

#Socialism and Nationalism


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#### Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition


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Socialism and Nationalism
=========================


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


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#### Sources


**Editions**2. James Connolly, Socialism and Nationalism: a selection from the writings of James Connolly, ed.
Desmond Ryan (Dublin: The Sign of the Three Candles, 1948).
3. James Connolly, Collected Works (Dublin: New Books Publications 1987), i 281–493.
**Sources, comment on the texts, and secondary literature**2. James Connolly and W. Walker, The Connolly-Walker controversy on socialist
unity in Ireland (Dublin 1911, repr. Cork: Cork Workers Club 1986).
3. Desmond Ryan, James Connolly: his life, work & writings (Dublin: Talbot Press 1924).
4. G. Schuller, James Connolly and Irish freedom: a marxist analysis (Cork: Cork Workers
Club 1986, reprint of a work first published 1926).
5. Noelle Davis, Connolly of Ireland patriot and socialist (Carnarvon: Swyddfa'r Caernerfon 1946).
6. R. M. Fox, James Connolly the forerunner (Tralee: Kerryman 1946).
7. Fifty years of Liberty Hall (Dublin: Three Candles 1959).
8. Desmond Ryan, James Connolly, in J. W. Boyle (ed), Leaders and workers (Cork: Mercier Press 1960, repr. 1978).
9. C. Desmond Greaves, The life and times of James Connolly (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1961).
10. James Connolly, Yellow unions in Ireland and other articles (Belfast: Connolly Bookshop 1968).
11. Peter Berresford Ellis, James Connolly selected writings edited with an introduction by P. Berresford Ellis (New York: Monthly
Review 1973).
12. Samuel Levenson, James Connolly a biography (London: Brian & O'Keeffe 1973).
13. E. Strauss, Irish nationalism and British democracy (Westport CT: Greenwood 1975).
14. Carl Reeve and Anne Barton Reeve, James Connolly and the United States: the road to the 1916
Irish rebellion (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press 1978).
15. Sean Cronin, Young Connolly (Dublin: Repsol 1978, 2nd. ed. 1983).
16. Proinsias Mac an Bheatha, James Connolly and the Worker's Republic (Dublin: Foilseacháin
Náisiúnta Teo 1978).
17. Bernard Ransom, Connolly's Marxism (London: Pluto Press 1980).
18. Ruth Dudley Edwards, James Connolly (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1981).
19. Patrick Anthony Lake, James Connolly: the development of his political ideology (unpubl.
dissertation 1984).
20. 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).
21. Michael O'Riordan, General introduction, to James Connolly, Collected works (2
vols Dublin: New Books Publications 1987), i, pages ix–xvii.
22. Cathal O'Shannon, Introduction, ibid. 11–16.
23. Robert Lynd, James Connolly: an appreciation, ibid. 495–507 (first published October 1916).
24. Austen Morgan, James Connolly: a political biography (Manchester: Manchester U.P. Manchester
1988).
25. Andy Johnston, James Larraggy, Edward McWilliams, Connolly: a Marxist analysis (Dublin: Irish
Workers Group 1990).
26. Kieran Allen, The politics of James Connolly (London: Pluto Press 1990).
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. W. K. Anderson, James Connolly and the Irish left (Dublin: Irish Academic Press Dublin 1994).
29. Peter McKevitt, James Connolly (Dublin: Catholic Truth Society n.d.).
30. X. T. Zagladina, James Connolly [in Russian] (Moscow: Mysl Publishing House 1985).
**The edition used in the digital
edition.**2. James Connolly Socialism and Nationalism in Collected works, Ed. Desmond Ryan. New Books Publications, Dublin, volume 1 (1987) pages 281–493

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Created: By James Connolly (1868-1916)
 Date range: 1896-1916.#### Use of language


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### Socialism and Nationalism: Author: James Connolly




---

p.304


SOCIALISM AND NATIONALISM
-------------------------


In Ireland at the present time there are at work a
variety of agencies seeking to preserve the national sentiment in the
hearts of the people.


These agencies, whether Irish Language
movements, Literary Societies or Commemoration Committees, are
undoubtedly doing a work of lasting benefit to this country in helping
to save from extinction the precious racial and national history,
language and characteristics of our people.


Nevertheless, there
is a danger that by too strict an adherence to their present methods of
propaganda, and consequent neglect of vital living issues, they may only
succeed in stereotyping our historical studies into a worship of the
past, or crystallizing nationalism into tradition—glorious and
heroic indeed, but still only a tradition.


Now traditions may,
and frequently do, provide materials for a glorious martyrdom, but can
never be strong enough to ride the storm of a successful revolution.


If the national movement of our day is not merely to re-enact the old
sad tragedies of our past history, it must show itself capable of rising
to the exigencies of the moment.


It must demonstrate to the
people of Ireland that our nationalism is not merely a morbid idealising
of the past, but is also capable of formulating a distinct and definite
answer to the problems of the present and a political and economic creed
capable of adjustment to the wants of the future.


This concrete
political and social ideal will best be supplied, I believe, by the
frank acceptance on the part of all earnest nationalists of the Republic
as their goal.
[1](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note001.html'))


Not a
Republic, as in France, where a capitalist monarchy with an elective
head parodies the constitutional abortions of 


---

p.305


 England, and
in open alliance with the Muscovite despotism brazenly flaunts its
apostacy to the traditions of the Revolution.


Not a Republic as
in the United States, where the power of the purse has established a new
tyranny under the forms of freedom; where, one hundred years after the
feet of the last British red-coat polluted the streets of Boston,
British landlords and financiers impose upon American citizens a
servitude compared with which the tax of pre-Revolution days was a mere
trifle.


No! *The* Republic I
would wish our fellow-countrymen to set before them as their ideal
should be of such a character that the mere mention of its name would at
all times serve as a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land, at all
times holding forth promise of freedom and plenteousness as the reward
of their efforts on its behalf.


To the tenant farmer, ground
between landlordism on the one hand and American competition on the
other, as between the upper and the nether millstone; to the
wage-workers in the towns, suffering from the exactions of the
slave-driving capitalist to the agricultural labourer, toiling away his
life for a wage barely sufficient to keep body and soul together*;* in fact to every one of the toiling millions
upon whose misery the outwardly-splendid fabric of our modern
civilisation is reared, the Irish Republic might be made a word to
conjure with—a rallying point for the disaffected, a haven for the
oppressed, a point of departure for the Socialist, enthusiastic in the
cause of human freedom.


This linking together of our national
aspirations with the hopes of the men and women who have raised the
standard of revolt against that system of capitalism and landlordism, of
which the British Empire is the most aggressive type and resolute
defender, should not, in any sense, import an element of discord into
the ranks of earnest nationalists, and would serve to place us in touch
with fresh reservoirs of moral and physical strength 


---

p.306



sufficient to lift the cause of Ireland to a more commanding position
than it has occupied since the day of Benburb.


It may be pleaded
that the ideal of a Socialist Republic, implying, as it does, a complete
political and economic revolution would be sure to alienate all our
middle-class and aristocratic supporters, who would dread the loss of
their property and privileges.


What does this objection mean?
That we must conciliate the privileged classes in Ireland!


But
you can only disarm their hostility by assuring them that in a *free*
Ireland their ‘privileges’
will not be interfered with. That is to say, you must guarantee that
when Ireland is free of foreign domination, the green-coated Irish
soldiers will guard the fraudulent gains of capitalist and landlord from
‘the thin hands of the poor’ just as remorselessly
and just as effectually as the scarlet-coated emissaries of England do
to-day.


On no other basis will the classes unite with you. Do you
expect the masses to fight for this ideal?


When you talk of
freeing Ireland, do you only mean the chemical elements which compose
the soil of Ireland? Or is it the Irish people you mean? If the latter,
from what do you propose to free them? From the rule of England?


But all systems of political administration or governmental machinery
are but the reflex of the economic forms which underlie them.


English rule in England is but the symbol of the fact that English
conquerors in the past forced upon this country a property system
founded upon spoliation, fraud and murder: that, as the present-day
exercise of the ‘rights of property’ so originated
involves the continual practice of legalised spoliation and fraud,
English rule is found to be the most suitable form of government by
which the spoliation can be protected, and an English army the most
pliant tool with which 


---

p.307


 to execute judicial murder when the
fears of the propertied classes demand it.[2](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note002.html'))


---

p.309





The Socialist who would destroy, root and branch, the whole brutally
materialistic system of civilisation, which like the English language we
have adopted as our own, is, I hold, a far more deadly foe to English
rule and tutelage, than the superficial thinker who imagines it possible
to reconcile Irish freedom with those insidious but disastrous forms of
economic subjection—landlord tyranny, capitalist fraud and unclean
usury; baneful fruits of the Norman Conquest, the unholy trinity, of
which Strongbow and Diarmuid MacMurchadha—Norman thief and Irish
traitor—were the fitting precursors and apostles.


If you
remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin
Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic
your efforts would be in vain.


England would still rule you. She
would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through
her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist
institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears
of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.


England would still
rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage
at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.


Nationalism without Socialism—without a reorganisation of
society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common
property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin—is
only national recreancy.


It would be tantamount to a public
declaration that our oppressors had, so far, succeeded in inoculating us
with their perverted conceptions of justice and morality that we had
finally decided to accept those conceptions as our own, and no longer
needed an alien army to force them upon us.


As a Socialist I am
prepared to do all one man can do to achieve for our motherland her
rightful heritage—independence; 


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p.308


 but if you ask me to
abate one jot or tittle of the claims of social justice, in order to
conciliate the privileged classes, then I must decline.


Such
action would be neither honourable nor feasible. Let us never forget
that he never reaches Heaven who marches thither in the company of the
Devil. Let us openly proclaim our faith: the logic of events is with us.
- Shan Van Vocht. 
[3](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note003.html')), January, 1897.





---

p.310


PATRIOTISM AND LABOUR
---------------------


What is Patriotism? Love of
country, someone answers. But what is meant by ‘love of
country’? ‘The rich man’, says a French writer, ‘loves his
country because he conceives it owes him a duty, whereas the poor man
loves his country as he believes he owes it a duty’. The recognition
of the duty we owe our country is, I take it, the real mainspring of
patriotic action; and our ‘country’, properly
understood, means not merely the particular spot on the earth's surface
from which we derive our parentage, but also comprises all the men,
women and children of our race whose collective life constitutes our
country's political existence. True patriotism seeks the welfare of each
in the happiness of all, and is inconsistent with the selfish desire for
worldly wealth, which can only be gained by the spoliation of less
favoured fellow-mortals.[4](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note004.html'))


Viewed in the light of such a definition, what are the claims to patriotism possessed by the moneyed class of Ireland? The percentage of weekly wages of £1 per week and under received by the workers of the
three kingdoms is stated by the Board of Trade report to be as
follows:—England, 40; Scotland, 50; and Ireland, 78 per cent. In
other words, three out of every four wage-earners in Ireland receive
less than £1 per week. Who is to blame? What determines the rate
of wages? The competition among workers for employment. There is always
a large surplus of unemployed labour in Ireland, and owing to this fact
the Irish employer is able to take advantage of the helplessness of his
poorer fellow-countrymen and compel them to work for less than their
fellows in England receive for the same class of work.


The
employees of our municipal Corporations and other public bodies in
Ireland are compelled by our middle-class 


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p.311



town-councillors—their compatriots—to accept wages of from
4*s*. to 8*s*. per week less
than English Corporations pay in similar branches of public services.
Irish railway servants receive from 5*s*. to 10*s*. per week less than English railway servants in the
same departments, although shareholders in Irish railways draw higher
dividends than are paid on the most prosperous English lines. In all
private employment in Ireland the same state of matters prevails. Let us
be clear upon this point. There is no law upon the statute book, no
power possessed by the Privy Council, no civil or military function
under the control of Prime Minister, Lord Lieutenant, or Chief Secretary
which can, does or strives to compel the employing class in Ireland to
take advantage of the crowded state of the labour market and use it to
depress the wages of their workers to the present starvation level.


To the greed of our moneyed class operating upon the social
conditions created by landlordism and capitalism and maintained upon
foreign bayonets, such a result is alone attributable, and no amount of
protestations should convince intelligent workers that the class which
grinds them down to industrial slavery can, at the same moment, be
leading them forward to national liberty. True patriotism seeks the
welfare of each in the happiness of all, and is inconsistent with the
selfish desire for worldly wealth which can only be gained by the
spoliation of less favoured fellow-mortals. It is the mission of the
working-class to give to patriotism this higher, nobler, significance.
This can only be done by our working class, as the only universal,
all-embracing class, organising as a distinct political party,
recognising in Labour the cornerstone of our economic edifice and the
animating principle of our political action.


Hence the rise of
the Irish Socialist Republican Party. We are resolved upon national
independence as the indispensable ground-work of industrial
emancipation, but we are equally 


---

p.312


 resolved to have done with
the leadership of a class whose social charter is derived from
oppression. [5](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note005.html')) Our policy is the outcome of long reflection upon the history and peculiar circumstances of our country. In an
independent country the election of a majority of Socialist representatives to the Legislature means the conquest of political power by the revolutionary party, and consequently the mastery of the military
and police forces of the State, which would then become the ally of
revolution instead of its enemy.


In the work of social
reconstruction which would then ensue, the State power—created by
the propertied classes for their own class purposes—would serve
the new social order as a weapon in its fight against such adherents of
the privileged orders as strove to resist the gradual extinction of
their rule.


Ireland not being an independent country, the
election of a majority of Socialist Republicans would not,
unfortunately, place the fruits of our toil so readily within our grasp.
But it would have another, perhaps no less important, effect. It would
mean that for the first time in Irish history a clear majority of the
responsible electorate of the Irish nation—men capable of bearing
arms—had registered at the ballot-boxes their desire for
separation from the British Empire. Such a verdict, arrived at not in
the tumultuous and, too often, fickle enthusiasm of monster meetings,
but in the sober atmosphere and judicial calmness of the polling-booth,
would ring like a trumpet-call in the ears alike of our rulers and of
every enemy of the British imperial system. That would not long survive
such a consummation. Its enemies would read in the verdict *thus* delivered at the ballot-box a
passionate appeal for help against the oppressor,
the *moral* insurrection of the Irish people, which a small
expeditionary force and war material might convert into such a
*military* insurrection as would exhaust the power of
the empire at home and render its possessions an easy prey abroad. How
long would such an appeal be disregarded?




---

p.313


Meanwhile,
there is no temporary palliative of our misery, no material benefit
which Parliament can confer that could not be extorted by the fear of a
*revolutionary* party seeking to
create such a situation as I have described, sooner than by any action
of even the most determined Home Rule or other constitutional party.
Thus, alike for present benefits and for future freedom, the
revolutionary policy is the best. A party aiming at a merely political
Republic and proceeding upon such lines, would always be menaced by the
danger that some astute English Statesman might, by enacting a sham
measure of Home Rule, disorganise the Republican forces by an appearance
of concessions, until the critical moment had passed. But the Irish
Socialist Republican Party, by calling attention to evils inherent in
that social system of which the British Empire is but the highest
political expression, founds its propaganda upon discontent with social
iniquities which will only pass away when the Empire is no more, and
thus implants in all its followers an undying, ineradicable hatred of
the enemy, which will remain undisturbed and unmollified by any
conceivable system of political quackery whatever.


An Irish Socialist Republic ought, therefore, to be the rallying cry of all our countrymen who desire to see the union and triumph of Patriotism and
Labour.


### *Editorial Note:*

### 


Whilst in full sympathy with Mr. Connolly's views on the labour and social questions, we are absolutely opposed to the scheme he puts forward for the formation of an Irish Republican party in the British Parliament. Any conscientious Republican would stick at the oath of allegiance and no
reliance could be placed on what John O'Leary calls ‘double-oathed’ men. John Mitchel allowed himself to be returned as a representative, but absolutely refused to entertain the idea of claiming his seat. He looked upon his election merely as a declaration in favour


---

p.314



 of his unalterable rebel principles. We would like to have this question debated.


- Shan Van Vocht. , August, 1897.



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p.315


SOCIALISM AND IRISH
NATIONALISM
-------------------------------


The public life of Ireland has been generally so
much identified with the struggle for political emancipation, that,
naturally, the economic side of the situation has only received from our
historians and public men a very small amount of attention.


Scientific Socialism is based upon the truth incorporated in this
proposition of Karl Marx, that, ‘the economic dependence of the
workers on the monopolists of the means of production is the foundation
of slavery *in all its forms*, the cause of nearly
all social misery, modern crime, mental degradation and political
dependence’. Thus this false exaggeration of purely political forms
which has clothed in Ireland the struggle for liberty, must appear to
the Socialist an inexplicable error on the part of a people so strongly
crushed down as the Irish.


But the error is more in appearance
than in reality.


The reactionary attitude of our political
leaders notwithstanding*,* the great mass
of the Irish people know full well that if they had once conquered that
political liberty which they struggle for with so much ardour, it would
have to be used as a means of social redemption before their well-being
would be assured.


In spite of occasional exaggeration of its
immediate results one must remember that by striving determinedly, as
they have done, towards this definite political end, the Irish are
working on the lines of conduct laid down by modern Socialism as the
indispensable condition of success.


Since the abandonment of the
unfortunate insurrectionism of the early Socialists whose hopes were
exclusively concentrated on the eventual triumph of an uprising and
barricade struggle, modern Socialism, relying on the slower, but surer
method of 


---

p.316


 the ballot-box, has directed the attention of its
partisans toward the peaceful conquest of the forces of Government in
the interests of the revolutionary ideal.


The advent of Socialism
can only take place when the revolutionary proletariat, in *possession* of the organised forces of
the nation (the political power of government) will be able to build up
a social organisation in conformity with the natural march of industrial
development.


On the other hand, non-political co-operative effort
must infallibly succumb in face of the opposition of the privileged
classes, entrenched behind the ramparts of law and monopoly. This is why,
even when he is from the economic point of view intensely conservative,
the Irish Nationalist, even with his false reasoning, is an active agent
in social regeneration, in so far as he seeks to invest with full power
over its own destinies a people actually governed in the interests of a
feudal aristocracy.


The section of the Socialist army to which I
belong, the Irish Socialist Republican Party, never seeks to hide its
hostility to those purely bourgeois parties which at present direct
Irish politics.


But, in inscribing on our banners an ideal to
which they also give lip-homage, we have no intention of joining in a
movement which could debase the banner of revolutionary Socialism.


The Socialist parties of France oppose the mere Republicans without
ceasing to love the Republic. In the same way the Irish Socialist
Republican Party seeks the independence of the nation, whilst refusing
to conform to the methods or to employ the arguments of the chauvinist
Nationalist.


