what we deem their lack of vision, we yet

refuse to accept our correspondent's comparison as we regard it as

unjust to the leaders of to-day.


The present-day leaders of the

Irish Volunteers do undoubtedly hold allegiance to Ireland as their

first and most sacred duty. They are not merely dissatisfied subjects of

the British Empire, 


---

p.134


 they are dissatisfied to be subjects of

the Empire at all. Among them there may be some who hold that to have a

Volunteer force at all is enough of a gain for one generation; there may

be others who like to play at soldiers but shrink from the reality, and

there may be others who were never more than wire-pullers, and who have

brought their wire-pulling propensities into their new conditions. No

organisation can hope to be quite free of such undesirables, nor even

sure of being able to recognise them.


But the one certain mark to

distinguish the Irish Volunteers of to-day from their forerunners is the

fact that in their allegiance they set Ireland first. Given that, and

all other things can be forgiven them. True, the presence upon their

Executive of some of the men who voted the betrayal to John Redmond and

his party is a standing invitation to suspicion and distrust. These men

were either false to their trust, or incapable blockheads. In either

case they should have been sent back to the obscurity and harmlessness

of private life to live under suspicion or pity the remainder of their

days. To place them again in power was to forfeit the complete *confidence* of the people in a time

where complete confidence was necessary. Yet we have heard demands for

absolute trust and confidence in a body some of whose trusted members

have already abused that trust so vilely.


But granting all this

the point remains that the Irish Volunteers of our time have that great

quality the want of which betrayed their predecessors. That quality is:

complete faith in their own country, complete confidence in her destiny

to be a nation, and complete reliance upon the power of Ireland to

survive all the shocks an adverse fate may bring upon her.


- Workers' Republic , January 8, 1916.



---

p.136


What is our Programme?
----------------------


We are often asked the above

question. Sometimes the question is not too politely put, sometimes it

is put in frantic bewilderment, sometimes it is put in wrathful

objurgation, sometimes it is put in tearful entreaty, sometimes it is

put by Nationalists who affect to despise the Labour movement, sometimes

it is put by Socialists who distrust the Nationalists because of the

anti-Labour record of many of their friends, sometimes it is put by our

enemies, sometimes by our friends, and always it is pertinent, and

worthy of an answer.


The Labour movement is like no other

movement. Its strength lies in being like no other movement. It is never

so strong as when it stands alone. Other movements dread analysis and

shun all attempts to define their objects. The Labour movement delights

in analysing, and is perpetually defining and re-defining its

principles and objects. The man or woman who has caught the spirit of

the Labour movement brings that spirit of analysis and definition into

all his or her public acts, and expects at all times to answer the call

to define his or her position. They cannot live on illusions, nor thrive

by them; even should their heads be in the clouds they will make no

forward step until they are assured that their feet rest upon the solid

earth.


In this they are essentially different from the middle or

professional classes, and the parties or movements controlled by such

classes in Ireland. These always talk of realities, but nourish

themselves and their followers upon the unsubstantial meat of phrases;

always prate about being intensely practical but nevertheless spend

their whole lives in following visions.


When the average

non-Labour patriot in Ireland who boasts of his practicality is

brought in contact with the cold world 


---

p.137


 and its problems he

shrinks from the contact. Should his feet touch the solid earth he

affects to despise it as a ‘mere material basis’,

and strives to make the people believe that true patriotism needs no

foundation to rest upon other than the brain storms of its poets,

orators, journalists, and leaders.


Ask such people for a

programme and you are branded as a carping critic; refuse to accept

their judgment as the last word in human wisdom and you become an enemy

to be carefully watched; insist that in the crisis of your country's

history your first allegiance is to your country and not to any leader,

executive, or committee, and you are forthwith a disturber, a fac-

tionist, a wrecker.


What is our programme? We at lease, in

conformity with the spirit of our movement, will try and tell it. Our

programme in time of peace was to gather into Irish hands in Irish trade

unions the control of all the forces of production and distribution in

Ireland. We never believed that freedom would be realised without

fighting for it. From our earliest declaration of policy in Dublin in

1896 the editor of this paper has held to the dictum that our ends

should be secured ‘peacefully if possible, forcibly if necessary’.

Believing so, we saw what the world outside Ireland is realising to-day,

that the destinies of the world and the fighting strength of armies are

at the mercy of organised Labour as soon as that Labour becomes truly

revolutionary. Thus we strove to make Labour in Ireland

organised—and revolutionary.


We saw that should it come

to a test in Ireland, (as we hoped and prayed it might come), between

those who stood for the Irish nation and those who stood for the foreign

rule, the greatest civil asset in the hand of the Irish nation for use

in the struggle would be the control of Irish docks, shipping, rail-

ways and production by Unions that gave sole allegiance to Ireland.


We realised that the power of the enemy to hurl his forces upon the

forces of Ireland would lie at the mercy of the men 


---

p.138


 who

controlled the transport system of Ireland; we saw that the hopes of

Ireland as a nation rested upon the due recognition of the identity of

interest between that ideal and the rising hopes of Labour.


In

Europe to-day we have seen the strongest governments of the world exert-

ing every effort, holding out all possible sort of inducement, to

organised Labour to use its organisation on the side of those

governments in time of war. We have spent the best part of our lifetime

striving to create in Ireland the working class spirit that would create

an Irish organisation of Labour willing to do voluntarily for Ireland

what those governments of Europe are beseeching their trade unions to do

for their countries. And we have partly succeeded.


We have

succeeded in creating an organisation that will willingly do more for

Ireland than any trade union in the world has attempted to do for its

national government. Had we not been attacked and betrayed by many of

our fervent advanced patriots, had they not been so anxious to destroy

us, so willing to applaud even the British Government when it attacked

us, had they stood by us and pushed our organisation all over Ireland it

would now be in our power at a word to crumple up and demoralise every

offensive move of the enemy against the champions of Irish freedom. Had

we been able to carry out all our plans, as such an Irish organisation

of Labour alone could carry them out, we could at a word have created

all the conditions necessary to the striking of a successful blow

whenever the military arm of Ireland wished to move.


Have we a

programme? We are the only people that had a programme—that

understood the mechanical conditions of modern war, and the dependence

of national power upon industrial control. What is our programme now? At

the grave risk of displeasing alike the perfervid Irish patriot and the

British ‘competent military authority’, we shall

tell it.


We believe that in times of peace we should work along

the 


---

p.139


 lines of peace to strengthen the nation, and we believe

that whatever strengthens and elevates the working class strengthens

the nation. But we also believe that in times of war we should act as in

war. We despise, entirely despise and loathe, all the mouthings and

mouthers about war who infest Ireland in time of peace, just as we

despise and loathe all the cantings about caution and restraint to which

the same people treat us in times of war.


Mark well then our

programme. While the war lasts and Ireland still is a subject nation we

shall continue to urge her to fight for her freedom.


We shall

continue, in season or out of season, to teach that the ‘far-flung battle line’ of England is weakest at the

point nearest its heart, that Ireland is in that position of tactical

advantage, that a defeat of England in India, Egypt, the Balkans or

Flanders would not be so dangerous to the British Empire as any conflict

of armed forces in Ireland, that the time for Ireland's battle is NOW,

the place for Ireland's battle is HERE. That a strong man may deal lusty

blows with his fists against a host of surrounding foes, and conquer,

but will succumb if a child sticks a pin in his heart.


But the

moment peace is once admitted by the British Government as being a

subject ripe for discussion, *that moment our policy

will be for peace* and in direct opposition to all talk or

preparation for armed revolution. We will be no party to leading out

Irish patriots to meet the might of an England at peace. The moment

peace is in the air we shall strictly confine ourselves, and lend all

our influence to the work of turning the thought of Labour in Ireland to

the work of peaceful reconstruction.