As Socialists we are not imbued with national or
racial hatred by the remembrance that the political and social order
under which we live was imposed on our fathers at the point of the
sword; that during 700 years Ireland has resisted this unjust foreign
domination; that famine, pestilence and bad 


---

p.317


 government have
made of this western isle almost a desert and scattered our exiled
fellow-countrymen over the whole face of the globe.


The
enunciation of facts such as I have just stated is not able to-day to
inspire or to direct the political energies of the militant
working-class of Ireland; such is not the foundation of our resolve to
free Ireland from the yoke of the British Empire. We recognise rather
that during all these centuries the great mass of the British people had
no political existence whatever; that England was, politically and
socially, terrorised by a numerically small governing class; that the
atrocities which have been perpetrated against Ireland are only
imputable to the unscrupulous ambition of this class, greedy to enrich
itself at the expense of defenceless men; that up to the present
generation the great majority of the English people were denied a
deliberate voice in the government of their own country; that it is,
therefore, manifestly unjust to charge the English people with the past
crimes of their Government; and that at the worst we can but charge them
with a criminal apathy in submitting to slavery and allowing themselves
to be made an instrument of coercion for the enslavement of others. An
accusation as applicable to the present as to the past. [6](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note006.html'))


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p.320





But whilst
refusing to base our political action on hereditary national antipathy,
and wishing rather comradeship with the English workers than to regard
them with hatred, we desire with our precursors the United Irishmen of
1798 that our animosities be buried with the bones of our
ancestors—there is not a party in Ireland which accentuates more
as a vital principle of its political faith the need of separating
Ireland from England and of making it absolutely independent. In the
eyes of the ignorant and of the unreflecting this appears an
inconsistency, but I am persuaded that our Socialist brothers in France
will immediately recognise the justice of the reasoning upon which such
a policy is based.




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p.318


1. We hold *that* ‘the economic emancipation of the worker requires
the conversion of the means of production into the common property of
Society’. Translated into the current language and practice of actual
politics this teaches that the necessary road to be travelled towards
the establishment of Socialism requires the transference of the means of
production from the hands of private owners to those of public bodies
directly responsible to the entire community.


2. Socialism seeks
then in the interest of the democracy to strengthen popular action on
all public bodies.


3. Representative bodies in Ireland would
express more directly the will of the Irish people than when those
bodies reside in England.


An Irish Republic would then be the
natural depository of popular power; the weapon of popular emancipation,
the only power which would show in the full light of day all these class
antagonisms and lines of economic demarcation now obscured by the mists
of bourgeois patriotism.


In that*,*
there is not a trace of chauvinism. We desire to preserve with the
English people the same political relations as with the people of
France, of Germany or of any other country; the greatest possible
friendship, but also the strictest independence. Brothers, but not
bedfellows. Thus, inspired by another ideal, conducted by reason not by
tradition, following a different course, the Socialist Republican Party
of Ireland arrive at the same conclusion as the most irreconcilable
Nationalist. The governmental power of England over us must be
destroyed; the bonds which bind us to her must be broken. Having learned
from history that all bourgeois movements end in compromise, that the
bourgeois revolutionists of to-day become the conservatives of
to-morrow, the Irish Socialists refuse to deny or to lose their identity
with those who only half understand the problem of liberty. They seek
only the alliance and the friendship of those hearts who, loving liberty
for its own sake, 


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p.319


 are not afraid to follow its banner when
it is uplifted by the hands of the working-class who have most need of
it. Their friends are those who would not hesitate to follow that
standard of liberty, to consecrate their lives in its service even
should it lead to the terrible arbitration of the sword.


- L'Irlande
Libre. ,[7](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note007.html')) Paris, 1897.





---

p.321


THE MEN WE HONOUR
-----------------


Apostles of Freedom are ever idolised
when dead, but crucified when living. Universally true as this statement
is, it applies with more than usual point to the revolutionary hero in
whose memory the Irish people will, on Monday,
15th August, lay the foundation stone of a great memorial.


Accustomed, as we are, to accept without question the statements of
platform oratory or political journalism as embodying the veriest truths
of history, the real meaning and significance of the life and struggles
of the high-souled organiser of the United Irish movement of 1798 is too
often lost to the people of Ireland to-day. We think with pride and joy
of Wolfe Tone and his struggle for Ireland, but when we think of his
enemies, of those who thwarted him at every opportunity, who ceased not
to revile him while alive and paused not in their calumnies even when he
had passed beyond the grave, we are too apt to forget that the most
virulent and unforgiving of those enemies were not the emissaries of the
British Crown, but the men from whose lips the cant of patriotism was
never absent, the leaders in Church and politics of the people whose
emancipation Wolfe Tone had laboured to secure—and met death in
the effort to forward. Yet it is a lesson we need to remember, fraught
as it is with meaning, in the task before the Irish democracy
to-day.


There are few passages in the life of Tone more pregnant
with interest to the attentive reader than that which chronicles the
negotiations between himself and the great Whig Party of which Grattan
was such a shining light. The attempt of the Whig aristocracy to cajole
and bribe the young and ardent democrat into lending his intellect and
powers to the service of their party, and the scornful refusal of the
high-minded, but 


---

p.322


 penniless, Tone to thus prostitute his
genius in the cause of compromise and time-serving, points a moral the
young men of Ireland might well lay to heart in deciding under which
flag they will take their stand in the struggle to which we henceforth
challenge friends and enemies.


‘I was a democrat from the
commencement’, proudly declared our hero, and in the light of that
announcement we at once perceive why the wealthy classes of Ireland with
scarce a dozen exceptions ranged themselves against him; why Grattan
never by word or deed testified the slightest sympathy with the United
Irishmen; why Dan O'Connell took up arms to defend Dublin for the
British Government against his own countrymen and rebel co-religionists;
why the Catholic aristocracy fought side by side with the Orange
yeomanry; why the fiercest invectives of Lord Castlereagh or Beresford
of the Riding School were but faint echoes of the maledictions heaped
upon the revolutionists by the aristocratic Catholic Bishops; why, in
short, Wolfe Tone and his comrades were overwhelmed by the treachery of
their own countrymen more than by the force of the foreign enemy. He was
crucified in life, now he is idolised in death, and the men who push
forward most arrogantly to burn incense at the altar of his fame are
drawn from the very class who, were he alive to-day, would hasten to
repudiate him as a dangerous malcontent. False as they are to every one
of the great principles to which our hero consecrated his life, they
cannot hope to deceive the popular instinct, and their presence at the
'98 commemorations will only bring into greater relief the depth to
which they have sunk. [8](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note008.html'))


---

p.324


 Our Home Rule leaders
will find that the glory of Wolfe Tone's memory will serve, not to
cover, but to *accentuate* the
darkness of their shame.


Wolfe Tone was abreast of the
revolutionary thought of his day, as are the Socialist Republicans of
our day. He saw clearly, as we see, that a dominion as long rooted in
any country as 


---

p.323


 British dominion in Ireland can only be
dislodged by a revolutionary impulse in line with the development of the
entire epoch. Grasping this truth in all its fulness he broke with the
so-called ‘practical’ men of the time, and wherever
he could get a hearing he, by voice and pen, inculcated the republican
principles of the French Revolution and counselled his countrymen to
embark the national movement on the crest of that revolutionary wave.
His Irish birth did not *create* his hatred of the
British Constitution, but only intensified it. Like Mitchel, fifty years
later, he held ideas on political and social order such as would have
made him a rebel even had he been an Englishman. In this fact lay his
strength and the secret of his enthusiasm. We who hold his principles
cherish his memory all the more on that account, believing as we do that
any movement which would successfully grapple with the problem of
national freedom must draw its inspiration, not from the mouldering
records of a buried past, but from the glowing hopes of the living
present, the vast possibilities of the mighty future.


When the
hour of the social revolution at length strikes and the revolutionary
lava now pent up in the Socialist movement finally overflows and
submerges the kings and classes who now rule and ruin the world, high up
in the topmost niches of the temple a liberated human race will erect to
the heroes and martyrs who have watered the tree of liberty with the
blood of their body and the sweat of their intellect, side by side with
the Washingtons, Kosciuszkos and Tells of other lands, a grateful Irish
people will carve the name of our precursor, Theobald Wolfe Tone,[9](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note009.html')) the man whose
virtues we can only honour by imitation as the Socialist Republic will
yet honour his principles by realisation.


- Workers' Republic. , August 13, 1898.





---

p.325


SOCIALISM IN IRELAND
--------------------


#### 1


We find that amongst a large section of the Irish in this country
(the U.S.A.) and Irish Socialists here are included, it is tacitly
assumed that Socialism cannot take root in Ireland, that the Home Rule
press, the supposed conservative habits of thought of the people and,
above all, the hostility of the clergy, make it impossible for Socialist
thought to make headway amongst the Irish working class. This assumption
is, of course, not to be reasoned with—you cannot reason with a
thing that ignores facts— but is only to be combatted with a quiet
presentation of facts to prove that which is assumed as impossible of
existence, is already existent, and not only existent, but lusty,
aggressive and powerful. The influence of the Home Rule Press is in
reality nil amongst the intelligent working-class of Ireland: the
conservative habits of thought supposed to be characteristically Irish
are in reality the reflex of agricultural conditions in Ireland, as
elsewhere, and do not prevail where the Irish worker lives and suffers
in the industrial environment of a city and the hostility of the clergy
has worn off its own edge by too frequent and indiscriminate use.


The Irish Socialist Republican Party—founded in May 1896, in
Dublin, and now represented by the Socialist Party of Ireland—has
had to suffer under the boycott of the entire Irish press, with the
single honourable exception of the United
Irishman, in the early days of that journal (now
re-christened, Sinn Fein.)


Of the weekly newspapers was this more particularly true, and it is
from the weekly Irish newspapers that the Irish in America and the
agricultural Irish, derived and derive their 


---

p.326


 impressions of
political life in Ireland. Yet, despite this attempt to destroy the
influence of this working-class party and to circumscribe the scope of
its activities, it has to its record and to its honour, the credit of
having initiated and carried to a successful
conclusion—unaided—the most striking protest against British
tyranny in Ireland in this generation, viz., the Anti-Jubilee Protest of
Dublin in 1897, of having been the moving spirit in rendering nugatory
the visit of the late Queen Victoria on a recruiting mission to Dublin
during the Boer War (a fact recorded by the French newspapers of the
time, which spoke of the Socialist Republicans as the only centre from
which the British authorities expected trouble) of having originated and
popularised an anti-enlisting crusade at a time when even some
well-intentioned ‘physical-force men’ favoured the
idea of Irish youths entering the British army, ‘in
order to learn the use of the rifle’—one of the most
disastrous ideas ever current in Ireland; of having emphasised the fact
that there have ever been two currents in modern Irish history, viz.,
the revolutionary and the compromising or constitutional, and that their
ideas can no more mix or their ideals be compounded, than may blend oil
and water, and finally, of having conducted the first political
campaigns of the Irish working-class on the basis of revolutionary
Socialism.


Let those who tell us that the Irish will never
respond to the call of Socialism remember that five years ago the
candidate of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, in contests against
the nominees of the Home Rule and Unionist Parties, polled a vote which
represented a third of the total electorate; let them remember this, and
then, thinking of the frantic joy of the Socialist Parties of America
when they succeed in polling the necessary three or five per cent. to
get on the official ballot, let them stop trying to discourage the Irish
in America by their foolish declarations that Socialism will never take
root amongst the Irish.




---

p.327


#### 1


Socialism in Ireland is now
a force, influencing alike the political, economic and literary thought
of the island. . ..


- Harp. , March, 1908.



#### 2


It is interesting to observe how Ireland has been and is
being made the scene of many radical experiments in legislation which,
in any other country, would be only looked for as the result of a great
Socialist upheaval.


The Land Acts or rather the Purchase Clauses
of the Land Acts upon which so many of our doctrinaires waste so much
good ink in reckless denunciations are, despite their many drawbacks, an
*assertion* of the right of the
original community not only to establish new property relations to suit
new ideas, but also to establish tribunals by means of which the working
of these relations may be supervised and controlled.


Of course it
is not the Land Nationalisation many of us would like to see, but it is
nevertheless the germ out of which a socialisation of the land may
ultimately develop. In Ireland the propaganda of Land Nationalisation
was doomed to sterility in the past by virtue of the fact that the most
earnestly radical and truly revolutionary people in the country, and
hence the people most sincerely democratic, looked upon the government
as a foreign government and, therefore, upon the proposal to nationalise
the land as a proposal to hand over the soil of their country to a
foreign government and thus to increase the powers of that government
over the economic as well as over the political life of the Irish.


In their phraseology, Land Nationalisation meant making the land the
property of the government, and they would inquire:— 
> 
> What government? The English Government! We have no other government
> here. Oh, no! It is too much power that government has already.
> 
> 
> 






---

p.328


#### 2


Hence, not even Michael Davitt could
popularise Land Nationalisation in Ireland in his day. The political
groundwork was wanting, the necessary basis of a government directly
under the control of the people concerned. With the Nationalist masses
the same difficulty was encountered in the propagation of Socialism,
until the uncompromising attitude of the Dublin Socialists on the
national question made it clear that Socialism meant on the political
side of Ireland an absolute revolutionary change which would make the
people of Ireland complete rulers of their own country, as the economic
change would thus logically make them owners of the country they would
politically rule.


In other words, the Socialists of Ireland had
to recognise that the world for the workers can only be realised by the
people of each country seizing upon their own country and wresting it by
one means or another from the hands of the present rulers or proprietors
and restoring it with all its powers and potentialities to the people
who inhabit it and labour upon it.


With the advent of
self-government in any shape in Ireland, the question of the ownership
and administration of the soil can, and will, be approached in a new
spirit.


One change I foresee, and hope for, exists already in
embryo in the labourers' cottages Acts. Under these Acts, the local
authority has the power to acquire land and build cottages for the
labourers. These latter become the tenants of the local authority.


Now, I foresee that there may be a change in the spirit of future
Land Acts, and that the local County Councils may be authorised to
acquire the lands now being purchased by the farmer, and that the
purchase price being paid by the present tenants may be changed into a
rent payable to the democratically elected County Councils.


If
this were done and a reduction in the yearly payment, coupled with a
guarantee of fixity of tenancy and right to a 


---

p.329


 selling
interest in the farm (goodwill) given to the farmers in return for their
surrender of their future rights of ownership, it is quite conceivable
that such a change might be effected without any more opposition than
would be offered to any other legislative change.


But the result
of this change would be that the local County Councils would become the
owners of the soil under the national government, that all questions
affecting the administration of the soil would be as keenly under the
supervision of the democracy immediately interested as questions
affecting the occupancy of labourers' cottages are now, and that thus
the gradual democratisation of the agriculture interests would become
the vital question in rural politics, as the spread of the same
political principle and method of administration would similarly affect
industrial interests in urban and national politics.


The
squabbles over the occupancy of a labourer's cottage, which, at present,
make such piquant reading in our Irish newspapers have a sordid side,
but *those* that I have glanced at
show that they have a practical,
illuminating side also.


When the principal deliberations of an
Urban or County Council perforce turn on the question of the
administration of the farms and other lands of the County, as the
deliberations of Boards of Guardians now turn upon the occupancy of
labourers' cottages, we will begin to have a vivid understanding of the
Marxian phrase about ‘the government of men being replaced by the
administration of things’.


The Land Acts dispossessed the
landlords and thus ended the economic influence upon which their
political power is based. Hence, outside of North-East Ulster, the
landed aristocracy have ceased to be a power in politics. An
agricultural labourer would have a greater chance to be elected than a
landlord in the south-west or east of Ireland would have by his former
tenants.


The genius of peasant proprietorship is essentially
individualistic, 


---

p.330


 and therefore exercises a disintegrating
influence upon the political strength and influence of the peasant
proprietor. The Land Acts, therefore, have, despite their faults,
destroyed the slavery of the Irish tenantry, taken from agricultural
questions their exclusive power over Irish affairs, and opened a way for
the fundamental reorganisation of the social life of the community.


Then, two years ago, another Royal Commission investigating the
question of Irish railways, reported in favour of Nationalisation. With
the coming of self-government, the almost unanimous expression of
approval with which this was received in Ireland is likely to take
concrete form in *a* legislative
enactment.


And now another Commission reports, likewise, in
favour of a State Medical Service. And this, also, is received with a
chorus of approval.


Said I not that although the Irish have
little regard for Socialist theories they have a strong bias in favour
of action on lines that are in essence lines of Socialist activity?


Side by side with all this development of mere Government Socialism,
those who know Ireland best know that there is also developing that
strong and active spirit of industrial rebellion, that aggressive
challenging of the rights and powers of the master class that is
absolutely necessary to prevent such governmentalism degenerating into
despotic paternalism.


I do not believe it to be possible to
prevent a continual extension of the powers of government, even if it
were desirable, but I look to the cultivation of the rebel spirit to
secure that that extension of the functions of government shall connote
a conquest of powers by the working-class instead of an invasion of our
rights by the master class.


It is because of that defiant, rebel
spirit in Ireland to-day, ever keeping step with, indeed out-marching,
the trend of legislative experimenting with social problems that we
Irish Socialists feel at last that we are leaving the stage of
theorising 


---

p.331


 and are seeing our principles becoming the faith
that moves our class to action.


It is an inspiration to know the
working-class of Ireland in their times of conflict. To see that class
resolute, erect, defiant, day by day battling with its Nationalist
masters, and in starvation and suffering winning its way to victory,
which, at the same time as it closes in grappling with the Irish
exploiter, it holds itself uncompromisingly aloof from and hostile to
its British rulers and their Irish allies. To know that class is to love
it.


And I pity those in whom the narrow prejudices of a colony
are still, after 300 years of plantation, too strong to permit them to
identify themselves with such a nation.


- Forward. , August 16, 1913.





---

p.332


THE FIGHTING RACE
-----------------


We gather from the American
newspapers that our countrymen in the United States army and navy have
been highly distinguishing themselves in the cause of the war with
Spain.


This is as it should be and in consonance with all our
Irish traditions. We are a fighting race, we are told, and every
Irishman is always proud to hear our politicians and journalists tell of
our exploits in the fighting line—in other countries, in other
climes and in other times.


Yes, we are a fighting race. Whether
it is under the Stars and Stripes or under the Union Jack; planting the
flag of America over the walls of Santiago or helping our own oppressors
to extend their hated rule over other unfortunate nations*,* our brave Irish boys are ever to the
front.


When the Boer has to be robbed of his freedom, the
Egyptian has to be hurled back under the heel of his taskmaster, the
Zulu to be dynamited in his caves, the Matabele slaughtered beside the
ruins of his smoking village or Afridi to be hunted from his desolated
homestead, wheresoever, in short, the bloody standard of the oppressors
of Ireland is to be found over some unusually atrocious piece of
scoundrelism, look then for the sons of our Emerald Isle, and under the
red coats of the hired assassin army you will find them.