That is our programme. You

can now compare it with the programme of those who bid you hold your

hand now, and thus put it in the power of the enemy to patch up a

temporary peace, turn round and smash you at his leisure, and then go to


---

p.140




 war again with the Irish question settled—in the

graves of Irish patriots.


We fear that is what is going to

happen. It is to our mind inconceivable that the British public should

allow conscription to be applied to England and not to Ireland. Nor do

the British Government desire it. But that Government will use the cry

of the necessities of war to force conscription upon the people of

England, and will then make a temporary peace, and turn round to force

Ireland to accept the same terms as have been forced upon England.


The English public will gladly see this done—misfortune likes

company. The situation will then shape itself thus: the Irish

Volunteers who are pledged to fight conscription will either need to

swallow their pledge, and see the young men of Ireland conscripted, or

will need to resist conscription, and engage the military force of

England at a time when England is at peace.


This is what the

diplomacy of England is working for, what the stupidity of some of our

leaders who imagine they are Wolfe Tones is making possible. It is our

duty, it is the duty of all who wish to save Ireland from such shame or

such slaughter to strengthen the hand of those of the leaders who are

for action as against those who are playing into the hands of the

enemy.


We are neither rash nor cowardly. We know our opportunity

when we see it, and we know when it has gone. We know that at the end of

this war England will have at least an army of one million men, *or more than two soldiers for every adult male in

Ireland*. And these soldiers veterans of the greatest war in

history.


We shall not want to fight those men. We shall devote

our attention to organising their comrades who return to civil life, to

organising them into trade unions and Labour parties to secure them

their rights in civil life.


Unless we emigrate to some country

where there are men.


- Workers' Republic , January 22, 1916.



---

p.141


What is a free Nation?
----------------------


We are moved to ask this question because of the

extraordinary confusion of thought upon the subject which prevails in

this country, due principally to the pernicious and misleading newspaper

garbage upon which the Irish public has been fed for the past

twenty-five years.


Our Irish daily newspapers have done all that

human agencies could do to confuse the public mind upon the question of

what the essentials of a free nation are, what a free nation must be,

and what a nation cannot submit to lose without losing its title to be

free.


It is because of this extraordinary newspaper-created

ignorance that we find so many people enlisting in the British army

under the belief that Ireland has at long last attained to the status of

a free nation, and that therefore the relations between Ireland and

England have at last been placed upon the satisfactory basis of freedom.

Ireland and England, they have been told, are now sister nations, joined

in the bond of Empire, but each enjoying equal liberties—the equal

liberties of nations equally free. How many recruits this idea sent into

the British Army in the first flush of the war it would be difficult to

estimate, but they were assuredly numbered by the thousand.


The

Irish Parliamentary Party, which at every stage of the Home Rule game

had been outwitted and bull-dozed by Carson and the Unionists, which had

surrendered every point and yielded every advantage to the skilful

campaign of the aristocratic orange military clique in times of peace,

behaved in equally as cowardly and treacherous a manner in the crisis of

war.


There are few men in whom the blast of the bugles of war do

not arouse the fighting instinct, do not excite to some chivalrous 


---

p.142


 impulses if only for a moment. But the Irish Parliamentary

Party must be reckoned amongst that few. In them the bugles of war

only awakened the impulse to sell the bodies of their countrymen as

cannon fodder in exchange for the gracious smiles of the rulers of

England. In them the call of war sounded only as a call to emulate in

prostitution. They heard the call of war—and set out to prove that

the nationalists of Ireland were more slavish than the orangemen of

Ireland, would more readily kill and be killed at the bidding of an

Empire that despised them both.


The orangemen had at least the

satisfaction that they were called upon to fight abroad in order to save

an Empire they, had been prepared to fight to retain unaltered at home;

but the nationalists were called upon to fight abroad to save an Empire

whose rulers in their most generous moments had refused to grant their

country the essentials of freedom in nationhood.


Fighting abroad

the orangeman knows that he fights to preserve the power of the

aristocratic rulers whom he followed at home; fighting abroad the

nationalist soldier is fighting to maintain unimpaired the power of

those who conspired to shoot him down at home when he asked for a

small instalment of freedom.


The orangeman says: ‘We will

fight for the Empire abroad if its rulers will promise not to force us

to submit to Home Rule’. And the rulers say heartily: ‘It is

unthinkable that we should coerce Ulster for any such purpose’.


The Irish Parliamentary Party and its press said: ‘We will prove

ourselves fit to be in the British Empire by fighting for it, in the

hopes that after the war is over we will get Home Rule’. And the

rulers of the British Empire say: ‘Well you know what we have promised

Carson, but send out the Irish rabble to fight for us, and we will,

ahem, consider your application after the war’. Whereat, all the

Parliamentary 


---

p.143


 leaders and their press call the world to

witness that they have won a wonderful victory!


James Fintan

Lalor spoke and conceived of Ireland as ‘a discrowned queen, taking

back her own with an armed hand’. Our Parliamentarians treat Ireland,

their country, as an old prostitute selling her soul for the promise of

favours *to come*, and in the spirit of that

conception of their country they are conducting their political

campaign.


That they should be able to do so with even the partial

success that for a while attended their apostasy was possible only

because so few in Ireland really understood the answer to the question

that stands at the head of this article.


What is a free Nation? A

free nation is one which possesses absolute control over all its own

internal resources and powers, and which has no restriction upon its

intercourse with all other nations similarly circumstanced except the

restrictions placed upon it by nature. Is that the case of Ireland? If

the Home Rule Bill were in operation would that be the case of Ireland?

To both questions the answer is: no, most emphatically, NO!


A

free nation must have complete control over its own harbours, to open

them or close them at will, to shut out any commodity, or allow it to

enter in, just as it seemed best to suit the well-being of its own

people, and in obedience to their wishes, and entirely free of the

interference of any other nation, and in complete disregard of the

wishes of any other nation. Short of that power no nation possesses the

first essentials of freedom.


Does Ireland possess such control?

No. Will the Home Rule Bill give such control over Irish harbours to

Ireland? It will not. Ireland must open its harbours when it suits the

interests of another nation, England, and must shut its harbours when it

suits the interests of another nation, England; and the Home Rule Bill

pledges Ireland to accept this loss of national control for ever.




---

p.144


How would you like to live in a house if the keys of all

the doors of that house were in the pockets of a rival of yours who had

often robbed you in the past? Would you be satisfied if he told you that

he and you were going to be friends for ever more, but insisted upon you

signing an agreement to leave him control of all your doors, and custody

of all your keys? That is the condition of Ireland to-day, and will be

the condition of Ireland under Redmond and Devlin's precious Home Rule

Bill.


That is worth dying for in Flanders, the Balkans, Egypt or

India, is it not?


A free nation must have full power to nurse

industries to health, either by government encouragement or by

government prohibition of the sale of goods of foreign rivals. It may be

foolish to do either, but a nation is not free unless it has that power,

as all free nations in the world have to-day. Ireland has no such power,

will have no such power under Home Rule. The nourishing of industries in

Ireland hurts capitalists in England, therefore this power is expressly

withheld from Ireland.


A free nation must have full power to

alter, amend, or abolish or modify the laws under which the property of

its citizens is held in obedience to the demand of its own citizens for

any such alteration, amendment, abolition, or modification. Every free

nation has that power; Ireland does not have it, and is not allowed it

by the Home Rule Bill.