Yes, we
are a fighting race. In Africa, India or America, wherever blood is to
be spilt, there you will find Irishmen, eager and anxious for a fight,
under any flag, in anybody's quarrel, in any cause—except their
own.


In that cause, for our own freedom and own land, we have for
the last century consistently refused to fight. On any other part of the
earth's surface we can shed our blood with the 


---

p.333


 blessing of
Mother Church and the prayers of the faithful to strengthen our arms,
but in Ireland and for the freedom of the Irish people.


Anathema.


It is an impious thought and we must avoid it.
Whatever we do let us keep on the safe side of the road and not quarrel
with the Church which—denounced the United Irishmen and
excommunicated the Fenians.


Faith and Fatherland. Oh, yes. But
don't forget that when the Englishman was a Catholic and worshipped at
the same altar as the Irishman, he plundered, robbed and murdered the
Irishman as relentlessly as he did when, with sword in one hand and
Bible in the other, he came snuffily chanting his psalms in the train of
Oliver Cromwell.


The question of religious faith has precious
little bearing upon the question of freedom. Witness Catholic Spain
devastating Catholic Cuba, the Catholic capitalists of Italy running
down with cannon the unarmed Catholic workmen, the Irish Catholic
landlord rackrenting and evicting the Catholic tenant, the wealthy
Catholic feasting inside the mansion while the Catholic beggar dies of
hunger on the doorstep.


And as a companion picture witness the
Protestant workmen of Belfast so often out on strike against their
Protestant employers and their Protestant ancestors of 100 years ago in
active rebellion against the English Protestant Government.


‘Our institutions in Church and State’ is the catchword
with which the wealthy Irish Unionist endeavours to arouse religious
bigotry among the Protestant working-class of Ulster and so prevent them
coalescing with the working-class Catholic in a united effort for their
common emancipation.


And ‘Faith and
Fatherland’ by linking the national demands with a specific
religious belief serves the same purpose in the mouth of the Home Rule
trickster.




---

p.334


For what other purpose than that herein
specified are either rallying cries used?


To keep the people of
Ireland, and especially the workers, divided is the great object of all
our politicians, Home Ruler or Unionist.


And our great object in
this journal will be to **unite** the workers and to bury, in one common
grave, the religious hatreds, the provincial jealousies and mutual
distrusts upon which oppression has so long depended for security.


The man whose forefathers manned the walls of Derry is as dear to us
as he who traces his descent from the women who stood in the breaches of
Limerick. Neither fought for Ireland, but only to decide which *English* king should rule Ireland.


What have we
to do with their quarrels? In the words of the United
Irishmen—‘Let us bury our animosities with the bones of our
ancestors’.


In the near future when kings and the classes who
are makers of kings no longer encumber the earth with their foul
presence, how our Irish youth will smile when they read that 200 years
ago Irishmen slaughtered each other to decide which English king should
have the right to rob the Irish people.


And that for 200 years
after the descendants of the respective parties conclusively proved to
their own satisfaction that the leader of the other side had been a
scoundrel.


And the impartial world looking on examined the
evidence and came to the conclusion that on that point, at least, *both parties* were right*.* Both kings were scoundrels, *ergo* the followers of both were—


Well,
never mind.


- Workers' Republic. , August 13,
1898.





---

p.335


PHYSICAL FORCE IN
IRISH POLITICS
--------------------------------


Ireland occupies a position among the nations
of the earth unique in a great variety of its aspects, but in no one
particular is this singularity more marked than in the possession of
what is known as a ‘physical force party’—a
party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and
agree upon no single principle, except upon the use of physical force as
the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this
country and the governing power of Great Britain.


Other countries
and other peoples have, from time to time, appealed to what the first
French Revolutionists picturesquely described as the ‘sacred right of
insurrection’, but in so appealing they acted under the inspiration
of, and combated for, some great governing principle of political or
social life upon which they, to a man, were in absolute agreement. The
latter-day high *falutin'*
‘hillside’ man, on the other hand, exalts into a
principle that which the *revolutionists* of other countries have
looked upon as a weapon, and in his gatherings prohibits all discussion
of those principles which formed the main strength of his prototypes
elsewhere and made the successful use of that weapon possible. Our
people have glided at different periods of the past century from moral
force agitation, so-called, into physical force rebellion, from
constitutionalism into insurrectionism, meeting in each the same failure
and the same disaster and yet seem as far as ever from learning the
great truth that neither method is ever likely to be successful until
they first insist that a perfect agreement *upon the
end to be attained* should be arrived at as a starting-point of all
our efforts.


To the reader unfamiliar with Irish political
history such a remark seems to savour almost of foolishness, its truth
is so 


---

p.336


 apparent; but to the reader acquainted with the inner
workings of the political movements of this country the remark is
pregnant with the deepest meaning. Every revolutionary effort in Ireland
has drawn the bulk of its adherents from the ranks of the disappointed
followers of defeated constitutional movements. After having exhausted
their constitutional efforts in striving to secure such a modicum of
political power as would justify them to their own consciences in taking
a place as loyal subjects of the British Empire, they, in despair,
turned to thoughts of physical force as a means of attaining their ends.
Their conception of what constitutes freedom was, in no sense changed or
revolutionised; they still believed in the political form of freedom
which had been their ideal in their constitutional days; but no longer
hoping for it from the acts of the British Parliament, they swung over
into the ranks of the ‘physical force’ men as the
only means of attaining it.


The so-called physical force movement
of to-day in like manner bases its hopes upon the disgust of the people
over the failure of the Home Rule movement; it seeks to enlist the
people under its banners, not so much by pointing out the base ideals of
the constitutionalists or the total inadequacy of their pet measures to
remedy the evils under which the people suffer, as by emphasising the
greater efficacy of physical force as a national weapon. Thus, the one
test of an advanced Nationalist is, in their opinion, one who believes
in physical force. It may be the persons so professing to believe are
Republicans; it may be they are believers in monarchy; it may be that
Home Rule would satisfy them; it may be that they despise Home Rule. No
matter what their political faith may be, if only they are prepared to
express belief in the saving grace of physical force, they are acclaimed
as advanced Nationalists—worthy descendants of ‘the men of '98’.
The '98 Executive, organised in the
commencement by professed believers in the physical force doctrine,
started by proclaiming its adherence to the principle 


---

p.337


 of
national independence ‘as understood by Wolfe Tone and the United
Irishmen’, and in less than twelve months from doing so, deliberately
rejected a similar resolution and elected on its governing body men
notorious for their Royalist proclivities. As the '98 Executive
represents the advanced Nationalists of Ireland, this repudiation of the
Republican faith of the United Irishmen is an interesting corroboration
of the truth of our statement that the advanced Nationalists of our day
are utterly regardless of principle and only attach importance to
methods—an instance of putting the cart before the horse,
absolutely unique in its imbecility and unparalleled in the history of
the world.


It may be interesting, then, to place before our
readers the Socialist Republican conception of the functions and uses of
physical force in a popular movement. We neither exalt it into a
principle nor repudiate it as something not to be thought of.[10](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note010.html')) Our position
towards it is that the use or non-use of force for the realisation of
the ideas of progress always has been and always will be determined by
the attitude, not of the party of progress, but of the governing class
opposed to that party. If the time should arrive when the party of
progress finds its way to freedom barred by the stubborn greed of a
possessing class entrenched behind the barriers of law and order; if the
party of progress has indoctrinated the people at large with the new
revolutionary conception of society and is therefore representative of
the will of a majority of the nation; if it has exhausted all the
peaceful means at its disposal for the purpose of demonstrating to the
people and their enemies that the new revolutionary ideas do possess the
suffrage of the majority; then, but not till then, the party which
represents the revolutionary idea is justified in taking steps to assume
the powers of government, and in using the weapons of force to dislodge
the usurping class or government in possession, and treating its members
and supporters as usurpers and rebels against the constituted 


---

p.338


 authorities always have been treated. In other words,
Socialists believe that the question of force is of very minor
importance; the really important question is of the principles upon
which is based the movement that may or may not need the use of force to
realise its object.


Here, then, is the immense difference between
the Socialist Republicans and our friends the physical force men. The
latter, by stifling all discussions of principles, earn the passive and
fleeting commendation of the unthinking multitude; the former, by
insisting upon a thorough understanding of their basic principles, do
not so readily attract the multitude, but do attract and hold the more
thoughtful amongst them. It is the difference betwixt a mob in revolt
and an army in preparation. The mob who cheer a speaker referring to the
hopes of a physical force movement would, in the very hour of apparent
success, be utterly disorganised and divided by the passage through the
British Legislature of any trumpery Home Rule Bill. The army of *class*-conscious workers organising under
the banner of the Socialist Republican Party, strong in their knowledge
of economic truth and firmly grounded in their revolutionary principles,
would remain entirely unaffected by any such manoeuvre and, knowing it
would not change their position as a subject class, would still press
forward, resolute and undivided, with their faces set towards their only
hope of emancipation—the complete control by the working-class
democracy of *all the powers of National
Government*.


Thus the policy of the Socialist Republicans is
seen to be the only wise one. *Educate that you may be
free*; principles first, methods afterwards. If the advocacy of
physical force failed to achieve success or even to effect an uprising
when the majority were unenfranchised and the secret ballot unknown, how
can it be expected to succeed now that the majority are in possession of
voting power and the secret ballot safeguards the voter?




---

p.339


The ballot-box was given us by our masters for their
purpose; let us use it for our own. Let us demonstrate at that
ballot-box the strength and intelligence of the revolutionary idea; let
us make the hustings a rostrum from which to promulgate our principles;
let us grasp the public powers in the interest of the disinherited
class; let us emulate our fathers and, like the ‘true
men of '98’, place ourselves in line with the most advanced thought
of our age and drawing inspiration and hope from the spectacle presented
by the world-wide revolt of the workers, prepare for the coming of the
day when the Socialist working-class of Ireland will, through its
elected representatives, present its demand for freedom from the yoke of
a governing master class or nation—the day on which the question
of moral or physical force shall be finally decided.


- Workers' Republic. , July 22, 1899.





---

p.340


THE LANGUAGE MOVEMENT
---------------------


#### 1


Talking of Gaelic
scholars brings me by an easy and natural transition to speak of the
great Celtic renascence of late years.


I think it has its bad and
its good points. Its bad points are, in my opinion, only accidental to
the movement and were well got rid of.


They consist in the
attempt to exclude all other methods of culture, to deny the value of
all other literature and the worth of all other peoples and, in general,
to make our Irish youths and maidens too self-centred.[11](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note011.html'))


---

p.345





I believe the
Gaelic movement has great promise of life in it, but that promise will
only be properly fulfilled when it naturally works its way into the life
of the nation, side by side with every other agency making for a
regenerated people.


The chief enemy of a Celtic revival to-day is
the crushing force of capitalism which irresistibly destroys all
national or racial characteristics, and by sheer stress of its economic
preponderance reduces a Galway or a Dublin, a Lithuania or a Warsaw to
the level of a mere second-hand imitation of Manchester or Glasgow.


In the words of Karl Marx, ‘Capitalism creates a world after its
own image’, and the image of Capitalism is to be found in the
industrial centres of Great Britain.


A very filthy image
indeed.


You cannot teach starving men Gaelic, and the treasury of
our national literature will and must remain lost forever to the poor
wage-slaves who are contented by our system of society to toil from
early morning to late at night for a mere starvation wage.




---

p.341


#### 1


Therefore, I say to our friends of the Gaelic
movement—your proper place is in the ranks of the Socialist
Republican Party, fighting for the abolition of this accursed social
system which grinds us down in such a manner; which debases the
character and lowers the ideals of our people to such a fearful degree,
that to the majority of our workers the most priceless manuscript of
ancient Celtic lore would hold but a secondary place in their esteem
beside a rasher of bacon.


Help us to secure to all our
fellow-countrymen, a free, full and happy life; secure in possession of
a rational, human existence, neither brutalised by toil nor debilitated
by hunger, and then all the noble characteristics of our race will have
full opportunity to expand and develop. And when all that is good in
literature, art and science is recognised as the property of
all—and not the heritage of the few—your ideals will receive
the unquestioned adhesion of all true Irishmen.


I do not ask you
to cease for a moment your endeavours on your present lines of
education, but only to recognise in us your natural allies, as you
should recognise that those who, under any pretext, however specious,
would ask you to help them to perpetuate that British
capitalism—which now thwarts you at every turn—is your enemy
and the enemy of your cause.


The success of our cause is certain—sooner or later. But the welcome light of the sun of
freedom may, at any moment, flash upon our eyes and with your help we
would not fear the storm which may precede the dawn.


- The Workers' Republic. October 1, 1898.



#### 2


I do believe in the necessity, and indeed in the inevitability, of an
universal language; but I do not believe it will be brought 


---

p.342



about, or even hastened, by smaller races or nations consenting to the
extinction of their language. Such a course of action, or rather of
slavish inaction, would not hasten the day of a universal language, but
would rather lead to the intensification of the struggle for mastery
between the languages of the greater powers.[12](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note012.html'))


---

p.346





On the other hand, a large number of
small communities, speaking different tongues, are more likely to agree
upon a common language as a common means of communication than a small
number of great empires, each jealous of its own power and seeking its
own supremacy.


I have heard some doctrinaire Socialists arguing
that Socialists should not sympathise with oppressed nationalities or
with nationalities resisting conquest. They argue that the sooner these
nationalities are suppressed the better, as it will be easier to conquer
political power in a few big empires than in a number of small states.
This is the language argument over again.


It is fallacious in
both cases. It is even more fallacious in the case of nationalities than
in the case of languages, because the emancipation of the working-class
will function more through the economic power than through the political
state. The first act of the workers will be through their economic
organisations seizing the organised industries; the last act the
conquest of political power.


In this the working class will, as
they needs must*,* follow in the lines
traversed by the capitalist revolutions of Cromwellian England, of
Colonial and Revolutionary America, of Republican France, in each of
whom the capitalist class had developed their economic power before they
raised the banner of political revolt.


The working class in their
turn must perfect their organisations, and when such organisations are
in a position to control, seize and operate the industries*,* they will find their political power equal to
the task.




---

p.343


#### 2


But the preparatory work of the
revolutionary campaign must lie in the daily and hourly struggles in the
workshop, the daily and hourly perfectioning of the industrial
organisation.


And these two factors for freedom take no heed to
political frontiers, nor to the demarcations of political states. They
march side by side with the capitalist; where capitalism brings its
machinery it brings the rebels against itself, and all its governments
and all its armies can establish no frontier the revolutionary idea
cannot pass.


Let the great truth be firmly fixed in your mind
that the struggle for the conquest of the political state of the
capitalist is not the battle, it is only the echo of the battle. The
real battle is being fought out, and will be fought out, on the
industrial field.


Because of this and other reasons the
doctrinaire Socialists are wrong in this as in the rest of their
arguments. It is not necessary that Irish Socialists should hostilise
those who are working for the Gaelic language, nor whoop it up for
territorial aggrandisement of any nation. Therefore, in this, we can
wish the Sinn Feiners, good luck.


Besides, it is well to remember
that nations which submit to conquest or races which abandon their
language in favour of that of an oppressor do so, not because of the
altruistic motives, or because of a love of brotherhood of man, but from
a slavish and cringing spirit.


From a spirit which cannot exist
side by side with the revolutionary idea.


This was amply
evidenced in Ireland by the attitude of the Irish people towards their
language.


For six hundred years the English strove to suppress
that mark of the distinct character of the Gael—their language,
and failed. But in one generation the politicians did what England had
failed to do.


The great Daniel O'Connell, the so-called
liberator, conducted 


---

p.344


 his meetings entirely in English. When
addressing meetings in Connaught where, in his time, everybody spoke
Gaelic and over 75 per cent. of the people nothing else but Gaelic,
O'Connell spoke exclusively in English. He thus conveyed to the simple
people the impression that Gaelic was something to be ashamed
of—something fit for only ignorant people. He pursued the same
course all over Ireland.


As a result of this and similar actions
the simple people turned their backs upon their own language and began
to ape ‘the gentry’. It was the beginning of the
reign of the toady and the crawler, the seoinin and the slave.


The agitator for revenue
came into power in the land.


It is not ancient history, but the
history of yesterday that old Irish men and women would speak Irish to
each other in the presence of their children, but if they caught son or
daughter using the language the unfortunate child would receive a cuff
on the ear accompanied with the adjuration:— 
> 
> ‘Speak English, you rascal; speak English like a
> gintleman’!
> 
> 
> 




It is
freely stated in Ireland that when the Protestant evangelisers, soupers
they call them at home, issued tracts and Bibles in Irish in order to
help the work of proselytising, the Catholic priesthood took advantage
of the incident to warn their flocks against reading all literature in
Gaelic. Thus still further discrediting the language.


I cannot
conceive of a Socialist hesitating in his choice between a policy
resulting in such self-abasement and a policy of defiant self-reliance
and confident trust in a people's own power of self-*emancipation* by a people.


- The Harp. , April, 1908.





---

p.347


PARNELLISM AND LABOUR
---------------------


So
long as they seek for Home Rule—for mere changes within the
Constitution—our Irish parties at Westminster are, and must ever
be, in the position of political hucksters seeking a good price for the
votes they offer as wares. Their ‘independence’ is
only the fraudulent cloak with which they strive to cover their venality
and lack of spirit.


We must not omit to specify one other cause
of the decay of the official Parnellite party, viz., their
unsatisfactory attitude towards labour. When Charles Stewart Parnell was
basely deserted in Committee Room 15 by the crowd of adventurers and
hack journalists out of whom he had constructed a formidable political
party; when he was attacked in Ireland by the tenant farmers who owed
much of whatever security they possessed to his skilful leadership; when
the priesthood, whom he had elevated to power in the branches of the
National League, turned to rend the man under whose firm guidance their
influence might have become a power for freedom; when he was, in fact,
deserted by the men who had ever been most loud-mouthed in their
adulation of his person, it was the leal and true-hearted workingmen of
Ireland who sprang to his side and fought his battles. They had never
gained, but ever lost by his agitation, but in the supreme crisis of his
destinies they rose superior to all other considerations and fought for
the man battling against an insulting form of foreign dictation. They
asked no reward—and got none. During the early days of the split
Mr. Parnell did, indeed, adopt a programme laid before him by Dublin
workingmen—a programme embodying nearly every measure advocated as
palliative measures by the Socialist parties, but with his untimely
death disappeared every hope of seeing that programme adhered to by any
Home Rule 


---

p.348


 party. Every succeeding year has seen the
Parnellite party become more and more conservative and reactionary.
To-day, in direct opposition to the policy of their great leader, we
find the Parnellite chiefs seeking every opportunity to hob-nob with the
representatives of Irish landlordism; hailing their feeblest utterances
upon a financial question as the brightest scintillations of wisdom; and
not scrupling to tell at Cambridge an audience, composed of the young
fledglings of English aristocracy, that the realisation of Ireland's
independence was neither possible nor desirable.


Followers of
Parnell they are indeed, but they follow at such a respectable distance
they have lost sight not only of the leader but of his principles.


Meanwhile, the manhood of Ireland, no longer dazzled by the glare of
a great personality, have had time to more closely examine their
position, social and political. As a result they turn alike from the men
who sold their leader at the bidding of an unscrupulous politician; from
the incapable gang whose only hope of existence is to live like
political cannibals upon the reputation of the dead; and from the
pitiful compromise of the National Demand which scarce even the genius
of Parnell could make appear respectable.


The working class of
Ireland trusts no more the charming of the middle-class politician,
charm he never so plausibly; strong in its own power it marches
irresistibly forward to its destiny, the Socialist Republic.


- Workers' Republic , October 8, 1898.



---

p.349


BRITISH LABOUR AND IRISH POLITICIANS
------------------------------------


I have spent
a great portion of my life alternating between interpreting Socialism to
the Irish and interpreting the Irish to the Socialists. Of the two
tasks, I confess, that while I am convinced that the former has been
attended with a considerable degree of success, the latter has not. At
least *as* far as the Socialists of Great
Britain are concerned, they always seem to me to exhibit towards the
Irish working-class democracy of the Labour movement the same inability
to understand their position and to share in their aspirations as the
organised British nation, as a whole, has shown to the struggling Irish
nation it has so long held in subjection.


No one, and least of
all the present writer, would deny the sympathy of the leaders of the
British Labour movement towards the Labour and Socialist movements of
Ireland, but a sympathy not based upon understanding is often more
harmful than a direct antagonism. A case in point will serve to
illustrate my meaning as well as to provide a guide and a warning for
the future.


Upon the passing of the Local Government Act,
establishing household suffrage for the municipalities and local
governing bodies of Ireland, in 1898, the Trades Councils and other
trades bodies all over this country proceeded to form independent Labour
Electoral Associations for the purpose of running Labour candidates
against the nominees of both the orthodox Irish political parties.


At once, as was natural, the capitalist politicians took fright, and
in press and on platform the Irish workers were denounced for daring to
abandon their ‘natural leaders’.


But the
Irish workers who knew the Irish political cliques and their leaders at
first hand and appraised them accordingly 


---

p.350


 at their just
value, went on with the nomination of their candidates, practically
every trades council in this country being actively engaged in the work
of fighting for independent Labour representation.


The small
British Socialist press which then existed had given, up till this, a
cordial approval of this hopeful development of the political side of
the Irish Labour movement.


But so ominous did this movement
appear to the interests which control the Home Rule party that
eventually the present leader of that party took the field against it,
and in a carefully reported speech, declared that ‘Labour and
Nationality must march together’, meaning as all his hearers knew, as
everybody in Ireland knew, that Labour must abandon its political
adventure as a separate cause, and must be content to seek its fortunes
as a subordinate issue in the Home Rule camp.


Labour, in Ireland,
did not pay much attention to this pronouncement against it, but the
responsible leaders of the Labour movement in Great Britain immediately
seized upon this phrase and in press and on platform it was heralded in
that country as a ‘magnificent pronouncement of the Irish party *in favour of Labour*’.
[13](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note013.html'))


A more ridiculous
perversion of facts it would be hard to conceive. But all during these
fiercely contested Local Government elections in Ireland where Irish
M.P.'s were brought down in shoals into the municipal wards to fight
against the nominees of the Irish Trade Unions, these same M.P.'s had no
better weapons in their armouries than the eulogies which, in England,
were being lavished by responsible Labour men upon the Home Rule
leaders—eulogies based upon and only made possible by a wresting
of the language of a politician from all relation to the circumstances
which inspired it.


If some one had said, in England, that
‘Labour and Liberalism must march together’, no one
would have or could have construed it into a declaration of Liberalism
in favour of the 


---

p.351


 Labour movement, but all would have
recognised it as a declaration against that political independence of
Labour which is the very essence of the movement. So it was with the
former declaration in Ireland; but the British Socialists, accustomed to
think of the Home Rule party as a minority party, utterly misunderstood
its attitude and language when speaking in Ireland as a majority party
deprecating all political activities not under the control of its
officials.


This is but one sample out of many that could be
quoted of the difficulty of making the comrades in Great Britain
understand the totally different conditions in Ireland and also
understand that these conditions naturally produce catch-words, phrases
and rallying cries which bear no relation to the conditions which
prevail in Great Britain.


The Labour party in Parliament tries to
surmount this difficulty by, so to speak, establishing Home Rule in its
relations with Ireland. Thus, if a trade union in Ireland writes to the
Labour party asking that a certain question be raised in Parliament, if
that question pertains to a district represented by a member of the Home
Rule party, the answer sent to the trade union generally is that the
question has been turned over to the Irish party, and that should that
Party raise it in the House, the Labour Party will support it.


As
the Irish Parliamentary Party desires to pose in Ireland as opposed to
all class division, and as a cold matter of fact is generally bossed
locally by small sweating employers, slum landlords and publicans, the
M.P. from the district never brings the question up and the incident
never is made public, but only serves to accentuate ‘the pleasant relations which exist in the House between
the Irish Party and Labour’. Ahem!


As a result of these ‘pleasant relations’,
there was no one in the House to fight for the inclusion of Ireland in the Meals for *Necessitous* School Children Act and thus while
reformers in England are now fiercely fighting for the right to feed 


---

p.352


 children during holidays, the school children of Ireland are
yet denied the primary right of being fed during school hours.


A
threat from the Labour Party to wreck the Insurance Bill unless Ireland
was included in the Medical Benefits would have secured that, the best
part of the Act, for Ireland. But that would have disturbed the pleasant
relations also, and Ireland was left out, and a totally inadequate,
unworkable Act without that provision foisted upon this country.


Ireland is, to-day, the battle-ground almost daily of fierce
industrial disputes. In these disputes there are continual outrages by a
police and constabulary over whom no popularly elected body in city or
country exercises the smallest control; but in no case are these
outrages upon Labour made the subject of Parliamentary questions by the
Irish parties. Strikers arrested in industrial disputes are tried and
sentenced by resident magistrates drawn entirely from the possessing
classes; but although their findings and sentences are usually a
travesty upon law and an outrage upon justice, the smug serenity of our
lawmakers is never troubled by any question pertaining thereto.


Labour and Nationality, now as in 1898, are marching together (in
Parliament) and the fierce battles of the labourer in the towns of
Ireland for bread must not disturb their pleasant relations.


Oh
yes, the Home Rulers are great democrats—in England; great friends
of Labour—in England; heroic defenders of the common
people—in England. But in Ireland. Ah! that is another matter.


During a lock-out in Dundalk at the beginning of last year, a girl
picket was arrested for striving to induce another girl not to blackleg.
She was summarily tried and sentenced to prison on a charge of
‘indecent conduct in the streets’. No unclean language
or action had been attributed to her and the police evidence simply
stated that she had persisted in picketing, yet the cold-blooded
scoundrelism of the authorities framed a 


---

p.353


 charge against her
calculated to blast her character and ruin her whole life. If she had
been a daughter of an Irish farmer fighting an Irish landlord in Land
League days the then Irish Party would have made the world ring with
their denunciations of such character assassinations; but she was only
an Irish working girl fighting an Irish employer, and none of the Irish
heroes who, on the platforms of the Liberal Party in England, are
fighting for the ‘Glory of God and the Honour of
Erin’, had time to waste on such as her.


Small wonder that we
in Ireland are working to establish a Labour Party of our own. We have
no fault to find with the Labour Party in Great Britain. We recognise
that it has its own problems to face and that it cannot well be expected
to turn aside to grapple with ours. And, Heaven knows, these problems
are serious enough to require the most earnest study and undivided
attention of men on the spot. They require more study and attention that
can be given by men absorbed in the urgent problems of the greater
population across the water.


From time to time I propose to give
some attention to the elucidation of the problems peculiar to Ireland
and particularly to this part of it. For the present, it is sufficient
to emphasise the fact that the religious affiliations of the population
of Ulster determine their political leanings to a greater extent than is
the case in any part of Europe outside the Balkans. But the manner in
which this has developed is also unique. I believe that it is true to
say that, politically speaking, the Protestantism of the North of
Ireland has no parallel outside this country, and that the Catholicism
of the Irish Catholics is, likewise, peculiar in its political
trend.


To explain—I mean that, whereas, Protestantism has
in general made for political freedom and political Radicalism, it has
been opposed to slavish worship of kings and aristocrats. Here, in
Ireland, the word Protestant is almost a convertible 


---

p.354


 term
with Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of aristocracy and
hatred of all that savours of genuine political independence on the part
of the ‘lower classes’.


And in the same
manner, Catholicism which in most parts of Europe is synonymous with
Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of aristocracy and hatred
of all that savours of genuine political independence on the part of the
lower classes, in Ireland is almost synonymous with rebellious
tendencies, zeal for democracy, and intense feeling of solidarity with
all strivings upward of those who toil.


Such a curious phenomenon
is easily understood by those who know the history of Ireland.
Unfortunately for their spiritual welfare—and I am using the word
‘spiritual’, not in its theological but in its
better significance as controlling mental and moral development
upward—the Protestant elements of Ireland were, in the main, a
plantation of strangers upon the soil from which the owners had been
dispossessed by force. The economic dispossession was, perforce,
accompanied by a political and social outlawry. Hence every attempt of
the dispossessed to attain citizenship, to emerge from their state of
outlawry, was easily represented as a tentative step towards reversing
the plantation and towards replanting the Catholic and dispossessing the
Protestant.


Imagine this state of matters persisting for over 200
years and one realises at once that the planted population—the
Protestants—were bound to acquire insensibly a hatred of political
reform, and to look upon every effort of the Catholic to achieve
political recognition as an insidious move towards the expulsion of
Protestants. Then the Protestant always saw that the kings and
aristocrats of England and Ireland were opposed by the people whom he
most feared and from recognising that it was but an easy step to regard
his cause as identical with theirs. They had a common enemy, and he
began to teach his children that they had a common cause, and common
ideals.




---

p.355


This is the reason—their unfortunate
isolation as strangers holding a conquered country in fee for rulers
alien to its people—that the so-called Scotch of Ulster have
fallen away from and developed antagonism to political reform and mental
freedom as rapidly as the Scots of Scotland have advanced in adhesion to
these ideals.


The Catholics, for their part, and be it understood
I am talking only of the Catholic workers, have been as fortunately
placed for their political education as they were unfortunately placed
for their political and social condition. Just as the Socialist knows
that the working class, being the lowest in the social system, cannot
emancipate itself without as a result emancipating all other classes, so
the Irish Catholic has realised instinctively that he, being the most
oppressed and disfranchised, could not win any modicum of political
freedom or social recognition for himself without winning it for all
others in Ireland. Every upward step of the Catholic has emancipated
some one of the smaller Protestant sects; every successful revolt of the
Catholic peasant has given some added security even to those Protestant
farmers who were most zealously defending the landlord. And out of this
struggle the Catholic has, perforce, learned toleration. He has learned
that his struggle is, and has been, the struggle of all the lowly and
dispossessed, and he has grown broadminded with the broadmindedness of
the slave in revolt against slavery.


But with the advent of Home
Rule, nay even with the promise of Home Rule and the entrance of Ireland
upon the normal level of civilised, self-governing nations, the old
relation of Protestant and Catholic begins to melt and dissolve, and
with their dissolution will come a new change in the relation of either
faith to politics. The loss of its privileged position will mean for
Protestantism the possibilities of an immense spiritual uplifting; an
emergence into a knowledge of its kinship with its brothers and sisters
of different creeds. Whether the entrance 


---

p.356


 of Catholicity
into a position of mere numerical voting power will lead, in its turn,
to a withering up of those kindly feelings born of its past sufferings
is another matter. I do not believe that it will, at least amongst the
toilers. Our apprenticeship to misery has been too long, our journeyings
in the desert of slavery have surely implanted in our breasts a sense of
the criminality of any attempt to impose fetters upon others such as we
have ourselves worn. And out of that belief the writer looks forward
with confidence to the future*,* believing
that the tale these Notes from Ireland will have to tell will be a
hopeful one, even if the hope is nurtured amid storm and stress.


- Forward , May 3, 1913.



---

p.357


MR. JOHN E. REDMOND, M.P.: HIS STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS
----------------------------------------------------


In
endeavouring to give readers in Great Britain some real conception of
the realities of Irish political life, one finds the task of explanation
made increasingly difficult by the spectacular nature of the campaign
waged by the Redmondites on the one hand, and the reactionary, lying
stupidities of the Irish Tories on the other. The fact that national
political freedom is both desirable and necessary blinds many people to
the truth that the advocates of such freedom on the political field may
be most intensely conservative on the social or economic field and,
indeed, may be purblind bigots in their opposition to all other
movements making for human progress or enlightenment.


On the
other hand there are not wanting, even among Socialists, many who seeing
the socially reactionary character of much of the agitation for national
freedom, became opposed to the principle because of the anti-Socialist
character of some of its advocates.


The Socialist Party of
Ireland avoids the dangers of either course. It recognises that national
political freedom is an inevitable step towards the attainment of
universal economic freedom, but it insists that the non-Socialist
leaders of merely national movements should be regarded in their true
light as champions of the old social order and not exalted into the
position of popular heroes by any aid of Socialist praise or
glorification. A fact many of our British comrades are apt to
forget.


We need not beslaver the United Irish League because we
detest the Tories. We can detest them both. In fact they represent the
same principle in different stages of social development. The Tories are
the conservatives of Irish feudalism, 


---

p.358


 the United Irish
Leaguers are the conservatives of a belated Irish capitalism. It is our
business to help the latter against the former only when we can do so
without prejudice to our own integrity as a movement.


How
difficult this becomes, at times, is best illustrated by the position of
Mr. John E. Redmond, M.P.*,*
‘Leader of the Irish race’, as his followers
enthusiastically assure us. Mr. Redmond has a record as a reactionist
difficult to excel. Long before the Parnell split, he denounced the
Irish agricultural labourers in a speech at Rathfarnham, near Dublin,
for forming a trade union to protect their own interests. On the
granting of Local Government in 1898, a measure that first enfranchised
the Irish working class on local bodies, Mr. Redmond made a speech
counselling the labourers to elect landlords to represent them—a
speech truly characterised by Mr. Michael Davitt in the House of Commons
as the ‘speech of a half-emancipated slave’. The labourers in town
and country treated Mr. Redmond's advice with contempt and elected men
of their own class all over Ireland. Compelled by the imperative
necessity of maintaining in power a Home Rule government, Mr. Redmond
votes for every measure of social reform the defeat of which would lead
to the resignation of said government, but quietly acquiesces in every
exemption of Ireland from progressive measures. Mr. Redmond believes
that the Irish people are capable of governing their country, but
opposed the proposal of Mr. T. W. Russell to allow the Irish people to
control their own schools under the Local Government Act of 1898. Mr.
Redmond bewails the fact that lack of employment compels the Irish
workers to emigrate at the rate of 30,000 per year, but opposed the
attempt of the Labour party to compel the government to recognise its
duty to provide work for them at home; Mr. Redmond believes that all
public servants and representatives should be paid for their services to
the State from the funds of the state, but is opposed to payment of 


---

p.359


 members being extended to Ireland; Mr. Redmond's heart bleeds
for the poor of Ireland, but he would not vote for the Feeding of School
Children's Act to be applied to Ireland, and Mr. Redmond is a friend of
the Labour party in England (!), but his party fights to the death
against every independent candidature of Labour throughout the purely
Nationalist districts of Ireland.


If we are, as we are, capable
of running our own country, how comes it we are not fit to be trusted
with our own schools? And if the public control of schools by the
Catholic Irish people would lead to atheism and to the persecution of
the clergy, how has it not produced the same effect in Canada which Mr.
Redmond is continually praising as an example for Ireland? Here is what
a clergyman, the Rev. J. E. Burke, in a recent speech in the Assembly
Hall, Belfast, said of the educational system of Canada—that
country so beloved of Mr. T. P. O'Connor and Mr. Redmond: 
> 
> hey had no church schools—nothing but state schools. While the
> priest and the parson were at liberty to visit the schools and give
> advice and encouragement, they had nothing to do in the management. The
> children of all nationalities and all creeds and classes attended these
> schools and grew up together in them, and he believed that the result of
> this was a better understanding amongst them in after life.
> 
> 
> 




Mr. Redmond exalts Canada as a model for Irish
Government, but opposes in Ireland all these domestic institutions which
make free government a success in Canada.


If it was right, as it
undoubtedly was, to demand aid for Irish farmers, why is it not equally
right to demand state aid or local aid for starving Irish school
children?


If, as Mr. Redmond claims, Ireland is overtaxed to the
extent of over two millions per year, how will payment of 


---

p.360



Irish members of Parliament be a gift from the ‘British’ Treasury? Does one feel like the recipient of
a ‘gift’ when you get back some of your own?


How then does Mr. Redmond and his party maintain their hold despite
their essentially reactionary position? Simply because the Irish
Unionists are still more reactionary. It is almost a choice between the
devil and the deep sea.


Observe: In the debate in the House of
Commons on the M'Cann case, Mr. Joseph Devlin, M.P., taunted the Orange
bigots with the fact that none of their clergymen had been on the
Anti-Sweating platform in the Ulster Hall, Belfast. As a matter of fact,
the same was true of the Catholic clergymen. None of them were on that
platform either, but the stupid Orange reactionaries could not think of
a better answer to Joe than to deny the fact of the sweating. The
obvious retort was apparently beyond their capacities.


Another
illustration: In the debate upon the issue of the writ for North Louth,
an Orange member, Mr.William Moore, moved to suspend the issue of the
writ for four months on the ground that ‘Protestants’ had been assaulted. This motion was made
despite the fact that the whole trend of the evidence had been to prove
that every species of intimidation and bribery had been brought to bear
upon Catholics who refused to bow to the dictates of the official Home
Rule gang. That, in short, it was Catholics who needed to be protected
and not Protestants.


A motion to suspend the issue of the writ
pending a Parliamentary investigation into the workings of the
organisations responsible for the wholesale terrorism exercised upon the
electors of North Louth—irrespective of religion—would have
opened the way for a capable man to give such an exposure of the
workings of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (Board of Erin) and its
relation to the United Irish League, as might have led to the
extirpation of that pest in Ireland, but no one could expect such *statesmanship* from the Orange
quarter.




---

p.361


But just imagine what a real Irish democrat
could have made of such a situation! Then he could have dealt with the
pilgrimage of the M.P.'s to America and Canada to beg from Irish exiles
money towards the Irish cause, how our exiled brothers and sisters
stinted themselves of, perhaps, even the necessaries of life in order to
help to ‘free Ireland and uplift poor Mother Erin’,
and how the money thus procured was used to debauch Irish men and women,
to destroy political purity, to purchase bludgeons to smash in the heads
of Irish men, and to terrorise the peaceful countryside?