It is recognised to-day that it is upon

the wise treatment of economic power and resources, and upon the wise

ordering *of* social activities that the

future of nations depends. That nation will be the richest and happiest

which has the foresight to marshal the most carefully its natural

resources to national ends. But Ireland is denied this power, and will

be denied it under Home Rule. Ireland's rich natural resources, and the

kindly genius of its children, are not to be allowed to combine for the

satisfaction 


---

p.145


 of Irish wants, save in so far as their

combination can operate on lines approved of by the rulers of

England.


Her postal service, her telegraphs, her wireless, her

customs and excise, her coinage, her fighting forces, her relations with

other nations, her merchant commerce, her property relations, her

national activities, her legislative sovereignty—all the things

that are essential to a nation's freedom are denied to Ireland now, and

are denied to her under the provisions of the Home Rule Bill. And Irish

soldiers in the English Army are fighting in Flanders to win for

Belgium, we are told, all those things which the British Empire, now as

in the past, denies to Ireland.


There is not a Belgian patriot

who would not prefer to see his country devastated by war a hundred

times rather than accept as a settlement for Belgium what Redmond and

Devlin have accepted for Ireland. Have we Irish been fashioned in meaner

clay than the Belgians?


There is not a pacifist in England who

would wish to end the war without Belgium being restored to full

possession of all those national rights and powers which Ireland does

not possess, and which the Home Rule Bill denies to her. But these same

pacifists never mention Ireland when discussing or suggesting terms of

settlement. Why should they? Belgium is fighting for her independence,

but Irishmen are fighting for the Empire that denies Ireland every right

that Belgians think worth fighting for.


And yet Belgium as a

nation is, so to speak, but a creation of yesterday—an

artificial product of the schemes of statesmen. Whereas, the frontiers

of Ireland, the ineffaceable marks of the separate existence of Ireland,

are as old as Europe itself, the handiwork of the Almighty, not of

politicians. And as the marks of Ireland's separate nationality were not

made by politicians so they cannot be unmade by them.


As the

separate individual is to the family, so the separate 


---

p.146




nation is to humanity. The perfect family is that which best draws out

the inner powers of the individual, the most perfect world is that in

which the separate existence of nations is held most sacred. There can

be no perfect Europe in which Ireland is denied even the least of its

national rights; there can be no worthy Ireland whose children brook

tamely such denial. If such denial has been accepted by soulless slaves

of politicians then it must be repudiated by Irish men and women whose

souls are still their own.


The peaceful progress of the future

requires the possession by Ireland of all the national rights now denied

to her. Only in such possession can the workers of Ireland see stability

and security for the fruits of their toil and organisation. A destiny

not of our fashioning has chosen this generation as the one called upon

for the supreme act of self-sacrifice—to die if need be that our

race might live in freedom.


Are we worthy of the choice? Only by

our response to the call can that question be answered.


- Workers' Republic , February 12, 1916.



---

p.147


The Slums and the Trenches
--------------------------


A speaker at a recent

recruiting meeting in Dublin declared that the Dublin slums were more

unhealthy than the trenches in Flanders, and the same ‘bright saying’ has been repeated in a circular issued

by the recruiting authorities.


It is the English idea of wit.


Consider it, my friends, consider it well. The trenches in Flanders have

been the graves of scores of thousands of young Irishmen, scores of

thousands of the physically strongest of the Irish race have met their

death there in desperate battle with a brave enemy who bore them no

malice and only wished well for their country.


A very large

proportion of these young Irishmen were born and reared in the slums and

tenement houses of Dublin. These same slums are notorious the world over

for their disease-breeding unhealthy character. All the world over it is

known that the poor of Dublin are housed under conditions worse than

those of any civilised people on God's earth.


From out of those

slums these poor misguided brothers of ours have been tricked and

deluded into giving battle for England—into waging war upon the

German nation which does not permit anywhere within its boundaries such

slums and fever dens as the majority of Dublin's poor must live in.


When at last the common-sense of the people of Dublin reasserts

itself, and men and women begin to protest against this suicidal

destruction of the Irish race in a war that is not of their making, and

for an Empire that they abhor, the cheap wits of the recruiters

sneeringly tell them that there is more danger of death in a Dublin slum

than in a trench in the line of battle.


But you can die

honourably in a Dublin slum. If you die of fever, or even of want,

because you preferred to face fever 


---

p.148


 and want, rather than

sell your soul to the enemies of your class and country, such death is

an honourable death, a thousand times more honourable than if you won a

V.C. committing murder at the bidding of your country's enemies.


These are war times. In times of war the value of the individual life

is but little, but the estimate set upon honour is even higher than in

times of peace. True, the conception of honour is often all wrong, but

the community and the individual in time of war do esteem highly the

individual who sets his own conception of honour higher than his regard

for his own life.


The boy or man who has a soul strong enough to

resist all blandishments to betray the cause of freedom as he sees it,

who is strong enough in his own mind and purpose to face the prospect of

long unemployment and its consequent misery and want, who can see day by

day his strength wasting and his body shrinking for want of nourishment,

who knows that that nourishment will be his for a time if he is prepared

to sell himself into the service of the age-long enemy, and who in face

of all this is yet man enough to hold out to the last, should he die in

his Dublin slum is nevertheless a hero and a martyr fit to be ranked

with and honoured alongside of the greatest heroes and noblest martyrs

this island has produced.


‘The trenches healthier than the

slums of Dublin’. Ay, my masters, but death in a slum may be the

noblest of all deaths if it is the death of a man who preferred to die

rather than dirty his soul by accepting the gold of England, and death

in the trenches fighting for the Empire is that kind of death spoken of

by the poet who lashes with his scorn the recreant who 
> 1. doubly dying shall go down
>   
> To the vile dust
> 
> from which he sprung,
>   
> Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
> 





In the times of the wars at the end of the

eighteenth century when all that was best in Ireland eagerly,

passionately awaited 


---

p.149


 the coming of the French, the armies

of England were at least two-thirds composed of Irishmen. Are these

poor deluded fools remembered or honoured to-day? Where in all Ireland

could a popular demonstration be organised in their honour. Not in any

one part of Ireland would any body of Irish men or women spontaneously

turn out to do tribute to their memory. Nor yet could all the gold of

the British Empire induce any popular body or trade union in nation-

alist Ireland to walk in a procession to pay the tribute of respect to

their record.


But in the same period there were men and women in

Ireland who with all the wealth, power, and influence of the country

against them, took their stand on the side of England's enemies, and

held by that faith to the last, despite poverty, hunger and want,

despite imprisonment, torture and exile, despite death by the bullet,

the bayonet and the hangman. These men and women held to the creed that

England has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, never

can have any right in Ireland, and so holding they believed that whilst

England so holds Ireland—whilst England is here at all—every

enemy whose blows hurt England is a natural ally to Ireland, every blow

which weakens England, loosens a link of the chain that binds Ireland in

slavery.


These men and women, who were they? In what estimation

are they held in Ireland to-day? They are the heroes and the heroines of

the popular mind—the demigods of modern Irish history. Scarcely

more than a century is gone and already they are enshrined in the

memories of the Irish race, whilst all who fought for England are

forgotten, or repudiated when remembered.


Did you ever hear an

Irish man or woman say, ‘my grandfather fought for England in '98’ and expect to get popular approval or

respect because of that fact? You did not. But if ever you met a man or

woman who could say that their grandfather or great grandfather, fought

against England in 


---

p.150


 '98, were you not proud to meet them,

and did not you and all your friends look upon them with respect because

of what their ancestor had done against England? You did. And you were

quite right, too.


But some people in Ireland do honour the men

who fought for England in '98, or pretend to honour them. Who are these

people? They are the people whose ancestors were the greatest enemies of

the Irish race, the evictors, the floggers, the pitchcappers, the

exterminators of the Irish people. The descendants of the landlords who

‘enforced their rights with a rod of iron and renounced their duties

with a front of brass.’ And some people there are who pretend to

honour the men who fight for England in our day. Who are they who in

press and on platform pour their praises on the heroism of our poor

brothers whom they have driven or coaxed to the front?