A real
representative of the Irish democracy might go on to show how Mr. Joseph
Devlin's organisation, the A.O.H., supposed to be the Ancient Order of
Hibernians, but by some believed to be the Ancient Order of Hooligans,
has spread like an ulcer throughout Ireland, carrying social and
religious terrorism with it into quarters hitherto noted for their
broad-mindedness and discernment.


How it has organised the
ignorant, the drunken and the rowdy, and thrown the shield of religion
around their excesses; how it has made it impossible to conduct a
political contest in the South of Ireland except on the lines of civil
war; and how, every man who dares to oppose the Redmondite party, or
every man within that party who opposes the A.O.H., must be at all times
prepared to take his life in his hands. . ..


Every shade of political feeling in Ireland, outside of the official
gang at the head of the United Irish League, agree that this
organisation of Mr. Devlin's creation, and of whose work Mr. Redmond
accepts the fruits, is the greatest curse yet introduced into the
political and social like of Ireland. It is the organised ignorance of
the community placing itself unreservedly at the disposal of the most
insidious and inveterate enemies of enlightenment. In West Belfast it
calls upon the Labour vote, upon the Socialists, to vote for ‘Wee Joe Devlin’,
and in Queenstown [14](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note014.html'))


---

p.363


 it foments a riot in order to prevent a Socialist 


---

p.362


 speaker delivering his message; it is a true reincarnation of
mediaeval intolerance masquerading in the guise of Christian charity . . ..


Such is the problem, or rather some factors
in the problem, in Ireland. Say, ye British Socialists, have your
leaders any conception of this problem, or do they imagine that an Irish
branch of a British Socialist organisation can grapple with this
problem, or do anything with it save make a mess of it?


Or that
it can be grappled with in any manner save from within the Irish nation
by the workers of Ireland uniting in a party of their own to throw off
the incubus of social slavery and religious intolerance? Such is the
work the Socialist Party of Ireland sets out to accomplish. In that work
the Socialists of Ireland know well that they can expect no help or
countenance from the bigots of either Green or Orange persuasion, and
while ever insisting upon the right of Ireland to control its own
destinies, it allows precedence in its thoughts and plans to no interest
but one, that of the working class. To the Redmonds and the Devlins, the
Carsons and the Moores —it leaves the apostleship of religious
bigotry; in our ranks there is no room for that type of politician of
whom the poet writes that:— 
> 1. With all his conscience and with one
> eye askew,
>   
> So false he partly took himself for true;
>   
> Whose
> pious talk, when most his heart was dry.
>   
> Made wet the crafty
> crow's-foot round his eye;
>   
> Who never naming God except for
> gain,
>   
> So never took that useful name in vain;
>   
> Made Him his
> cat's paw, and the Cross his tool,
>   
> And Christ his bait to trap
> his dupe and fool;
>   
> Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace, he
> forged,
>   
> And, snakelike, slimed his victim ere he gorged.
> 




- Forward , March 18, 1911.



---

p.364


WEE JOE DEVLIN
--------------



That great, that heroic figure,
Wee Joe Devlin, at the recent Convention of the Ancient Order of
Hibernians (Board of Erin), told how his society had rallied to the
Empire in its day of difficulty—that difficulty for which all good
Irish Nationalists were wont to pray: 
> 
> All the funds of
> the society were invested in Irish securities, so that the money was
> retained in Ireland for the benefit of the Irish people, with the
> exception of £12,000 which had been invested in the new War Loan
> at 4½ per cent., a fact which, taken with the numbers of those
> who had joined the colours, ought to demonstrate beyond question or
> doubt that in regard to the war the society, as a whole, recognised, in
> sympathy with the *overwhelming* majority of the Irish people, the
> obligation of supporting the cause of justice and freedom as represented
> by the Allies, as against the brute force, materialism and tyranny for
> which Germany stands in the present world conflict (applause).
> 
> 
> 




When you read a speech like that you at once
realise that if Germany has discovered poisonous gas, we in Ireland have
suffered from it for years. As I think of the hundreds of good men I
have known, fathers of families, husbands, sons with aged parents, etc.,
who have been enticed to leave their homes and dear ones and march out
to battle for an Empire that never kept faith with the Irish race, and
think that it was Wee Joe's influence that led them to their folly, I
think things that the Defence of the Realm Acts will not permit me to
print.


Belfast opponents of Joe Devlin usually refer to him
sarcastically as the ‘Wee Bottlewasher’, alluding
to his position before he climbed into power. The sarcasm is pointless.
A bottlewasher was an honest occupation, but a recruiting sergeant
luring to their death the men who trusted him and 


---

p.365


 voted him
into power is—ah well, let us remember the Defence of the Realm
Act.


The present writer cannot ride up the Falls Road in his own
motor car, the penny tram has to do him. But thank God, there are no
fresh made graves in Flanders or the Dardanelles filled by the mangled
corpses of men whom he coaxed or bullied into leaving their homes and
families.


And that consolation counts more to the peace of his
soul than would the possession of a motor car, or the companionship of
grossly overfed boon companions of the bottlewasher—or of the
bottle.


There are widows in Belfast to-day whose husbands would
still be with them if they had taken my advice; there are orphans in
Belfast to-day whose fathers would still be able to work for them and
love them if they had taken my advice; there are stricken mothers and
fathers in Belfast to-day whose sons would still be smiling and happy at
the family hearth to-day if my advice had been listened to. And I am
confident that it will not be long before these widows, orphans and
bereaved parents with every sob and sigh will breathe a curse upon the
conscienceless politician to whose advice they did listen.


You
can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the
people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the
time.


What is true of my attitude in Belfast is true of our
attitude in Dublin and all over Ireland wherever our voice and influence
could reach.


We saved the lives of thousands, held together
thousands of homes, and amid all the welter and turmoil of a gigantic
and unparalleled national betrayal we presented to the world the
spectacle of the organised Irish working class standing steadfastly by
the highest ideals of freedom, so that the flag of Labour became one
with the standard of national liberty.


- Workers' Republic , August 28, 1915.



---

p.366


THE IRISH MASSES IN HISTORY
---------------------------


In its issue of August 8, the Boston Pilot had a very interesting article
upon the life of a typical Irish girl of ancient Ireland. The article
dealt with the life of the ancient Irish as it has been reconstructed by
antiquarians from a study of the gold and silver ornaments found in
various bogs in Ireland, and from the allusions to the use of those
ornaments made in old Irish manuscripts.


All this is interesting,
especially to those who desire to have their Irish patriotism or pride
of race buttressed up by historical data. And, of course, there are many
such.


I, also, was much interested in the article, but for
another reason. To me it was especially interesting as illustrative of
the curious effect modern property relations have upon the mind of even
the most gifted amongst us. The gifted authoress of the article in
question took as the imaginary subject of her sketch an ancient Irish
princess and reconstructed her life in the most ingenious manner,
describing her lying down and uprising, her hunting and riding and
chess-playing and sweet-hearting and, in fact, all the incidents in
which an Irish princess is revealed or touched upon by the old Irish
manuscripts in song or story.


In all of those pursuits she was
waited upon by a slave woman, a different slave woman for each separate
amusement; in all, there must have been at least a dozen different slave
women waiting upon the one princess, and what appeared to my cold
Socialistic mind as curious was that the writer wrote and treated of the
princess as a typical ‘colleen’ of ancient Ireland,
and utterly neglected to recognise in the slave women any right to be
regarded as Irish types at all.


Yet when we remember that for
every princess living the life of luxury and ease sketched by the Pilot
writer there must 


---

p.367



have been at least a dozen other women attending her and a hundred other
Irish women working in the fields attending cattle and weaving and
spinning to feed and clothe and house and ornament her, it must be
conceded that any one of these hundred useful Irish women had more right
to be considered ‘typical Irish colleens’ than the
useless drone whose life our authoress has reconstructed with such
loving fidelity and care.


By all means tell us about the typical
colleens of ancient Erin, shake up for us the dry bones of history and
tell us about the wives and mothers and daughters of the producing
classes of our native country, but do not ask us to believe that a
princess was anything more than a type of the class to which she
belonged—a predatory useless class—a class whose predatory
proclivities hindered the free development of the nation and prepared
the way for its subjection.


What a history that would be which
would tell us the history of the real women of Ireland—the women
of the people! What a record of ceaseless suffering, of heroism, of
martyrdom! What a recital of patient toil, of uncomplaining
self-sacrifice, of unending abnegation! Aye, and what a brilliant tale
of things accomplished, of deeds done, of miracles achieved!


Think of all the insurrections against British tyranny in Ireland,
and as you honour the men who went out to front the armed force of the
oppressors think also of the brave women who kissed them and cried over
them ere they went, but bade them go for freedom's sake.


Think of
all the slimy roll of informers in Erin, and wonder when you remember
how seldom even tradition places woman's name upon the list.


Think of the long and bloody history of the fight against private
property in Irish land—against Irish landlordism, and when you
remember how the Irish mother, the woman of the house, consented to
suffer eviction and ruin rather than let her husband betray the cause of
his friends and neighbours, then if 


---

p.368


 you believe in a God
thank Him for the spirit and courage and honour of our Irish
womanhood.


But then you will not be accepting princesses as the
types of Irish life, you will be looking for types of the real womanhood
of Ireland where only they can be found, among the producing
classes.


Those Irish girls who in the recent dock strike in
Belfast joined their fathers and brothers and sweethearts in the streets
to battle against the English troops imported in the interests of Irish
capitalism are to my mind a thousand times more admirable ‘types of Irish colleens’
than the noblest *bean uasal* of Gaelic Erin*,* much as I admire the latter.


What
would we think of the historian who would picture the life of the
daughter of an Irish aristocrat of to-day, and then tell us that this
was a picture of the life of a typical Irish girl of the twentieth
century? We would laugh him to scorn. Yet that is the manner in which
history is written.


- The Harp , September, 1908.



---

p.369


SINN FEIN, SOCIALISM AND THE NATION
-----------------------------------


In a recent issue of
 The Peasant, a correspondent, ‘Cairbre’, in the midst of a very fair and reasonable
article on Sinn Fein and
Socialism, says:—‘A rapprochement between Sinn
Feinism and Socialism is highly desirable’. To this I desire to say a
fervent ‘Amen’, and to follow up in my prayer with
a suggestion which may help in realising such a desirable consummation.
Always presupposing that the rapprochement is desired between Sinn
Feiners who sympathise with Socialism and not merely with those who see
no further than ‘the Constitution of '82’, on the
one hand, and Socialists who realise that a Socialist movement must rest
upon and draw its inspiration from the historical and actual conditions
of the country in which it functions and not merely lose themselves in
an abstract ‘internationalism’ (which has no
relation to the real internationalism of the Socialist movement), on the
other.


But, first, it would be as well to state some of the
difficulties in the way in order that we may shape our course in order
to avoid them.


Sinn Fein has two sides—its economic
teaching and its philosophy of self-reliance. With its economic
teaching, as expounded by my friend Mr. Arthur Griffith in his adoption
of the doctrines of Frederick List, Socialists have no sympathy, as it
appeals only to those who measure a nation's prosperity by the volume of
wealth produced in a country, instead of by the distribution of that
wealth amongst the inhabitants. According to that definition, Ireland in
1847 was a prosperous country because it exported food, whereas Denmark
was comparatively unprosperous because it exported little. But with that
part of Sinn Fein which teaches that Ireland must rely upon itself,
respect her own traditions, know her own history, 


---

p.370


 preserve
her own language and literature without prejudice to, or denial of, the
worth in the language or literature of other people, stand erect in her
own worth and claim to be appraised for her own intrinsic value, and not
as part of the wheels and cogs of the imperial system of another
people—with that side of Sinn Fein*,*
Socialists may sympathise; and, indeed, as a cold matter of fact, those
doctrines were preached in Dublin by the Irish Socialist Republican
Party from 1896 onward, before the Sinn Fein movement was founded.


The first side of Sinn Fein necessarily excludes the Socialists; the
second does not. The first rests upon a capitalist conception of
progress; the second is a gateway by which Ireland may enter into the
intellectual domain which Socialism has made its own—by its
spiritual affinity with all the world-wide forces making for social
freedom.


Socialists are also somewhat divided in their ideas as
to what is a proper course in a country like Ireland. One set, observing
that those who talk loudest about ‘Ireland a
Nation’ are often the most merciless grinders of the faces of the
poor, fly off to the extremest limit of hostility to Nationalism and,
whilst opposed to oppression at all times, are also opposed to national
revolt for national independence.


Another, principally recruited
amongst the workers in the towns of North-East Ulster have been weaned
by Socialist ideas and industrial disputes from the leadership of Tory
and Orange landlords and capitalists; but as they are offered practical
measures of relief from capitalist oppression by the English Independent
Labour Party, and offered nothing but a green flag by Irish Nationalism,
they naturally go where they imagine relief will come from. Thus their
social discontent is lost to the Irish cause. These men see that the
workers shot down last winter in Belfast were not shot down in the
interests of the Legislative Union; they were shot down in the interests
of Irish capitalists. Hence, when a Sinn Feiner waxes eloquent 


---

p.371


 about restoring the Constitution of '82, but remains silent
about the increasing industrial despotism of the capitalist; when the
Sinn Feiner speaks to men who are fighting against low wages and tells
them that the Sinn Fein body has promised lots of Irish labour at low
wages to any foreign capitalist who wishes to establish in Ireland, what
wonder if they come to believe that a change from Toryism to Sinn
Feinism would simply be a change from the devil they do know to the
devil they do not know!


The other section of Socialists in
Ireland are those who inscribe their banners with the watchword ‘Irish Socialist Republic’, who teach that Socialism
will mean in Ireland the common ownership by Irish people of the land
and everything else necessary to feed, clothe, house and maintain life
in Ireland, and that therefore Socialism in its application to Ireland
means and requires the fullest trust of the Irish people as the arbiters
of their own destinies in conformity with the laws of progress and
humanity.


This section of Socialists were so Irish that they
organised and led the great anti-Jubilee procession of 1897 in Dublin,
which completely destroyed all the carefully-prepared British
preparations to represent *the* Irish as
loyal; and yet their position was so correct from their standpoint that
at the International Congress of 1900 at Paris they were granted, in the
name of Ireland, separate representation from England and treated and
acted as a separate nation.[15](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note015.html'))


Now the problem is to find a basis of
union on which all these sections who owe allegiance to one or other
conception of Socialism may unite. My position is that this union, or
rapprochement, cannot be arrived at by discussing our differences. Let
us rather find out and unite upon the things upon which we agree. Once
we get together, we will find that our differences are not so
insuperable as they appear whilst we are separated. What is necessary
first is a simple platform around which to 


---

p.372


 gather, with the
understanding that as much as possible shall be left to future
conditions to dictate and as little as possible settled now by rules or
theories. As each section has complete confidence in their own
doctrines, let them show their confidence by entering an organisation
with those who differ from them in methods, and depend upon the
development of events to prove the correctness of their position. Each
person to have complete freedom of speech in conformity with the common
object; the lecture platform to be common to all, and every lecture to
be followed by questions and discussion. With mutual toleration on both
sides, the Protestant worker may learn that the cooperation of the
Catholic who works, suffers, votes and fights alongside him is more
immediately vital to his cause and victory day by day than the
co-operation of workers on the other side of the Channel; and that
Socialists outside of Ireland are all in favour of that national
independence which he rejects for the sake of a few worthless votes.


And the Catholic Sinn Feiners may learn that love of freedom beats
strongly in the breasts of Protestant peasants and workmen who, because
they have approached it from a different historical standpoint, regard
the Nationalist conception with suspicion or even hostility.


- Irish Nation , [16](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note016.html')) January 23,
1909.



---

p.373


ARMS AND THE
MAN
----------------


Somewhere or other we have read that every act brings its
own payment; every crime its own punishment. Recent events in Ireland
would seem to bear out the truth of that bit of philosophy. We have had
on the part of the fervent supporters of the established institutions of
the British Empire a continual and increasing fervency of appeal to the
arbitrament of force as against the verdict of constitutional
government, a rising crescendo of hysterical eloquence invoking the use
of arms as against the verdict of votes. Landlords, ex-Crown lawyers,
ex-Ministers of the Crown, aspirants to be Ministers of the Crown,
Ministers of the Gospel, smug, sweating capitalists and dear ladies
living upon the sweated *toil* of poor
women—all have joined in declaring with one voice that the only
course open to lovers of justice and liberty when outvoted is to appeal
to the arbitrament of arms, and to bathe with blood the hills and dales
of their native land, what time the crack of rifles and zip-zip of
machine guns rattled around the banks of our ‘lazy
shining rivers’.


The world has looked on amazed, the
responsible Ministers of the Crown amused, and the forces of revolution
rather pleased than otherwise. But whilst the Government twirled its
thumbs rather bored at the spectacle, something was happening in other
circles on which the Government had not counted, and which the same
Government could not afford, or did not think it could afford, to view
with equanimity. That something took shape and form on the day on which
we announced that the Irish Transport & General Workers' Union proposed
to organise and drill a Citizen Army of its own. At first looked upon as
a mere piece of Liberty Hall heroics, it assumed a different aspect when
it was discovered that regiments had actually been 


---

p.374



organised, and drilling under the command of an experienced officer and
competent non-commissioned officers was in progress nightly. A parade
through the city impressing the onlookers by its discipline and
self-control effectually dispelled all illusions as to the deadly
earnestness of purpose of the men and their chiefs. Following this came
the uprise of Volunteer forces throughout Nationalist Ireland, and the
young stalwart men who have ever cherished high dreams for Erin
commenced to learn the rudiments of drill.


And then the
Government took action. To allow Orangemen to drill was all right. Their
leaders could be trusted to see that no action would be taken which
would interfere with the sacred rights of property, or to end the right
of the few to rule and rob the many. But to allow Labour to drill and
perhaps arm, to allow Nationalists to drill and arm!!!—that would
never do! Hence the Government which allowed the Orange aristocracy to
arm and drill the Orange mobs, to supply them with all the implements of
war, and to inflame them with the passions of war, promptly and
ruthlessly prevented the issue of arms to, or the learning of drill by
the people against whom the poor Orange dupes were being armed and
excited.


That was instance number one of the manner in which the
crime brings its own punishment, the counsel to arm on behalf of the
Orange aristocracy bringing inevitably with it the counsel to arm the
masses of the Nationalist democracy.


The second instance is of a
more tragic as well as of a more striking nature. During the progress of
the present dispute we have seen imported into Dublin some of the lowest
elements from the very dregs of the criminal population of Great Britain
and Ireland. This scum of the underworld have come here excited by
appeals to the vilest instincts of their natures; these appeals being
framed and made by the gentlemen employers of Dublin. They have been
incited to betray their fellows fighting against the imposition of an
agreement denounced by 


---

p.375


 the highest Court of Inquiry, as
well as by public opinion in general, as an interference with individual
liberty. And in order to induce them to act as Judases their rascally
passions were pandered to by the offer of wages higher than were ever
paid to union men, and by the permission and encouragement to carry
murderous weapons. Too much stress cannot be laid upon this latter
encouragement. There are natures so low that permission to carry about
the means whereby life may be destroyed has to them an irresistible
appeal; the feeling that they carry in their pockets the possibility of
destroying others, has to these base natures an intoxication all its
own. To that feeling the employers of Dublin deliberately appealed.
Deliberately, and with malice aforethought, they armed a gang of the
lowest scoundrels in these islands, and after daily inflaming them with
drink, sent them to and fro in the streets of the capital, inciting and
maddening all those upon whose liberties they were helping to make war.
In one of the streets on Thursday afternoon, this cold-blooded policy of
incitement to outrage had its effect. A few men jeered at the passing
scabs and made a show of hostility. Immediately a scab drew a revolver,
fired—and shot one of the employers principally responsible for
bringing him here and principally responsible for arming him and setting
him loose primed with drink upon the streets of Dublin. That action of
the employer in importing and arming such a scoundrel was a
crime—an anti-social crime of the foulest nature—and surely
never more dramatically did a crime bring its own punishment. It came
like a judgment from on high, and what wonder if such was the first
thought of the workers when the news was told!


So it will ever
be; no act can escape its consequences. And now let us ask if this
fearful example will be lost, or will it not help to arouse all to a
sense of the fearful dangers incident to the present warfare upon the
liberties of the working class of Dublin? Is it not time that saner
counsels prevailed and 


---

p.376


 that now, having fought our battle,
tried each other's mettle and felt each other's strength, we should sit
down to devise means to terminate the present conflict and provide for
the possibility of peaceful co-operation replacing the reign of chaos
and disorder?


- Irish Worker , December 13, 1913.



---

p.377


THE LIBERALS AND ULSTER
-----------------------


This is the
fateful week when, according to all the authorities, the drums of war
are really to beat in Ulster. Everybody is on the tip-toe of
expectation, and many worthy souls are not able to sleep at nights
listening anxiously for the first rattle of musketry.


It is all
very weird and puzzling. Had some writer gifted with the powers of
prophecy attempted four years ago, or fourteen years ago, to sketch in a
novel the outlines of the political developments of the past two years
in Ulster, he would have been branded as a foul libeller of the British
governing classes or else as an idiot who failed to understand the
passion for order and constitutional methods of procedure that inspires
those set in authority in these islands. Not in all Europe would he have
found one who would have accepted his prophecy as an indication of the
probable trend of events.


Permit me briefly to recapitulate the
chief marvels that have astounded the world in this political
struggle.


A Cabinet Minister, Mr. Winston Churchill, announces
that he has accepted an invitation from Ulster Liberals to address a
Home Rule meeting in the Ulster Hall in Belfast. A meeting of the Ulster
Unionist Council, with a noble lord in the chair, publicly announces
that it will take steps to prevent Mr. Churchill's meeting. Up to that
point nobody in Ulster who knows the Ulstermen had taken in the least
degree seriously the threats of fighting on their part. All recognised
that the rank and file were probably ready enough to fight, but all also
recognised that the economic position of the leaders of the Orange
forces, their standing as holders of capitalist stock, land, coal mines,
shipping, etc., made the suggestion that they should rebel against the
Government that guaranteed 


---

p.378


 their investments—a very
ridiculous suggestion indeed. It was generally felt that a firm
application of the power of the police force would suffice to quell in a
few days all the Orange resistance, and nobody dreamt that the
Government would hesitate in firmly applying that force upon the first
opportunity. Any open defiance of the law, any open declaration of an
intention to break the laws, supplied just that opportunity for the
Government to act with all the traditions of law and order at its
back.


This projected meeting of Mr. Winston Churchill and the
Unionist threat to prevent it*,* came
almost as a providential gift to a Government desirous, before it should
act, to have its opponents entirely in the wrong. All the traditions of
British constitutional procedure were outraged; even the most hardened
Tories in Great Britain looked askance at this Orange proposal to deny
to a Cabinet Minister that right of public meeting theoretically allowed
to even the most irresponsible agitator. The occasion called, and called
loudly, for a firm application of force to establish, once and for all,
the right of public meeting in Ulster; to convince the Orange hosts that
henceforth unpopular opinion must be met by arguments and not by bolts,
rivets, nuts or weapons of war.


But, lo and behold! the
Government ran away. Mr. Winston Churchill abandoned his right to hold
his meeting in the place advertised, and slunk away to the outskirts of
the city to hold a meeting surrounded by more soldiers and police than
would have sufficed to capture the city if held by the whole Orange
forces in battle array. We in Ulster gasped with astonishment at this
pitiful surrender of public liberties, and we realised that a direct
encouragement had been given to all the forces of reaction to pursue the
path of violence.


Mr. Winston Churchill's meeting was for the
Ulster Orange leaders a glorious opportunity; it gave them the excuse
for a daring experiment in lawlessness. That experiment was a 


---

p.379


 success; it stood and stands to the succeeding events in the
same relation as a trial trip of a newly-launched vessel stands to all
its following voyages. Such a trial trip demonstrates the amount of
pressure that can be safely put upon the boilers; Mr. Churchill's
meeting demonstrated how, in what manner, and to what extent, pressure
can be successfully applied to the Liberal Government by a reactionary
class.


Suppose that the declaration of an intention to take steps
to prevent the meeting had been made by a committee representing the
Labour movement, do you think that Mr. Churchill would have abandoned
his meeting, even although that Committee, represented an overwhelming
majority of the inhabitants of the city? You know that he would have
held that meeting at all costs, under such circumstances.


Next in
importance to the abandonment of the right of public meeting came the
tacit permission given to the Ulster Volunteers to arm themselves with
the avowed object of resisting the law.


For two years this arming
went on, accompanied by drilling and organising upon a military basis,
and no effort was made to stop the drilling or to prevent the free
importation of arms until the example of the Ulster Volunteers began to
be followed through the rest of Ireland. The writer of these notes
established a Citizen Army at Dublin in connection with the Irish
Transport & General Workers' Union, and this was followed by
the establishment of Irish Volunteer Corps all through Nationalist
Ireland. Hardly had the first of these corps been organised, and the
desirability of having them armed been mooted, than the Liberal
Government rushed out a proclamation forbidding the importation of arms
into Ireland. What had been freely allowed whilst Orangemen alone were
arming was immediately made illegal when Labour men and Nationalists
thought of obtaining the same weapons. Then having allowed the Unionists
to drill and arm, the Government made the fact of their military 


---

p.380


 preparations an excuse for proposing the dismemberment of
Ireland as a sop to those whom it had allowed to arm against it. Ulster,
where democracy had suffered most because of religious ascendancy, was
to be handed over to those whose religious ascendancy principles and
practices had made democracy suffer.


Then we had the revolt, or
mutiny, at the Curragh. Some regiments were ordered North, and the
Liberal Minister humbly inquired of the officers if these gentlemen
would kindly consent to go. The Orange leaders, their ladies and the
royal family itself, had, it is believed, been usually engaged for two
years in seducing these officers from all sense of duty—in
teaching them to believe that they should refuse to act against the poor
dupes who were being humbugged by the brothers, uncles, fathers, cousins
and other relatives of those officers. And hence, as the ties of class
are stronger than the ties of governments, the officers very quickly
told your backboneless Liberal War Minister that they would not proceed
against their fellow landlords and capi talists in the North, nor
against the poor wretches who had surrendered their political initiative
to them. And the Liberal War Minister, instead of promptly cashiering
those officers, or ordering them to be tried by court-martial, humbly
crawled to them, asked their pardon, so to speak, for daring to suggest
such a thing, and gave them a guarantee that their services would not be
called for against the Orange leaders. The guarantee was afterwards
repudiated, but the rebellious officers are still in high favour with
royalty, and still in command of their regiments. And the Liberal
Government itself allowed the men who had corrupted the army to put it
upon the defensive, and stand it in the dock, pitifully denying that it
did the very thing that it is not fit to hold office if it fears to do,
viz., to use its armed forces to make an ascendancy clique beaten at the
polls recognise the machinery of the law from which it derived its
powers in the past.


A final consummation to all this pitiful
compromise and 


---

p.381


 treachery to a people's hopes is the
gun-running of the past few weeks. A ship sails into Larne Harbour one
fine Friday evening, and immediately the Ulster Volunteers take
possession of that town and seaport, the Royal Irish Constabulary are
imprisoned in their barracks, the roads are held up by armed guards, the
railway stations of Park Road, Belfast, of Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee
are seized by the Ulster Volunteers and thousands of stands of rifles
are landed together with a million rounds of ammunition. Along with the
landing at Larne*,* vessels are used to
tranship arms and ammunition from the original gun-running steamer and
land the cargo so transhipped at Bangor and Donaghadee. Some hundreds of
motor cars' were used to convey the arms and ammunition to safe places,
that night, and the same motor cars worked all day on Saturday conveying
them from temporary resting places to more secure and handy depots
throughout Ulster.


In a few days afterwards the affair came up
for discussion in the House of Commons. The Liberals stormed and raved,
and the Tories laughed. Why should they not? All the laugh was on their
side. Then up rose again the hero of the Ulster Hall—Winston
Churchill. He screeched and shouted and perorated and declaimed about
law and order until one might have thought that, at last, a wrathful
government was about to put forth its mighty powers to crush its
unscrupulous enemy. And then, having attained to almost Olympic heights,
Mr. Churchill ended by cooing more gently than sucking dove and blandly
assured the Orange law breakers that he had not yet reached the limits
of concession—he was willing to betray the Irish some more. If
they would only let him know how much degradation of the mere Irish
would satisfy them, he would try and work it for them. And Parliament
adjourned, wondering what it all meant.


Now let me put the
situation re the gun-running to any unprejudiced reader. Can anyone
believe that the gun-ship, 


---

p.382


 the ‘Fanny’, which had been reported at Hamburg a month
before its appearance at Larne and the nature of its cargo known, could
keep hovering around these coasts for a month without the Government
having it under close supervision?


Can anyone believe that if
this gun-running feat had been attempted at Tralee, Waterford,
Skibbereen or Bantry and Nationalists had attempted to imprison armed
Royal Irish Constabularymen in their barracks that no shots would have
been fired and no lives lost?


Can anyone believe that if railway
stations were seized, roads held up, coastguards imprisoned and
telegraph systems interfered with by Nationalists or Labour men, that at
least 1,000 arrests would not have been made the next morning? Evidence
is difficult to get, they say. Evidence be hanged! If Nationalists or
Labour men were the culprits, the Liberal Government would have made the
arrests first and looked for evidence afterwards. And been in no hurry
about it either.


My firm conviction is that the Liberal
Government wish to betray the Home Rulers, that they connive at these
illegalities that they might have an excuse for their betrayal, and that
the Home Rule party through its timidity and partly through its hatred
of Labour in Ireland is incapable of putting the least pressure upon its
Liberal allies and must now dance to the piping of its treacherous
allies.


Who can forecast what will come out of such a welter of
absurdities, betrayals and crimes?


- Forward , May 30, 1914.



---

p.383


NORTH-EAST ULSTER
-----------------


#### 1


A Dublin Comrade once remarked to the
writer of these notes that as two things cannot occupy the same space at
the same time, so the mind of the working class cannot take up two items
at the same time. Meaning thereby that when that working class is
obsessed with visions of glory, patriotism, war, loyalty or political or
religious bigotry, it can find no room in its mind for considerations of
its own interests as a class.


Somewhere upon these lines must be
found the explanation of the fact that whereas Dublin and Nationalist
Ireland generally is seething with rebellion against industrial
conditions and manifesting that rebellion by a crop of strikes, in
Belfast and the quarter dominated by the loyalist element, class feeling
or industrial discontent is at present scarcely manifested at all.


For Dublin and its Nationalist allies, the Home Rule question has
long gone beyond the stage of controversy; it is regarded as out of the
region of dispute and consequently the mind of the working class is no
more excited over that question *than*
it can be considered to be excited over the general proposition that the
whole is greater than its parts.


In North-East Ulster, on the
other hand, the question of Home Rule is not a settled question in men's
minds, much less settled politically, and hence its unsettled character
makes it still possible for that question to so possess the minds of the
multitude that all other questions such as wages, hours and conditions
of labour, must take a subordinate place and lose their power to attract
attention, much less to compel action.


According to all Socialist
theories North-East Ulster, being the most developed industrially, ought
to be the quarter in which class lines of cleavage, politically and
industrially, should 


---

p.384


 be the most pronounced and class
rebellion the most common.


As a cold matter of fact, it is the
happy hunting ground of the slave-driver and the home of the least
rebellious slaves in the industrial world.


Dublin, on the other
hand, has more strongly developed working-class feeling, more strongly
accentuated instincts of loyalty to the working class than any city of
its size in the globe.


I have explained before how the perfectly
devilish ingenuity of the master class had sought its ends in North-East
Ulster. How the *lands* were stolen
from Catholics, given to Episcopalians, but planted by Presbyterians;
how the latter were persecuted by the Government, but could not avoid
the necessity of defending it against the Catholics, and how out of this
complicated situation there inevitably grew up a feeling of common
interests between the slaves and the slave-drivers.


As the march
of the Irish towards emancipation developed, as step by step they
secured more and more political rights and greater and greater
recognition, so in like ratio the disabilities of the Presbyterians and
other dissenters were abolished.


For a brief period during the
closing years of the eighteenth century, it did indeed seem probable
that the common disabilities of Presbyterians and Catholics would unite
them all under the common name of Irishmen. Hence the rebel society of
that time took the significant name of ‘United
Irishmen’.


But the removal of the religious disabilities from
the dissenting community had, as its effect, the obliteration of all
political difference between the sects and their practical political
unity under the common designation of Protestants, as against the
Catholics, upon whom the fetters of religious disability still
clung.


Humanly speaking, one would have confidently predicted
that as the Presbyterians and Dissenters were emancipated as a result of
a clamorous agitation against religious inequality, and as that
agitation derived its chief force and menace from the 


---

p.385


 power
of Catholic numbers in Ireland, then the members of these sects would
unite with the agitators to win for all an enjoyment of these rights the
agitators and rebels had won for them.


But the prediction would
have missed the mark by several million miles. Instead, the Protestants
who had been persecuted joined with the Protestants who had persecuted
them against the menace of an intrusion by the Catholics into the fold
of political and religious freedom—‘Civil and
religious liberty’.


There is no use blaming them. It is
common experience in history that as each order fought its way upward
into the circle of governing classes, it joined with its former tyrants
in an endeavour to curb the aspirations of these orders still
unfree.


That in Ireland religious sects played the same game as
elsewhere was played by economic or social classes does not prove the
wickedness of the Irish players, but does serve to illustrate the
universality of the passions that operate upon the stage of the world's
history.


It also serves to illustrate the wisdom of the Socialist
contention that as the working class has no subject class beneath it,
therefore, to the working class of necessity belongs the honour of being
the class destined to put an end to class rule, since, in emancipating
itself, it cannot help emancipating all other classes.


Individuals out of other classes must and will help*,* as individual Protestants have helped in the fight for
Catholic emancipation in Ireland; but on the whole, the burden must rest
upon the shoulders of the most subject class.


If the North-East
corner of Ireland is, therefore, the home of a people whose minds are
saturated with conceptions of political activity fit only for the
atmosphere of the seventeenth century, if the sublime ideas of an
all-embracing democracy equally as insistent upon its duties as upon its
rights have as yet found poor lodgment here, the fault lies not with
this generation of toilers, but with those pastors and masters who 


---

p.386


 deceived it and enslaved it in the past—and deceived it
in order that they might enslave it.


But as no good can come of
blaming it, so also no good, but infinite evil, can come of truckling to
it. Let the truth be told, however ugly. Here, the Orange working class
are slaves in spirit because they have been reared up among a people
whose conditions of servitude were more slavish than their own. In
Catholic Ireland, the working class are rebels in spirit and democratic
in feeling because for hundreds of years they have found no class as
lowly paid or as hardly treated as themselves.


At one time in the
industrial world of Great Britain and Ireland the skilled labourer
looked down with contempt upon the unskilled and bitterly resented his
attempt to get his children taught any of the skilled trades; the
feeling of the Orangemen of Ireland towards the Catholics is but a
glorified representation on a big stage of the same passions inspired by
the same unworthy motives.


An atavistic survival of a dark and
ignorant past!


Viewing Irish politics in the light of this
analysis, one can see how futile and vain are the criticisms of the
Labour Party in Parliament which are based upon a comparison of what was
done by the Nationalist group in the past and what is being left undone
by the Labour Group to-day. I am neither criticising nor defending the
Labour Group in Parliament; I am simply pointing out that any criticism
based upon an analogy with the actions, past or present, of the Irish
party, is necessarily faulty and misleading.


The Irish party had
all the political traditions and prejudices of centuries to reinforce
its attitude of hostility to the Government, nay, more, its only serious
rival among its own constituents was a party more uncompromisingly
hostile to the Government than itself—the republican or physical
force party.


The Labour party, on the other hand, has had to meet
and overcome all the political traditions and prejudices of its 


---

p.387


 supporters in order to win their votes, and knows that at any
time it may lose these suffrages so tardily given.


The Irish
party never needed to let the question of retaining the suffrages of the
Irish electors enter into their calculations. They were almost always
returned unopposed. The Labour party knows that a forward move on the
part of either Liberal or Tory will always endanger a certain portion of
Labour votes.


In other words, the Irish group was a party to
whose aid the mental habits formed by centuries of struggle came as a
reinforcement among its constituents at every stage of the struggle. But
the Labour party is a party which, in order to progress, must be
continually breaking with and outraging institutions which the mental
habits of its supporters had for centuries accustomed them to
venerate.


I have written in vain if I have not helped the reader
to realise that the historical backgrounds of the movement in England
and Ireland are so essentially different that the Irish Socialist
movement can only be truly served by a party indigenous to the soil, and
explained by a literature having the same source: that the phrases and
watchwords which might serve to express the soul of the movement in one
country may possibly stifle its soul and suffocate its expression in the
other.


One great need of the movement in Ireland is a literature
of its very own. When that is written*,*
people will begin to understand why it is that the Irish Catholic worker
is a good democrat and a revolutionist, though he knows nothing of the
fine spun theories of democracy or revolution; and how and why it is
that the doctrine that because the workers of Belfast live under the
same industrial conditions as do those of Great Britain, they are
therefore subject to the same passions and to be influenced by the same
methods of propaganda, is a doctrine almost screamingly funny in its
absurdity.