Who are

they? Why, they are the men who locked us out in 1913, the men who

solemnly swore that they would starve three-fourths of the workers of

Dublin in order to compel them to give up their civil rights—the

right to organise. The recruiters in Dublin and in Ireland generally are

the men who pledged themselves together in an unholy alliance to smash

trade unionism, by bringing hunger, destitution and misery in fiercest

guise into the homes of Dublin's poor.


On every recruiting

platform in Dublin you will see the faces of the men who in 1913-14 met

together day by day to tell of their plans to murder our women and

children by starvation, and are now appealing to the men of those women

and children to fight in order to save the precious skins of the gangs

that conspired to starve and outrage them.


Who are the recruiters

in Dublin? Who is it that sits on every recruiting committee, that

spouts for recruits from every recruiting platform?




---

p.151


Who are they? They are the men who set the police upon the unarmed

people in O'Connell Street, who filled the jails with our young working

class girls, who batoned and imprisoned hundreds of Dublin workers, who

racked and pillaged the poor rooms of the poorest of our class, who

plied policemen with drink, suborned and hired perjurers to give false

evidence, murdered John Byrne and James Nolan and Alice Brady, and in

the midst of a Dublin reeking with horror and reeling with suffering and

pain publicly gloated over our misery and exulted in their power to get

‘three square meals per day’ for their own overfed

stomachs.


These are the recruiters. Every Irish man or boy who

joins at their call gives these carrion a fresh victory over the Dublin

working class—over the working class of all Ireland.


The

trenches safer than the Dublin slums! We may yet see the day that the

trenches will be safer for these gentry than any part of Dublin.


- Workers' Republic , February 26, 1916.



---

p.152


The Days of March
-----------------


March 4th is the date which by

common consent is set aside in Ireland for the commemoration of the

heroic attempt of Robert Emmet. March 6th is the anniversary of the

Fenian Rising of 1867. Does March 1916 carry in its womb anything of

national importance for Ireland? Will our children be commemorating an

attempt, celebrating a victory, or mourning over a lost opportunity?


At this date who can tell? Despite all the pretensions of the British

Government during the trial of Emmet, and despite all the alarmist and

suspicion-breeding reports of the moderates since, we now know beyond

all doubt that had Robert Emmet pushed on to the Castle on the day of

his rising he would have captured that edifice of evil omen, and roused

all Ireland by the blow. The Government were not in the least prepared

for the emergency, and were only saved by the reluctance of the young

patriot to go on in a fight the first moments of which had been stained,

as he conceived it, by the useless shedding of blood.


Dublin

Castle is not of so much importance to-day in the political or mili-

tary government of Ireland, but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries it was the real centre of all the activities of foreign rule

in this country, as it had been for centuries before. In the hands of

the insurgents Dublin Castle would have been the centre of a

revolutionary uprising such as would have shaken the British Empire to

its foundations. It did not fall into the hands of the insurgents, as we

have said, simply because the revolutionists were not as ready to shed

blood as were their rulers.


It is not probable that much blood

will ever again be shed for the sake of the capture of Dublin Castle,

but it is probable 


---

p.153


 that the evil example of the Irish and

English press in extolling and glorifying deeds of blood in the

present war may make future revolutionists less scrupulous as to means,

and more determined to be as ruthless as their rulers.[28](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note028.html'))


The Fenian Rising in March, 1867, was

almost foredoomed to failure because like the United Irishmen in '98,

and the Young Irelanders in 1848, the leaders had allowed the golden

opportunity to slip away, and their attempt when it came was belated.

The Government were on the alert, and the Irish regiments suspected of

Fenian sympathies had been rushed off to India, and other places where

their English masters could rely upon them.


Irishmen in the

British Army in India in those days, like Irishmen in Flanders or

Gallipoli in our own day, fought the enemies of England because they

wanted to get back home to Ireland, not because they loved England, or

cared about the Empire. If they did not kill the enemies of England the

enemies of England would probably have killed them. The Irish soldiers

do not fight for England; they fight for their return ticket to Ireland,

and England always keeps the return half in her pocket as long as she

requires their services.


Thus in the days of Fenianism the

English Government by shipping off the Irish soldiers out of Ireland did

a double stroke of work. She weakened her Irish enemies, and

strengthened herself against her Indian enemies. The leaders of the

Fenian movement had preached and practised caution, and counselled delay

until their plans were thoroughly matured, but the Government struck

before that time, and all the sacrifice and suffering bore no immediate

fruit.


Remember. It is easy for us now to be wise after the

event, and to tell with unerring accuracy just when the blow might have

been struck with the greatest probability of success. It is easy for us

now because we know certain things which it was impossible for the

Fenian leaders to know. If we know 


---

p.154


 where they made a

mistake it is not because our judgment is better than was theirs, but

rather because we are judging a crisis that is past and whose hap-

penings are all therefore familiar to us.


The hurler on the ditch

sees the most of the game because he *is* on the

ditch, and not intent upon keeping his own end up in the place allotted

to him on the field. So the student of history is wise, and can justly

criticise the mistakes of men whose powers of judgment may nevertheless

have been infinitely superior to his own. He may justly criticise their

mistakes, but may also in the part he is playing in the historical

crises of his own time be making mistakes a thousand times more serious

and less excusable.


The United Irishmen waited too long, the

Young Irelanders waited too long, the Fenians waited too long. This is

the opinion of every student of history worthy of the name. But who dare

censure these brave men and women? Assuredly not the men and women of

our generation. To us also a great opportunity has come. Have we been

wise? The future alone can tell.


In these days of March let us

remember that generations, like individuals, will find their ultimate

justification or condemnation not in what they accomplished but rather

in what they aspired and dared to attempt to accomplish. The generation

or the individual that is stricken down in the attempt to achieve a high

and holy thing is itself therefore high and holy. By aspiring to reach a

height the generation or the individual places its soul unassailably

upon that height, even should its body be trampled in the mud at its

base. Upon what height or in what sunless depth of corruption has this

generation placed its soul?


Judged by the record of its

Parliamentary Party, its public press, its capitalist class, this

generation of Irish men and women has sunk to a lower depth that has yet

been reached by any white race under the sun. Judged by the marvellous

fight they have made to save the Irish cause in all its integrity and

historic 


---

p.155


 purity, those who have stood for an independent

Ireland have climbed higher against greater odds than ever before were

brought to bear against the soul of a people.


Is it not an

awe-inspiring, but yet glorious thought, that somewhere above the souls

of those martyrs whom Ireland gave to the cause of freedom in March are

weighing and judging the actions of those who invoke their memories in

March, 1916. Shall our souls rest eternally on the heights with them or

in the depths with their betrayers?


- Workers' Republic , March 11, 1916.



---

p.156


The Slackers
------------


#### 1


Ireland is in the throes

of a new invasion. But whereas all other invasions have been invasions

of fighting men, this last invasion is an invasion of men who have

declined to fight.


Since the passing of the military service law

and its coming into force in England this country has been flooded daily

with fresh hordes of English and Scotch, who have run away from military

service in their own country and settled down like a swarm of locusts

upon Ireland.[29](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note029.html'))


---

p.159





Simultaneously with

this invasion by British shirkers we have witnessed a concerted and

sustained effort on the part of the Labour Exchanges, and also on the

part of firms in England under Government control, to entice able-

bodied Irishmen out of Ireland to work in England. Advertisements are

appearing in the daily press calling for the services of Irishmen to

work in England, some even particularising Dublin men as being the kind

of men they want. Thus we find that young able-bodied Irishmen are being

seduced out of Ireland after being denied work on the grounds that they

were fit for military service, and even whilst they leave Ireland in

despair the country is filling up with cowardly runaways from England

for whom these same employers are gladly finding employment at the jobs

they refused to give Irishmen.


We are aware some captious critics

will say that it is a new position for the Editor of the Workers' Republic to take to calling

men cowardly runaways because they are trying to evade conscription.

Whoever does so misses the whole point of our complaint. We are against

conscription until we have 


---

p.157


 something worth defending. The

British workers, no more than the Irish, have not any stake in ‘their’ Empire worth risking their lives to defend.

That we freely grant.


But that being the case the duty of English

workers is to stay at home and fight conscription, not to run away from

that fight. We here in Ireland have been exempted from conscription for

the present because, and only because, the best fighting material in the

country have got arms in their hands and would have resisted

conscription to the last drop of their blood. We have always admitted

that we cannot remain at peace if the British Government wants us to

fight. That Government can force us to fight whether we like or not. But

neither that Government, nor any other Government, can decide for us

*the place where we are going to fight*, if fight

we must. And the best men in Ireland, the only men whom the Ireland of

the future will care to remember, have decided long ago that if they

must fight they will fight in Ireland, for Ireland, and under Ireland's

flag.[30](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note030.html'))


The knowledge

of these facts has temporarily saved Ireland from conscription. There

are in England and Scotland thousands of young men eligible for military

service who have banded themselves together to resist conscription. All

honour to them! These men are upholding the sanctity of the individual

soul against the tyranny of empires. As rebels ourselves we cannot

refuse them our admiration. But what shall we say of the thousands of

young, able-bodied English, Scots, and Welsh, now settling down upon

Ireland—recreants, runaways, traitors to both sides, who will

neither fight under conscription, nor fight against it! Loyalists to a

man, jingoes and ‘Rule Britannia’ shouters every

last one of them, they form the bulk of the audience at all West British

functions, and spore the colours of the British Army on their persons as

they parade our streets. But they are here to take our jobs, to take the

bread out of the mouths of Irishmen whilst using those same 


---

p.158




Irishmen to go and fight for the Empire. Surely such unmitigated curs

are typical products of Empire—of an Empire that has accustomed

itself to the practice of hiring slaves to fight freemen.


We

wonder what is thought of these slackers and recreants by those Irish

men and women whose relatives are at present risking their lives in the

British Army, or have already lost life or limb in the British service.

What a picture! Irish soldiers fighting for England; English slackers

staying at home to grab the jobs of Irish soldiers. And Irish employers

driving out Irishmen of military age to serve the Empire, and giving

their jobs to Englishmen and Scotsmen who refuse to risk their precious

skins for the Empire.


No work in Ireland for Irishmen, lots of

work in Ireland for Brit-Huns—every ship that goes to England

carrying away Irish men to jobs in England; every ship that comes to

Ireland carrying over Brit-Huns to jobs in Ireland.


Was ever a

nation so beset?


And John E. Redmond's appeal for recruits to

fight for this British Empire which these Britishers refuse to fight for

is pasted on every hoarding and dead wall in the country.


If the

devil is not immortal he must surely die of laughing at the work of his

agents in Ireland.


- Workers' Republic. , March 11, 1916.

#### 2


We have received the following

letter from a correspondent in Glasgow. We gladly publish it in order

that our readers may have the pleasure of seeing us pilloried by an able

writer, and judge for themselves as to the correctness of our position.


> To the Editor of The
> 
> Workers' Republic. Dear
> 
> Comrade,
> 
> 
> As a regular and admiring reader of the
> 
>  Republic, permit me to express my
> 
> disappointment with your leading article, entitled The Slackers, in which you criticise
> 
> those young 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.160
> 
> 
>  men who are landing in Ireland to escape
> 
> conscription. You dip your pen in vitriol and in the most intemperate
> 
> language denounce them as slackers, recreants, cowardly runaways,
> 
> Brit-Huns, and unmitigated curs.
> 
> 
> Before opening your flood-gates
> 
> of abuse you would surely make certain of your ground, and although you
> 
> do not produce it, you doubtless possess abundant evidence that the men
> 
> you denounce are everything you brand them. You have enjoyed their
> 
> acquaintance for a few days now, and must have collected extensive proof
> 
> that they are the `curs' you so charitably describe them to be. I would
> 
> not ask you to produce this proof, only your lurid description does not
> 
> tally with the impression of the men I formed during years of associ-
> 
> ation with them.
> 
> 
> You tell us the new arrivals are English, Welsh,
> 
> and Scotch. Well, they were Irish when they sailed from here. Irish to a
> 
> man. Fifty of my personal acquaintances are now basking in your
> 
> comradely scowls. Half of them are Irish born and have returned to their
> 
> natal roof-trees. The other half are born of Irish parents and have
> 
> crossed to the hospitality of relatives. They don't sing ‘Rule Britannia’. They never sport the loyal colours.
> 
> They duly ‘hate England’, and although they came
> 
> here some years ago to steal the jobs (by selling their labour cheap)
> 
> and ‘take the bread out of the mouths’ of
> 
> Scotchmen, they are not willing to be pressed into the Army if by the
> 
> simple device of changing their locus they can evade it.
> 
> 
> You are
> 
> opposed to conscription. So are they. You say they should remain in
> 
> Britain and fight against it. Don't you know the fight is over?
> 
> Conscription has won. It is the law of the land. Those who fought
> 
> against the Bill must now enter the Army, or devise some means of
> 
> avoiding it. There are only two ways of keeping out of the Army—to
> 
> step into prison or over to Ireland. Scotch 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.161
> 
> 
>  and English
> 
> resisters will go to prison; those who have friends in Ireland are
> 
> choosing the lesser punishment of returning to their native land.
> 
> 
> Whose applause do you hope to gain by such an article? What are your
> 
> motives for writing in a strain that does you so little credit? If you
> 
> believe it is wrong to join the Army, why deny a refuge to those who
> 
> believe with you? If you believe the Irish workers are poor because of
> 
> capitalist oppression, why mislead them to regard the Scotch and English
> 
> workers, who may compete for jobs, as the authors of Irish misery.
> 
> 
> ‘Glasgow Reader’
> 
> 
> 