- Forward. , August 2, 1913.



---

p.388


#### 2


It is often said that the Irish flag is a green flag to suit
a green people, but the Dublin workers are not so green as to believe
that a party which voted against the Right to Work Bill, the Minimum
Wage for Miners, and the Minimum Wage for Railwaymen, which intrigued
against the application to Ireland of the Feeding of Necessitous School
Children and the Medical Benefits of the National Health Insurance Act,
can be described as anything else than a treacherous ‘friend’ of Labour.


Some day a similar spirit
will come up North and the workers of the North-East corner will get
tired of being led by the nose by a party captained by landlords and
place-hunting lawyers. Here, in North-East Ulster, the ascendancy party
does not even need to pretend to be favourable to the aspirations of
Labour; it is openly hostile and the inculcation of slavish sentiments
is a business it never neglects. In that is the main difference between
the parties—the growth of a rebellious spirit amongst the
Nationalist democracy has compelled the Home Rule politicians to pay
court to Labour, to assume a virtue even when they have it not, but the
lack of such a spirit in this section has enabled the Orange leaders to
openly flout and antagonise the Labour movement.


But times change
and we change with them. North-East Ulster democracy is awakening also,
and we long for and will see in Belfast movements of Labour as great as,
if not greater than any of which Dublin can boast.


In that
glorious day Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right, but all those
leaders who now trumpet forth that battle cry will then be found arrayed
against the Ulster democracy.


- Forward. , June 7, 1913.



---

p.389


#### 3


A
correspondent of Forward in a
recent edition asked how it was that if the Orangemen were so bad they
allowed Mr. Connolly to hold meetings in the principal streets of
Belfast? Our answer to that is that neither Mr. Connolly nor any other
Socialist can now hold outdoor meetings in an exclusively Orange
district, even those Belfast Socialists who ‘will not
have Home Rule’ in their programme, cannot hold open-air meetings in
any exclusively Orange district. Socialist meetings in Belfast can only
be held in the business centre of the town where the passing crowd is of
a mixed or uncertain nature.


All this demonstrates how immensely
difficult is the task at present in Belfast. No part of these countries
has a part more difficult. It means the propagation of twentieth century
revolutionism amidst the mental atmosphere of the early seventeenth
century.


When striving to induce my Belfast comrades to adopt
this policy we are now propagating in our meetings, I was asked did I
think it would make our propaganda easier. I answered that I did not,
that on the contrary it would arouse passions immensely more bitter than
had even been met here by the Socialist movement in the past, but that
it would make our propaganda more fruitful and our organisation more
enduring.


To this I still adhere. A real Socialist movement
cannot be built by temporising in front of a dying cause such as that of
the Orange ascendancy, even although in the paroxysms of its death
struggle it assumes the appearance of an energy like unto that of
health. A real Socialist movement can only be born of struggle, of
uncompromising affirmation of the faith that is in us. Such a movement
infallibly gathers to it every element of rebellion and of progress, and
in the midst of the storm and stress of the struggle solidifies into a
real revolutionary force.


Therefore, we declare to the Orange
workers of Belfast that 


---

p.390


 we stand for the right of the
people in Ireland to rule as well as to own Ireland, and cannot conceive
of a separation of the two ideas, and to all and sundry we announce that
as Socialists we are Home Rulers, but that on the day the Home Rule
Government goes into power the Socialist movement in Ireland will go
into opposition.


- Forward. , August 23, 1913.



---

p.391


THE FIRST HINT OF PARTITION
---------------------------


Here in
Ireland the proposal of the Government to consent to the partition of
Ireland—the exclusion of certain counties in Ulster—is
causing a new line of cleavage. No one of the supporters of Home Rule
accepts this proposal with anything like equanimity, but rather we are
already hearing in North-East Ulster rumours of a determination to
resist it by all means. It is felt that the proposal to leave the Home
Rule minority at the mercy of an ignorant majority with the evil record
of the Orange party is a proposal that should never have been made, and
that the establishment of such a scheme should be resisted with armed
force if necessary.


Personally I entirely agree with those who
think so; Belfast is bad enough as it is; what it would be under such
rule the wildest imagination cannot conceive. Filled with the belief
that they were after defeating the Imperial Government and the
Nationalists combined, the Orangemen would have scant regards for the
rights of the minority left at their mercy.


Such a scheme would
destroy the Labour movement by disrupting it. It would perpetuate in a
form aggravated in evil the discords now prevalent, and help the Home
Rule and Orange capitalists and clerics to keep their rallying cries
before the public as the political watchwords of the day. In short, it
would make division more intense and confusion of ideas and parties more
confounded.


- Forward , March 21, 1914.



---

p.392


LABOUR AND THE PROPOSED PARTITION OF IRELAND
--------------------------------------------


The
recent proposals of Messrs. Asquith, Devlin, Redmond and Co. for the
settlement of the Home Rule question deserve the earnest attention of
the working class democracy of this country. They reveal in a most
striking and unmistakeable manner the depths of betrayal to which the
so-called Nationalist politicians are willing to sink. For generations
the conscience of the civilised world has been shocked by the historical
record of the partition of Poland; publicists, poets, humanitarians,
patriots, all lovers of their kind and of progress have wept over the
unhappy lot of a country torn asunder by the brute force of their alien
oppressors, its unity ruthlessly destroyed and its traditions trampled
into the dust.


But Poland was disrupted by outside forces, its
enemies were the mercenaries of the tyrant kingdoms and empires of
Europe; its sons and daughters died in the trenches and on the
battle-fields by the thousands rather than submit to their beloved
country being annihilated as a nation. But Ireland, what of Ireland? It
is the trusted leaders of Ireland that in secret conclave with the
enemies of Ireland have agreed to see Ireland as a nation disrupted
politically and her children divided under separate political
governments with warring interests.


Now, what is the position of
Labour towards it all? Let us remember that the Orange aristocracy now
fighting for its supremacy in Ireland has at all times been based upon a
denial of the common human rights of the Irish people; that the Orange
Order was not founded to safeguard religious freedom, but to deny
religious freedom, and that it raised this religious question, not for
the sake of any religion, but in order to use religious zeal in the
interests of the oppressive property rights 


---

p.393


 of rackrenting
landlords and sweating capitalists. That the Irish people might be kept
asunder and robbed whilst so sundered and divided, the Orange
aristocracy went down to the lowest depths and out of the lowest pits of
hell brought up the abominations of sectarian feuds to stir the passions
of the ignorant mob. No crime was too brutal or cowardly; no lie too
base; no slander too ghastly, as long as they served to keep the
democracy asunder.


And now that the progress of democracy
elsewhere has somewhat muzzled the dogs of aristocratic power, now that
in England as well as in Ireland the forces of labour art stirring and
making for freedom and light, this same gang of well-fed plunderers of
the people, secure in Union held upon their own dupes, seek by threats
of force to arrest the march of ideas and stifle the light of
civilisation and liberty. And, lo and behold, the trusted guardians of
the people, the vaunted saviours of the Irish race, agree in front of
the enemy and in face of the world to sacrifice to the bigoted enemy the
unity of the nation and along with it the lives, liberties and hopes of
that portion of the nation which in the midst of the most hostile
surroundings have fought to keep the faith in things national and
progressive.


Such a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and
Devlin, the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster
would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back
the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish
labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it
endured.


To it Labour should give the bitterest opposition,
against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death, if
necessary, as our fathers fought before us.


- Irish Worker , March 14, 1914.



---

p.394


THE EXCLUSION OF ULSTER
-----------------------


Socialists and Labour
people generally in Great Britain have had good reason to deplore the
existence of the Irish question and to realise how disastrous upon the
chances of their candidates has been the fact of the existence in the
constituencies of a large mass of organised voters whose political
activities were not influenced solely or even largely by the domestic
issues before the electors. Our British comrades have had long and sore
experience of contests in which all the arguments and all the local
feeling were on the side of the Socialist or Labour candidate, and yet
that local candidate was ignominiously defeated because there existed in
the constituency a large Irish vote—a large mass of voters who
supported the Liberal, not because they were opposed to Labour, but
because they wanted Ireland to have Home Rule.


Our British
comrades have learned that the existence of that Irish vote and the
knowledge that it would be cast for the Home Rule official candidate,
irrespective of his record on or his stand upon Labour matters, caused
hundreds of thousands who otherwise would have voted Labour to vote
Liberal in dread that the Irish defection would ‘let
the Tory in’. For a generation now the Labour movement in Great
Britain has been paralysed politically by this fear; and all hands have
looked forward eagerly to the time when the granting of Home Rule would
remove their fear and allow free expression to all the forces that make
for a political Labour movement in that country. Even many of the
actions and votes of the Labour party in the House of Commons which have
been strenuously complained of*,* have been
justified by that Party on the plea that it was necessary to keep in
power the government that would get Home Rule out of the way. Now, in
view of this 


---

p.395


 experience of the Socialist movement in Great
Britain, we can surely not view with any complacency a proposal that
will keep that question to the front as a live issue at British
elections for six years longer or rather for a totally indefinite
period. We know that this ‘six years period’ so
glibly spoken of by politicians has no background of reality to justify
the belief that that term can be considered as more than a mere figure
of speech.


In the Daily News and
Leader of 6th April, Mr. H.
W. Massingham, writing of the Ulster
Limit, says, and the saying is valuable as indicative of
the trend of Liberal thought: 
> 
> Should we, therefore, make
> an absolutely dead halt at the six years' milestone? Both parties
> implicitly admit that that is impossible, for one Parliament cannot bind
> another.
> 
> 
> 




And in the previous week the Liberal
Solicitor General declared in Parliament that if within the six years'
period 
> 
> the other side brought in a Bill to exclude
> Ulster, it would have a royal and triumphant procession to the foot of
> the throne.
> 
> 
> 




Thus we have it clearly
foreshadowed that there is no such thing as a six years' limit which can
be binding upon future Parliaments and that therefore the question of
Home Rule for the Ulster Counties will be a test question at future
elections in Great Britain, and will then play there the same disastrous
role for the Labour movement as the question of Home Rule does now. The
political organisation of the Home Rule party will be kept alive in
every industrial constituency on the pretext of working for a ‘United Ireland’, and in the same manner the Unionist
Party will also keep up its special organisations, Orange Lodges, etc.,
in order to keep alive the sectarian appeal to the voters from Ireland
who will be asked to ‘vote against 


---

p.396


 driving
Ulster under the heels of the Papish Dublin Parliament’.


Labour men in and out of Ireland have often declared that if Home
Rule was wanted for no other purpose, it was necessary in order to allow
of the solidifying of the Labour vote in Great Britain, and the rescue
of the Irish voters in that country from their thraldom to the Liberal
caucus. It might not be far from the truth to surmise that the Liberal
Party managers have seen the same point as clearly as we did ourselves,
and have quietly resolved that such a good weapon as the Nationalist
Party sentiment should not be entirely withdrawn from their armoury. The
reader will also see that with a perfectly Mephistophelian subtlety the
question of exclusion is not suggested to be voted upon by any large
area where the chances for or against might be fairly equal, where
exclusion might be defeated as it might be if all Ulster were the venue
of the poll, and all Ulster had to stay out or come in as a result of
the verdict of the ballot box. No, the counties to be voted on the
question are the counties where the Unionists are in an overwhelming
majority, and where therefore the vote is a mere farce—a
subterfuge to hide the grossness of the betrayal of the Home Rule
electors. Then again each county or borough enters or remains outside
according to its own vote, and quite independent of the vote of its
neighbours in Ulster. Thus the Home Rule question as far as Ulster is
concerned, may be indefinitely prolonged and kept alive as an issue to
divide and disrupt the Labour vote in Great Britain.


The effect
of such exclusion upon Labour in Ireland will be at least equally, and
probably more, disastrous. All hopes of uniting the workers,
irrespective of religion or old political battle cries will be
shattered, and through North and South the issue of Home Rule will be
still used to cover the iniquities of the capitalist and landlord class.
I am not speaking without due knowledge of the sentiments of the
organised Labour movement in Ireland when I say that we would much
rather 


---

p.397


 see the Home Rule Bill defeated than see it carried
with Ulster or any part of Ulster left out. . ..


Meanwhile, as a study in political disparity, watch the manoeuvres of
the Home Rule Party on this question. The deal is already, I believe,
framed up, but when the actual vote is to be taken in the Counties of
Down, Antrim, Derry and Armagh and the Boroughs of Belfast and Derry,
Messrs. Redmond, Devlin and Co. will tour these counties and boroughs
letting loose floods of oratory asking for votes against exclusion and
thus will delude the workers into forgetting the real crime, viz.,
consenting to make the unity of the Irish Nation a subject to be decided
by the votes of the most bigoted and passion-blinded reactionaries in
these four counties where such reactionaries are in the majority. The
betrayal is agreed upon, I repeat, the vote is only a subterfuge to hide
the grossness of the betrayal.


It still remains to be seen
whether the working class agitation cannot succeed in frightening these
vampires from the feast they are promising themselves upon the corpse of
a dismembered Ireland. . ..


- Forward , April 11, 1914.



---

p.398


IRELAND AND ULSTER: AN APPEAL TO THE WORKING CLASS
--------------------------------------------------


In this great crisis of the history of Ireland, I desire to appeal to
the working class—the only class whose true interests are always
on the side of progress—to take action to prevent *the* betrayal of their interests contemplated by those
who have planned the exclusion of part of Ulster from the Home Rule
Bill. Every effort is now being made to prevent the voice of the
democracy being heard in those counties and boroughs which it is
callously proposed to cut off from the rest of Ireland. Meetings are
being rushed through in other parts of Ireland, and at those meetings
wirepullers of the United Irish League and the Ancient Order of
Hibernians (Board of Erin) are passing resolutions approving of the
exclusion, whilst you who will suffer by this dastardly proposal are
never even consulted, but, on the contrary, these same organisations are
working hard to prevent your voice being heard, and have done what they
could to prevent the calling of meetings, of holding of demonstrations
at which you could register your hatred of their attempt to betray you
into the hand of the sworn enemies of democracy, of labour, and of
nationality.


An instance of this attempt to misrepresent you may
be quoted from the Irish press of March
26. In a letter from the Irish Press Agency it says:—

> 
> The proposal, representing the limit of concession and
> made ‘as the price of peace’ would only mean, if
> accepted, that the Counties of Down, Derry, Antrim and Armagh would
> remain as they are for six years at the end of which time they would
> come in automatically under Home Rule. They know, too, that the
> Nationalists in these four counties are perfectly willing to assent to
> this arrangement and that they are the Nationalists most concerned.
> 
> 
> 






---

p.399


Remember that this is a quotation
from a letter sent out by the Irish Press Agency and that copies of it
are supplied by the agents of the Irish Parliamentary Party to every
newspaper in Ireland and to Liberal papers in England, and you will see
how true is my statement that you are being betrayed, that the men whom
you trusted are busily engaged in rigging up a fake sentiment in favour
of this betrayal of your interests. For the statements contained in the
letter just quoted are, in the first part, deliberately misleading and,
and in the second part, an outrageous falsehood.


The statement
that the counties excluded would come in automatically at the end of six
years is deliberately misleading because, as was explained in the House
of Commons, two General Elections would take place before the end of
that time. If at either of these General Elections the Tories got a
majority—and it is impossible to believe that the Liberals can win
the other two elections successively—it would only require the
passage of a small Act of not more than three or four lines to make the
exclusion perpetual. And the Tories would pass it. What could prevent
them? You can prevent them getting the chance by insisting upon the
whole Home Rule Bill and no exclusion, being passed *now*. If you do not act *now*,
your chance is gone.


The second part of the statement I have
quoted is an outrageous falsehood, as every one knows. The Nationalists
of the four counties have not been asked their opinion, and if any
politician would dare to take a plebiscite upon this question of
exclusion or no exclusion, the democracy of Ulster would undoubtedly
register a most emphatic refusal to accept this proposal. And yet
so-called Home Rule journals are telling the world that you are quite
willing to be cut off from Ireland and placed under the heel of the
intolerant gang of bigots and enemies of progress who for so long have
terrorised Ulster.


Men and women, consider! If your lot is a
difficult one 


---

p.400


 now, subject as you are to the rule of a gang
who keep up the fires of religious bigotry in order to divide the
workers, and make united progress impossible; if your lot is a difficult
one, even when supported by the progressive and tolerant forces of all
Ireland, how difficult and intolerable it will be when you are cut off
from Ireland, and yet are regarded as alien to Great Britain, and left
at the tender mercies of a class who knows no mercy, of a mob poisoned
by ignorant hatred of everything national and democratic.


Do not
be misled by the promises of politicians. Remember that Mr. Birrell,
Chief Secretary, solemnly promised that a representative of Dublin
Labour would sit upon the Police Inquiry Commission in Dublin, and that
he broke his solemn promise. Remember that Mr. Redmond pledged his word
at Waterford that the Home Rule Bill would go through without the loss
of a word or a comma, and almost immediately afterwards he agreed to the
loss of four counties and two boroughs. Remember that the whole history
of Ireland is a record of betrayals by politicians and statesmen, and
remembering this, spurn their lying promises and stand up for a United
Ireland—an Ireland broad based upon the union of Labour and
Nationality.


You are not frightened by the mock heroics of a
pantomime army. Nobody in Ulster is. If the politicians in Parliament
pretend to be frightened, it is only in order to find an excuse to sell
you. Do not be sold. Remember that when soldiers were ordered out to
shoot you down in the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907 no officer resigned
then rather than shed blood in Ulster, and when some innocent members of
our class were shot down in the Falls Road, Belfast, no Cabinet
Ministers apologised to the relatives of the poor workers they had
murdered. Remember that more than a thousand Dublin men, women and
children were brutally beaten and wounded by the police a few months
ago, and three men and one girl killed, but no officer 


---

p.401



resigned, and neither Tory nor Home Rule press protested against the
coercion of Dublin. Why, then, the hypocritical howl against compelling
the pious sweaters of Ulster and their dupes to obey the will of the
majority? Remember the A.O.H., the U.I.L. and the Irish Parliamentary
Party cheered on the Government when it sent its police to bludgeon the
Nationalist workers of Dublin. Now the same *organisations* and the same party cheers on the
same treacherous Government when it proposes to surrender you into the
hands of the Carsonite gang. As the officers of the Curragh have stood
by their class, so let the working-class democracy of Ulster stand by
its class, and all Irish workers from Malin Head to Cape Clear and from
Dublin to Galway will stand by you.


Let your motto be that of
James Fintan Lalor, the motto which the working class Irish Citizen Army
has adopted as its aim and object, viz.: 
> 
> That the entire
> ownership of Ireland [all Ireland]—moral and material—is
> vested of right in the entire people of Ireland.
> 
> 
> 




And, adopting this as your motto, let it be heard and understood that
Labour in Ireland stands for the unity of Ireland—an Ireland
united in the name of progress, and who shall separate us?