 
> 
> The above is about the
> 
> most amusing criticism we have ever come across. The writer coolly
> 
> ignores our very explicit description of the men whom we attacked in our
> 
> article, and proceeds to a totally unnecessary defence of people whom we
> 
> did not attack. Then he waxes eloquent in defence of those men whom we
> 
> did not attack. It is easy being virtuously indignant over an article if
> 
> you persist in denying the facts upon which the article is based, and
> 
> spread your ink over a totally different series of facts, that have
> 
> nothing to do with the case.
> 
> 
> For example: Our critic says the
> 
> people whom he is defending ‘Don't sing ‘Rule
> 
> Britannia’, don't sport the loyal colours’. But the people whom
> 
> we were attacking *do* sport the loyal colours, and
> 
> *do* sing ‘Rule Britannia’,
> 
> and *do* shout for the war, and *are* blatant jingoes to a man; they are not Irish
> 
> refugees returning to the land of their birth, or the land of their
> 
> fathers. Oh, no, they are boys of the bull-dog breed, publicly and
> 
> privately asserting that Irishmen should go out to fight for the Empire
> 
> they will not shed their own blood to defend.
> 
> 
> Dublin, Ireland, is
> 
> rotten with these carrion; our patriotic jingo employers are continually
> 
> discharging Irishmen and 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.162
> 
> 
>  filling up their jobs with English
> 
> and Scots and Welsh, and these Brit-Huns are neither socialists,
> 
> radicals, no conscription fellowship members, nor people who believe
> 
> with us that it is wrong to join the Army. So why does our ‘Glasgow Reader’ get so excited, and indulge in such
> 
> unworthy insinuations about our ‘motives’, and ask
> 
> ‘whose applause do we hope to gain’, etc. He may be proud of his
> 
> deftness in making such insinuations; we are willing he should enjoy all
> 
> the credit of such literary finesse.
> 
> 
> His last sentence is a gem
> 
> of illogical and topsy-turvy reasoning. Let us repeat it: ‘If you
> 
> believe the Irish workers are poor because of capitalist oppression why
> 
> mislead them to regard the Scotch and English workers who may compete
> 
> for jobs as the authors of Irish misery?’
> 
> 
> Is not that a gem?
> 
> Here is the position. The capitalist class of these countries have
> 
> committed a great international crime. We stand solidly alongside of
> 
> all those in Ireland who have opposed that crime from its inception to
> 
> its latest development, and we have opposed and denounced all those who
> 
> in Ireland have been accomplices of that crime whether those accomplices
> 
> were of our own class, our nearest and dearest friends, or members of
> 
> the exploiting classes.
> 
> 
> Our attitude to parties in Great Britain
> 
> has been exactly the same. We have encouraged the enemies of the war,
> 
> and have exposed and denounced its friends and sponsors, regardless of
> 
> the class to which they belong.
> 
> 
> But because some of the shouters
> 
> for the war, some of the blatant jingoes and union-jackers came over to
> 
> Ireland, to help their rulers to depopulate Ireland by grabbing our jobs
> 
> whilst our brothers are elbowed out to starve or enlist, our critic has
> 
> nothing but covert insults for us when we dare to criticise them. *He* criticises the same element in Glasgow; 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.163
> 
> 
>  insinuates that we are misleading the Irish workers when we
> 
> criticise them after they have crossed the channel. So a Scotch jingo in
> 
> Glasgow is fair game for a socialist writer, but when he crosses to
> 
> Dublin we have to look upon him as a sacred person—to attack whom
> 
> is an offence against internationalism. A jingo is a jingo wherever we
> 
> meet him, and as far as we are concerned there is no close season for
> 
> jingoes. Nor game preserve in which they may not be hunted.
> 
> 
> Our
> 
> critic has allowed his generous sympathies for his comrades who have
> 
> returned to Ireland to becloud his mind. We did not attack them. We know
> 
> many of the Irish refugees who have left Great Britain for Ireland
> 
> rather than serve in the British Army, and we admire them and welcome
> 
> them in our midst. We know also some English and Scotch fighters who
> 
> have been against the war from the start, have braved unpopularity with
> 
> their own countrymen in opposing it, and if they find that they can
> 
> continue their fighting better in Ireland than in Great Britain they
> 
> also are welcome. But neither of these classes of immigrants into
> 
> Ireland were in our mind when we wrote our article, and nothing but the
> 
> most jaundiced imagination or the most slipshod reading could make the
> 
> article apply to them.
> 
> 
> And finally, let us say that we are sick
> 
> of the canting talk of those who tell us that we must not blame the
> 
> British people for the crimes of their rulers against Ireland. We do
> 
> blame them. In so far as they support the system of society which makes
> 
> it profitable for one nation to connive at the subjection of another
> 
> nation they are responsible for every crime committed to maintain that
> 
> subjection.
> 
> 
> If there is any section of the British people who
> 
> believe that Ireland would be justified in ending the British Empire if
> 
> she could, in order to escape from thraldom to it, then that section may
> 
> hold itself guiltless of any crime against Ireland. But if 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.164
> 
> 
> 
> 
> there is any such section, how small and utterly insignificant it is,
> 
> since it nowhere gives public proof of its existence.
> 
> 
> Of all the
> 
> bodies called into existence by the fight against the war, and against
> 
> conscription, is there one British organisation that claims for Ireland
> 
> (or would even allow to Ireland) the same right to determine its
> 
> national fate as all the British peace parties insist upon being secured
> 
> to Belgium? There is not one.
> 
> 
> The burden of all their cries is
> 
> that no *further* conquests must be made. This
> 
> means that all countries conquered before the war should remain
> 
> conquered, subject countries. Especially does it mean that the British
> 
> Empire should remain intact, and in possession of all its plunder.
> 
> 
> This pirate Empire holds as a subject population, unrepresented in
> 
> any parliament, one-sixth of the human race. Whosoever is of any of
> 
> these subject races and dares to aspire to an existence for his country
> 
> apart from the British Empire is seized as a criminal, and imprisoned or
> 
> executed by our rulers. India, Egypt, Ireland, have all supplied
> 
> examples in recent years. Yet this pirate crew who have seized upon and
> 
> held in bondage this vast mass of humanity, one-sixth of the human race;
> 
> who treat as a crime the noblest aspirations of freedom amongst that
> 
> mass, the crew of this pirate Empire have always the enthusiastic
> 
> support of the people of Great Britain in frustrating any attempt of a
> 
> subject population to escape from the Empire.
> 
> 
> As the glutton who
> 
> has gorged himself to suffocation demands that everybody else should
> 
> rise from the table so the ‘noblest minds of
> 
> England’ declare against further conquests by any of their national
> 
> rivals. An Empire whose sword is ever drinking blood in some part of the
> 
> world poses as the champion of the nations against the doctrine of
> 
> force.
> 
> 
> Such hypocrisy! We will believe in the guiltlessness of
> 
> the British people when their spokesmen dare to recognise publicly that
> 
> the British Empire cannot last, and so recognise the right 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> p.165
> 
> 
> 
> 
> of each one of its subject nations to be itself by the aid of any ally
> 
> it can attach to its side.
> 
> 
> For our part we take our stand openly
> 
> upon the fundamental truth that Ireland is a subject nation, and that
> 
> therefore Ireland has no national enemy in Europe save one, and that one
> 
> is the nation that holds her in subjection.
> 
> 
> - Workers' Republic. , March 25, 1916.
> 






---

p.166


The national Festival
---------------------


The question

often arises: Why do Irishmen celebrate the festival of their national

saint, in view of the recently re-discovered truth that he was by no

means the first missionary to preach christianity to the people of

Ireland? It is known now beyond the shadow of a doubt that the christian

religion had been preached and practised in Ireland long before St.

Patrick, that christian churches had been established, and it is

probable that the legend about the shamrock was invented in some later

generation than that of the saint. Certainly the shamrock bears no place

of any importance in early celtic literature, and the first time we

read of it as having any reference to or bearing on religion in Ireland

occurs in the work of a foreigner—and English monk.


But all

that notwithstanding there is good reason why Irish men and women should

celebrate St. Patrick's Day. They should celebrate it for the same

reason as they should honour the green flag of Ireland, despite the fact

that there is no historical proof that the Irish, in the days of

Ireland's freedom from foreign rule, ever had a green flag as a national

standard, or indeed ever had a national flag at all.


The claim of

the 17th of March to be Ireland's national festival, the claim of St.

Patrick to be Ireland's national saint, the claim of the shamrock to be

Ireland's national plant, the claim of the green flag to be Ireland's

national flag rests not on the musty pages of half-forgotten history but

on the affections and will of the Irish people.


Sentiment it

may be. But the man or woman who scoffs at sentiment is a fool. We on

this paper respect facts, and have a holy hatred of all movements and

causes not built upon truth. But sentiment is often greater than facts,

because it is an idealised 


---

p.167


 expression of fact—a mind

picture of truth as it is seen by the soul, unhampered by the grosser

dirt of the world and the flesh.


The Irish people, denied comfort

in the present, seek solace in the past of their country; the Irish

mind, unable because of the serfdom or bondage of the Irish race to give

body and material existence to its noblest thoughts, creates an emblem

to typify that spiritual conception for which the Irish race laboured in

vain. If that spiritual conception of religion, of freedom, of

nationality exists or existed nowhere save in the Irish mind, it is

nevertheless as much a great historical reality as if it were embodied

in a statute book, or had a material existence vouched for by all the

pages of history.


It is not the will of the majority which

ultimately prevails; that which ultimately prevails is the ideal of the

noblest of each generation. Happy indeed that race and generation in

which the ideal of the noblest and the will of the majority unite.


In this hour of her trial Ireland cannot afford to sacrifice any one

of the things the world has accepted as peculiarly Irish. She must hold

to her highest thoughts, and cleave to her noblest sentiments. Her sons

and daughters must hold life itself as of little value when weighed

against the preservation of even the least important work of her

separate individuality as a nation.


Therefore we honour St.

Patrick's Day (and its allied legend of the shamrock) because in it we

see the spiritual conception of the separate identity of the Irish

race—an ideal of unity in diversity, of diversity not con-

flicting with unity.


Magnificent must have been the intellect

that conceived such a thought; great must have been the genius of the

people that received such a conception and made it their own.


On

this Festival then our prayer is: Honour to St. Patrick the *Irish* Apostle, and Freedom to his people.


- Workers Republic , March 18, 1916.



---

p.168


The Call to Arms
----------------


#### 1


On Friday, March 24th, 1916, Dublin was the

startled witness of a sudden mobilisation of the Irish Citizen Army in

the middle of a working day—a mobilisation in response to a call

coming with the most dramatic unexpectedness. Never was the call so

sudden, never was the response swifter or more reassuring in its promise

for the future.


For some occult and inexplicable reason the

British Government decided upon the instant suppression of a nationalist

journal, The Gael. The journal in

question was the latest recruit to the ranks of true Irish journalism,

and circulated mostly in the south and midland counties, but as far as

we are aware had not in any sense exceeded the limits of candid and

outspoken criticism of those who govern Ireland, and those who support

them. It was not jingo, it was Irish, but quietly and thoroughly

educational rather than aggressive.


But swift upon the decision

of the Government a body of military and police raided the premises of

the printers in Liffey Street, seized all the type forms, dismantled the

machinery, and carried all the vital parts off to Dublin Castle along

with all books and papers connected or believed to be connected with the

journal. No explanation was given other than a notification that action

was taken by virtue of a warrant from General Friend.[31](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note031.html'))


Simultaneously with this raid the police all over the city entered

the shops of newsagents, and totally without warrant or legal sanction

proceeded to search their premises and confiscate all copies of The Gael they could find. Right here

in their illegal and bullying proceedings they encountered their first

reverse.


A number of the Dublin Metropolitan Police entered the


---

p.169




 shop of the Workers' Co-Operative Society at 31, Eden Quay,

and demanded all copies of The

Gael. The little girl in charge was not at all daunted by

the bullying of the uniformed daylight burglars and coolly answered that

she had no authority to give up the property placed in her charge. Then

the policemen proceeded to rummage around among the papers. Meanwhile

word of the raid had been sent to Mr. James Connolly, who is also

Manager of the Workers' Co-Operative Society, and he arrived on the

scene just as one of the police got in behind the counter. Inquiring if

the police had any warrant they answered that they had not. On hearing

this, Mr. Connolly turning to the policeman behind the counter as he had

lifted up a bundle of papers, covered him with an automatic pistol and

quietly said:


‘Then drop those papers, or I'll drop you’. He

dropped the papers. Then he was ordered out from behind the counter, and

he cleared. His fellow burglar tried to be insolent and was quickly told

that as they had no search warrant they were doing an illegal act, and

the first one who ventured to touch a paper would be shot like a dog.

After some more parley they slunk away vowing vengeance.


Immediately they had gone the Countess Markievicz arrived with news

of the raid upon the printing plant of The

Gael, and in the belief that this was a prelude to a

further general suppression as in 1914,[32](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note032.html'))

it was resolved to mobilise the Irish Citizen Army to protect the Workers' Republic and Liberty

Hall.


Whilst the mobilisation papers were being signed, there

came a fresh invasion of police headed by a sergeant and with

reinforcements of the police. This invasion was met in the same manner

with a request for the production of the warrant. The sergeant said he

could assure Mr. Connolly that a warrant was issued, but was told that

the reputation for veracity of the police was not good enough for his

word to be taken without the document. As the police saw that the forces

of the defenders 


---

p.170


 had been augmented, and the Countess

amongst others was lovingly toying with a large automatic whilst a

number of rifles were peeping round the corner, the sergeant concluded

that we had ‘reason’ on our side and withdrew.


After they had withdrawn*,* the office

staff wondering what article in The

Gael had caused such an action on the part of the British

Government, resolved to look through the paper and see. But lo, and

behold, we discovered that the current issue had not yet arrived, none

but old copies were on the premises, and consequently *we had been fighting the police to keep them from taking

from us papers that we had not got*. We were like Irishmen fighting

for freedom in Flanders, and not knowing what it means at home.


Just as we made this discovery we were ‘honoured’ by a visit from Inspector Bannon and a

largely augmented force of constables, all ready for business. To our

civil inquiry for his authority the Inspector produced the document in

question and proceeded to read it for our benefit, whilst both parties

stood lovingly eyeing each other, with their fingers upon the triggers

of their weapons. The warrant produced by the Inspector was the original

warrant for the seizure of The

Gael, and its concluding paragraph authorised the police

and military to enter all newsagents' shops, and seize all copies of the

paper they could discover.


As we had just discovered that we had

none of the paper in the shop we informed the Inspector in our politest

manner that he could search the shop for it as he had brought the

warrant, but would not be allowed to search Liberty Hall, ‘warrant or

no warrant’. To which the Inspector answered that he would not dream

of entering Liberty Hall. We believe him, but they were not always as

considerate. No search at all was made, beyond a mere formal turning

over of the papers on the counter.


Meanwhile the messengers with

the call to arms had been 


---

p.171


 speeding all over the city, and

everywhere the boys responded in the most loyal manner. In the machine

shops of the railways, in factories, in the dockyard, along the docks,

in the holds of coal boats, in stables, on carts, lorries and yokes of

every description, in buildings in process of erection, the call reached

the men, and on the instant tools were dropped, work abandoned, coats

hastily snatched up, and within five minutes of receiving the summons

the men were on their way despite the threats, promises, or supplication

of foremen, bosses, superintendents or owners. Staid middle-class men in

the streets, aristocratic old ladies out shopping, well-fed Government

officials returning from lunch were transfixed with horror when they

beheld the spectacle of working men with grimy faces and dirty working

clothes rushing excitedly through the streets with rifle in hand and

bandolier across shoulders, on the way to Liberty Hall. Visions of

guillotines in College Green, and battues of loyal sweaters fleeted

across their visions, and Dublin Castle and the Viceregal Lodge were

immediately attacked by batteries of telephone calls imploring the

British authorities for news.


In an hour from the first issue of

the summons Liberty Hall was garrisoned by a hundred and fifty

determined armed men, and more were trooping in every few minutes. It

was splendid to see the enthusiasm of the men, and when in the course of

the evening all the Women's Ambulance Corps trooped in, closely fol-

lowed by the Boy Scouts, excitement and longing for the battle was

running high in all our veins. The Irish Volunteers also were on the

alert and stood, we are informed, under arms until after two a.m. on

Sunday morning. Since then Liberty Hall

has been guarded day and night.


All through Saturday the wildest rumours were current, but

at Liberty Hall everything was quiet. The men were on the job, and every

man was confident of his neighbour as well as himself.


It is

understood that every military preparation was made 


---

p.172


 for an

attack upon Liberty Hall, but the preparations were countermanded at the

last moment. This is confirmed by a writer in the Belfast Northern Whig of Tuesday, March 28th.


The Royal Irish

Constabulary in Portobello Barracks professed to be anxious to attack

us, but the soldiers, being soldiers and not professional spies and

bullies like the R.I.C. did not express any desire to make war upon

their own countrymen.


The British Government thought to make a

coup that would demoralise the national forces, and suppress all their

papers but they reckoned without the splendid discipline of the armed

manhood of Ireland.


So endeth the first chapter. Who will write

the next?


### SEQUEL


As a sequel to this

military raid upon the liberties of the Irish people, and as a counter

to her activities at Liberty Hall the Countess Markievicz was served

with a notice from General Friend forbidding her to enter the County

Kerry for the purpose of delivering a lecture at Tralee on Sunday, March 26th. As we had no desire to hear of our

comrade being arrested at some obscure railway station on the way

down, and interned, another lady was sent in her place with a message.

This messenger, Miss Marie Perolz, got safely through, and had the time

of her life entertaining policemen, soldiers and detectives who

informed her that she was a Russian subject, etc., in the apparent

belief that they were interviewing Madam Markievicz.


- Workers' Republic. , April 1, 1916.



---

p.173


The Irish Flag
--------------


The Council of the Irish Citizen Army has resolved

after grave and earnest deliberation, to hoist the green flag of Ireland

over Liberty Hall, as over a fortress held for Ireland by the arms of

Irishmen.


This is a momentous decision in the most serious crisis

Ireland has witnessed in our day and generation. It will, we are sure,

send a thrill through the hearts of every true Irish man and woman, and

send the red blood coursing fiercely along the veins of every lover of

the race.


It means that in the midst of and despite the treasons

and backslidings of leaders and guides, in the midst of and despite all

the weaknesses, corruption and moral cowardice of a section of the

people, in the midst of and despite all this there still remains in

Ireland a spot where a body of true men and women are ready to hoist,

gather round, and defend the flag made sacred by all the sufferings of

all the martyrs of the past.


Since this unholy war first started

we have seen every symbol of Irish freedom desecrated to the purposes of

the enemy, we have witnessed the prostitution of every holy Irish

tradition. That the young men of Ireland might be seduced into the

service of the nation that denies every national power to their country,

we have seen appeals made to our love of freedom, to our religious

instincts, to our sympathy for the oppressed, to our kinship with

suffering.


The power that for seven hundred years has waged

bitter and unrelenting war upon the freedom of Ireland, and that still

declares that the rights of Ireland must forever remain subordinate to

the interests of the British Empire, hypocritically appealed to our

young men to enlist under her banner and shed their blood ‘in the

interests of freedom’.




---

p.174


The power whose reign in

Ireland has been one long carnival of corruption and debauchery of civic

virtue, and which has rioted in the debasement and degradation of

everything Irish men and wonder hold sacred, appealed to us in the name

of religion to fight for her as the champion of christendom.


The

power which holds in subjection more of the world's population than any

other power on the globe, and holds them in subjection as slaves without

any guarantee of freedom or power of self-government, this power that

sets Catholic against Protestant, the Hindu against the Mohammedan, the

yellow man against the brown, and keeps them quarrelling with each other

whilst she robs and murders them all—this power appeals to Ireland

to send her sons to fight under England's banner for the cause of the

oppressed. The power whose rule in Ireland has made of Ireland a desert,

and made the history of our race read like the records of a shambles, as

she plans for the annihilation of another race appeals to our manhood to

fight for her because of our sympathy for the suffering, and of our

hatred of oppression.


For generations the shamrock was banned as

a national emblem of Ireland, but in her extremity England uses the

shamrock as a means for exciting in foolish Irishmen loyalty to England.

For centuries the green flag of Ireland was a thing accurst and hated by

the English garrison in Ireland, as it is still in their inmost hearts.

But in India, in Egypt, in Flanders, in Gallipoli, the green flag is

used by our rulers to encourage Irish soldiers of England to give up

their lives for the power that denies their country the right of

nationhood. Green flags wave over recruiting offices in Ireland and

England as a bait to lure on poor fools to dishonourable deaths in

England's uniform.


The national press of Ireland, the true

national press, uncorrupted and unterrified, has largely succeeded in

turning back the tide of demoralisation, and opening up the minds of the

Irish public to a realisation of the truth about the position 


---

p.175


 of their country in the war. The national press of Ireland is a

real flag of freedom flying for Ireland despite the enemy, but it is

well that also there should fly in Dublin the green flag of this country

as a rallying point of our forces and embodiment of all our hopes. Where

better could that flag fly than over the unconquered citadel of the

Irish working class, Liberty Hall, the fortress of the militant working

class of Ireland.


We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who

are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the

sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer;

not the prostitute pressman—the hired liars of the enemy. Not

these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the

Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation

can be reared.


The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the

cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered.

Ireland seeks freedom. Labour seeks that an Ireland free should be the

sole mistress of her own destiny, supreme owner of all material things

within and upon her soil. Labour seeks to make the free Irish nation the

guardian of the interests of the people of Ireland, and to secure that

end would vest in that free Irish nation all property rights as

against the claims of the individual, with the end in view that the

individual may be enriched by the nation, and not by the spoiling of his

fellows.


Having in view such a high and holy function for the

nation to perform, is it not well and fitting that we of the working

class should fight for the freedom of the nation from foreign rule, as

the first requisite for the free development of the national powers

needed for our class? It is so fitting. Therefore on Sunday, April 16th, 1916, the green flag of Ireland

will be solemnly hoisted over Liberty Hall as the symbol of our faith in

freedom, and as a token to all the world that the working class of

Dublin stands for the cause of Ireland, and the cause of Ireland is the

cause of a separate and distinct nationality.




---

p.176


In

these days of doubt, despair, and resurgent hope we fling our banner to

the breeze, the flag of our fathers, the symbol of our national

redemption, the sunburst shining over an Ireland re-born.


- Workers' Republic , April 8, 1916.



---

p.177


Last Statement of James Connolly
--------------------------------


To the Field General Court

Martial, held at Dublin Castle, on May 9th,

1916.
*(Evidence mainly went to

establish the fact that the accused, James Connolly, was in command at

the General Post office, and was also Commandant-General of the Dublin

Division. Two of the witnesses, however, strove to bring in alleged

instances of wantonly risking the lives of prisoners. The Court held

that these charges were *irrelevant* and could not

be placed against the prisoner.)*


I do not wish to make any

defence except against charges of wanton cruelty to prisoners. These

trifling allegations that have been made, if they record acts that

really happened, deal only with the almost unavoidable incidents of a

hurried uprising against long established authority, and nowhere show

evidence of set purpose to wantonly injure unarmed persons.


We

went out to break the connection between this country and the British

Empire, and to establish an Irish Republic. We believed that the call we

then issued to the people of Ireland, was a nobler call, in a holier

cause, than any call issued to them during this war having any

connection with the war. We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready

to die endeavouring to win for Ireland those national rights which the

British Government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium. As

long as that remains the case, the cause of Irish freedom is safe.


Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never

had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the

presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable

minority, ready to die to affirm 


---

p.178


 that truth, makes that

Government for ever a usurpation and a crime against human progress.


I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when

thousands of Irish men and boys, and hundreds of Irish women and girls,

were ready to affirm that truth, and to attest it with their lives if

need be.


JAMES CONNOLLY, *Commandant-General, Dublin Division, Army of the Irish Republic*.[33](javascript:footNote('E900002-004/note033.html'))