- Irish Worker , April 4, 1914.



---

p.402


THE SOLIDARITY OF LABOUR
------------------------


This being Easter week, the
news from Ireland for the readers of
 Forward will necessarily be of a short
and scrappy character. We are all busy enjoying ourselves, and as this
is the last Easter before the red flames of war will light up our
hilltops and the red rivers of blood flow along our valleys (ahem!), our
amusements must perforce be absorbing and exciting. For it is an awful
and serious thing to think that in a month or two the wooden guns of
Ulster may go off, and the trained ambulance corps may be wrestling with
the problems of how to tie up broken heads or staunch the flow of blood
from bleeding noses.


We may not see ‘red ruin
and the breaking up of laws’, but we may see the breaking of window
panes and hear the rattle of cobble stones upon our doors.


The
wooden guns of Ulster! Aye, but let us be frank with ourselves and
confess that the wooden guns of Ulster have, at least, succeeded in
frightening the Liberals, or if they have not frightened them, then the
Liberals are engaged in the greatest game of sham these countries have
ever seen. They are pretending to be frightened in order to cover their
action in going back on all the promises with which they have held the
Home Rulers of Great Britain and Ireland in leash for a generation.
Charles Stewart Parnell could have got Home Rule with Ulster excluded
thirty years ago. We have been told *ad
nauseam* about the statesmanlike qualities of John E. Redmond
as the leader of the Irish race, and yet it appears that his *statesmanship* has brought his
followers to the point of accepting with joyful eagerness and gratitude
that which Parnell rejected with scorn thirty years ago. A more
miserable fiasco than this ignominious collapse of a great national
movement is not recorded in history. 


---

p.403


 To this poor end have
come all the glorious promises, and this poor reward is all the Irish
Party can show for its persistent fight against Labour in every
three-cornered election in Great Britain, in every municipal election
without exception in Ireland


It is to us a grim comment upon the
boasted solidarity of Labour when we see a Labour M.P., in Great
Britain, calmly announcing that he prefers to follow the official
representatives of Irish capitalism rather than the spokesman of 86,000
organised Irish workers, and that he does so because the latter are yet
too weak to protect themselves politically—have no votes to
deliver in Parliament, whereas their enemies have.


Personally I
make no complaint about the position taken up by Mr. George N. Barnes,
M.P.*,* and his colleagues. I do not
complain because I expected it. I have always preached in Ireland that
politically we were far behind the English and Scots workers, that many
of the measures we required as an imperative necessity were already in
working order in Great Britain, and that it was absurd to expect the
British working men to turn aside to fight our political battles when
his own required so much effort and sacrifice.


On these lines of
argument I have fought for the establishment of a Labour Party in
Ireland, for the separate political organisation of the Irish workers
and for the separate economic and industrial organisation of the Irish
workers on a more revolutionary basis than was usual in England and
Scotland. This I felt to be wise, because, as much of Ireland is
practically unorganised, I do not see the necessity of us committing all
the mistakes in organisation already made in Britain, when we have so
much practically virgin soil to till in industrial organisation
here.


In doing this, in carrying on such a propaganda, I have
been continually subject to misrepresentation and even abuse. I have
been told that I was no Internationalist, that I was preaching hatred of
England, that I was a disruptor. In vain for me to insist that the usual
mistake of the Englishman, viz., that he 


---

p.404


 understood Irish
problems better than the Irish did themselves, applied quite as strongly
to British Socialists as to the British ruling class, and that therefore
the Irish Socialists should work out their own policy and create their
own literature, and that we must expect to be misunderstood until we
could compel recognition by our own strength. For preaching this
doctrine I have generally suffered the boycott from the official
Socialists in Great Britain, and dislike from those in Ireland who
followed their lead. But now comes along Comrade George N. Barnes, M.P.,
and he blandly acknowledges that Socialism in England in the votes of
its Parliamentary representatives will take its cue from the
representatives of an Irish party that openly avows in Ireland its
hatred of Socialism and its opposition to Independent Labour
representation in this country. This, I take it, is a confirmation of my
position that the Irish workers must work out their own salvation, and
that in the process of working it out they need not be astonished if the
working-class leaders in Great Britain utterly fail to understand
them.


This question of presenting Socialism so that it will
appeal to the peculiar hereditary instincts and character of the people
amongst whom you are operating is one of the first importance to the
Socialist and Labour movement. A position, theoretically sound, may fail
if expressed in terms unsuited to the apprehension of those to whom you
are appealing. For years I fretted at what I considered the utterly
foolish attitude of certain Socialist propagandists in Great Britain.
Their arguments did not appeal to me, and I did not believe that they
could appeal to anyone else. Since then I have come to believe that
these people, perhaps, understood the psychology of their own countrymen
better than I did, and that this question of psychology or mental
make-up was of fundamental importance. Since that dawned upon me, I have
painstakingly stuck to the endeavour to translate Socialist doctrines
into terms understood by the Irish, in or out of Ireland. I fancy that I
have at least 


---

p.405


 in that respect set a headline for abler
persons than myself to copy in future. But we cannot deal with Ireland
without getting entangled in the question of religion. Hence I have got
frequently involved in disputes centring around that point. Now observe
this confession! I have, I believe, fairly well presented my case on
that subject, but my case was the case for workers to whom the
traditions and aspirations of Irish Nationality had been of prime
importance. That achievement was reserved for, and I think has been most
excellently performed by our Comrade John Wheatley and his colleagues of
the Catholic Socialist Society. Nowhere have I come across literature so
well suited for the purpose of making Socialists of Catholics; my own
poor attempts have been, as I have said, directed to the enrolment in my
ranks of Irish workers.


All this is a digression in a sense, but
an understanding of it may explain to the reader ‘that
tired feeling’ that comes across us in Ireland when we witness the
love embraces which take place between the Parliamentary Labour Party
and our deadliest enemies—the Home Rule Party. I say our deadliest
enemies, because the Unionist Party is only a negligible quantity except
in a small corner of Ireland, and in that corner it is not destined to
be permanent. We do not get angry when we see these things or read such
letters; we simply say—‘What the devil is up with
those fellows’?


There will be no bad feeling over such
letters as Mr. Barnes', or the implied refusal of the Labour Party to
pay any attention to the request of organised Labour in Ireland, but it
will not help on a better understanding between the militant proletariat
of the two islands.


- Forward , April 18, 1914.



---

p.406


HOME RULE, ETC. 
BY GEORGE N. BARNES, M.P. 
EXTRACT
---------------------------------------------------


. . .. But I have taken my line, along with my
colleagues, from the Irish Nationalists. I note that an Irish
correspondent in your columns takes me to task for following the lead of
Irish Members of Parliament instead of Irish Trades Councils and Labour
bodies generally. In regard to which I have only to say that the
Nationalists of Ireland have sent men to Parliament and the Labour men
have not. I assume that the Irishmen know their mind and business best,
and I take it as expressed in that fact. Your correspondent has also a
good deal to say about the merits—or rather the demerits—of
the suggested compromise, and points out to me that the cutting out of
Ulster from the rest of Ireland will divide A.S.E. membership in Ireland
into two different political camps. It is sheer waste of fact arguing
about it. Nobody defends it on its merits. It is put forward as the
price of peace. If peace is not brought by it, then it goes by the
board. And so I leave it.


- Forward , April 11, 1914.



---

p.407


THE LATEST MASSACRE IN DUBLIN
-----------------------------


As I am writing all
the people of Ireland are agog with excitement over events in Dublin.
The first shots of the threatened civil war have at length been fired,
and the streets of an Irish city have run red with the blood of
Irishmen. But contrary to all the threats, omens and portents, it was
not an Ulster city that witnessed calamity; it was not the blood of
Ulstermen that was shed in defence of their rights and liberties. It was
only the blood of common ordinary Irishmen who dared to fancy that what
was sauce for the Orange goose was also sauce for the Nationalist
gander.


On Sunday, 26th July, the
Irish Volunteers brought off successfully a gunrunning coup of their own
at Howth, near Dublin. A few thousand Volunteers marched out from Dublin
and took possession of the village. Sentries were posted on all the
roads leading into Dublin, telegraph and telephone wires were earthed,
and every military precaution was taken to secure freedom from
interruption by the authorities.


When the regiments had
successfully taken possession of the harbour, signals were sent to a
yacht that was standing off the coast, and the yacht, steered by an
unknown lady, entered in and commenced to discharge a cargo of rifles.
The local customs chief and the head of the police force in the district
attempted to interfere at this juncture, but were quietly warned off at
the point of loaded revolvers. A quantity of rifles, variously estimated
at from 2,000 to 4,000,[17](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note017.html')) with corresponding ammunition, was landed and
dispatched and then the Volunteers present proceeded to march back in
military order to the city, each man carrying his newly acquired rifle,
but no ammunition.


The police, who were helpless, marched along
with the battalions without making any effort to disturb or intercept
the 


---

p.408


 march. But some cyclist had managed to slip past the
volunteer sentries and bring the news to Dublin Castle. The authorities
there hastily despatched a regiment of soldiers, the King's Own Scottish
Borderers, apparently with orders to seize the rifles and break up the
march.


These soldiers met the returning Volunteers near Fairview
and drawing across the roadway demanded the surrender of the rifles and
the disbandment of the parade. Although surrounded by police and
confronted by soldiery, the Volunteers refused to give up their arms,
and after a brief altercation the military fired and then charged with
fixed bayonets. Having foolishly neglected to retain their ammunition,
the Volunteers could only defend themselves with the butt-ends of their
rifles against the bayonets of the soldiery. Hence the conflict was but
one-sided. The soldiers captured about 20 rifles, all the rest being got
safely away. It is also stated that a quantity of rifles was wrenched
from the hands of the soldiers by the people.


Then the soldiers
after this ‘brilliant victory’ marched back to the
city, accompanied all the way by a crowd of angry demonstrators, furious
at the wanton slaughter of Dubliners for daring to exercise a right
which the Carsonites had freely exercised less than 24 hours previously
in Belfast.


Passing through the centre of the city the crowd
increased in numbers and in indignation. Stones were thrown, a few
soldiers were jostled, and suddenly, without a moment's warning, an
officer wheeled his company across the roadway and ordered them to fire
with ball cartridges upon the people. *No Riot Act was
read, no Magistrate was present, no warning was given*, but before
the people could realise their danger, the volley was sent flying into
the midst of the multitude in that crowded, narrow thoroughfare. The
hired assassins had obeyed orders. It is a soldier's duty to obey
orders—except when the soldier is an officer ordered to act
against his class instincts.


Stated baldly these are the facts of
Sunday's work in Dublin. 


---

p.409


 For the past two years the
aristocrats of the Tory Party have been preaching rebellion against
constituted authority. For two years they have been training and arming
a rebel army—an army to rebel against the mandate of the democracy
of these islands. Their conduct has continually been connived at by the
Government, and each fresh connivance has led them on to fresh acts of
aggression and organised intimidation. They held up three seaport towns,
made prisoners of the King of England's constabulary and coastguardmen,
interfered with the railway system, the telegraphs, and telephones, and
took unlawful possession of passengers upon the King's highway.


Finally, upon Saturday, 25th July,
they paraded through the streets of Belfast in military array, armed
with rifles, and escorting Maxim and other machine guns. All this they
were allowed to do with perfect impunity; indeed, their chiefs in the
midst of their illegalities were granted special indications of Royal
favour.


Upon the top of this the Irish Volunteers make an effort
to equip themselves with arms, so that they, the most popular body in
Ireland, should not also be the most unprotected. Who can question their
wisdom in resolving to protect themselves, as the Government would grant
them no protection? But immediately this attempt was made, police and
military are ordered out, a bayonet charge is made upon the Volunteers,
and volley firing with ball cartridges is practised upon unarmed crowds
in the streets of the capital city. At the time of writing, four persons
have been killed, and about 80 wounded as a result of the few minutes
blood lust of those in command of the soldiery on Sunday.


What a
grim comment upon the so-called impartiality of the Liberal Government!
What a telling indictment of the whole system of class rule upon which
the Government of these islands is conducted. What a striking refutation
of the theory that what is sauce for the Ulster goose would be sauce for
the 


---

p.410


 Irish gander. Here we have a demonstration—a
demonstration written in blood—that the ruling classes of those
countries are one in heart and sentiment, whether they call themselves
Tory or Liberal; that in the last analysis the rule of the classes is
founded upon the sword, and that no petty quarrel amongst themselves
over methods of ruling is going to make them tolerate the idea of guns
getting into the hands of slaves who cannot be trusted to use them in
the interests of their masters. Liberal and Tory may quarrel over
methods by which class rule should be maintained, but Liberal and Tory
are at one in the determination that maintained it must be, and that no
effective organisations of force should be allowed amongst those who
might question it or destroy it. The Dublin workers have shewn in the
near past that they are not willing slaves, political or social, and
that not even the necessity of the struggle for political freedom can
make them abandon their individual liberties, or weaken their fearless
democracy. Hence it became imperative in the interests of the ruling
tyrants that these guns should be prevented from remaining in the hands
of such men. It was felt that even John Redmond might not be able to
resist the appeal for a forward move made by men with guns in their
hands, and it was realised that this concept of an armed democracy,
inspired by democratic ideas and stirred by social unrest, was a menace
to the class rule for which governments exist. Hence the attempt to
disarm the Volunteers of Dublin and hence the fresh massacre of the
Dublin workers.


Brave, heroic, Dublin! Ever battling for the
right, ever suffering, ever consecrating by the blood of your children
the weary milestones of the path of progress. A year ago the Capitalist
class let loose its wolves and slanderers upon you, jailed, batoned and
murdered your sons and daughters, but were unable to destroy your holy
aspirations for freedom. To-day the Government of that class once more
spring at your throat; once more the blood of your children is shed in
the 


---

p.411


 streets, and even some of your misguided children who
cheered on that Government in its outrage of a year ago are now
ruthlessly slaughtered by that same Government.


Magnificent
Dublin! As you emerged with spirit unbroken and heart undaunted from
your industrial tribulation, so you will arise mightier and more united
from the midst of the military holocaust with which this Government of
all the treacheries meets your plans for political freedom.


Labour will not be swept off its feet in this crush. But Labour sees
that all its antagonisms to this Government were more than justified,
hears now that even the critics of Labour unite in declaring that no
more unscrupulous Government ever held sway in this country, and that
the only real hope of the people is in the strength of the people. For

> 1. Behind all kings and governments,
> all presidents and law,
>   
> Stand army corps and commoners to keep
> the world in awe;
>   
> For sword-strong races rule the earth and ride
> the conqueror's car,
>   
> And liberty has ne'er been won except by
> deeds of war.
> 




- Forward , August 1, 1914.



---

p.412


OUR DUTY IN THIS CRISIS
-----------------------



What should be the
attitude to the working-class democracy of Ireland in face of the
present crisis? I wish to emphasise the fact that the question is
addressed to the ‘working-class democracy’ because
I believe that it would be worse than foolish—it would be a crime
against all our hopes and aspirations—to take counsel in this
matter from any other source.


Mr. John E. Redmond has just earned
the plaudits of all the bitterest enemies of Ireland and slanderers of
the Irish race by declaring, in the name of Ireland, that the British
Government can now safely withdraw all its garrisons from Ireland, and
that the Irish slaves will guarantee to protect the Irish estate of
England until their masters come back to take possession—a
statement that announces to all the world that Ireland has at last
accepted as permanent this status of a British province. Surely no
inspiration can be sought from that source.


The advanced
Nationalists have neither a policy nor a leader. During the Russian
Revolution such of their Press as existed in and out of Ireland, as well
as their spokesmen, orators and writers vied with each other in
laudation of Russia and vilification of all the Russian enemies of
Czardom. It was freely asserted that Russia was the natural enemy of
England; that the heroic revolutionalists were in the pay of the English
Government and that every true Irish patriot ought to pray for the
success of the armies of the Czar. Now, as I, amongst other Irish
Socialists, predicted all along, when the exigencies of diplomacy makes
it suitable, the Russian bear and the English lion are hunting together
and every victory for the Czar's Cossacks is a victory for the
paymasters of those King's Own Scottish Borderers who, but the other
day, murdered the people of 


---

p.413


 Dublin in cold blood. Surely
the childish intellects that conceived of the pro-Russian campaign of
nine years ago cannot give us light and leading in any campaign for
freedom from the British allies of Russia to-day? It is well to remember
also that in this connection since 1909 the enthusiasm for the Russians
was replaced in the same quarter by as blatant a propaganda in favour of
the German War Lord. But since the guns did begin to speak in reality
this propaganda had died out in whispers, whilst without a protest, the
manhood of Ireland was pledged to armed warfare against the very power
our advanced Nationalist friends have wasted so much good ink in
acclaiming.


Of late, sections of the advanced Nationalist press
have lent themselves to a desperate effort to misrepresent the position
of the Carsonites, and to claim for them the admiration of Irish
Nationalists on the grounds that these Carsonites were fearless Irishmen
who had refused to take dictation from England. A more devilishly
mischievous and lying doctrine was never preached in Ireland. The
Carsonite position is indeed plain—so plain that nothing but sheer
perversity of purpose can misunderstand it, or cloak it with a
resemblance to Irish patriotism. The Carsonites say that their fathers
were planted in this country to assist in keeping the natives down in
subjection that this country might be held for England. That this was
God's will because the Catholic Irish were not fit for the
responsibilities and powers of free men and that they are not fit for
the exercise of these responsibilities and powers till this day.
Therefore, say the Carsonites, we have kept our side of the bargain; we
have refused to admit the Catholics to power and responsibility; we have
manned the government of this country for England, we propose to
continue to do so, and rather than admit that these
Catholics—these ‘mickies and
teagues’—are our equals, we will fight,
in the hope that our fighting will cause the English people to revolt
against their government and re-establish us in our historic position as
an 


---

p.414


 English colony in Ireland, superior to, and unhampered
by, the political institutions of the Irish natives.


How this can
be represented as the case of Irishmen refusing to take dictation from
England passeth all comprehension. It is rather the case of a community
in Poland, after 250 years colonisation, still refusing to adopt the
title of natives, and obstinately clinging to the position and
privileges of a dominant colony. Their programme is summed up in the
expression which forms the dominant note of all their speeches, sermons
and literature: 
> 
> We are loyal British subjects. We hold
> this country for England. England cannot desert us.
> 
> 
> 




What light or leading then can Ireland get from
the hysterical patriots who so egregiously misrepresent this fierce
contempt for Ireland as something that ought to win the esteem of
Irishmen?


What ought to be the attitude of the working-class
democracy of Ireland in face of the present crisis?


In the first
place, then, we ought to clear our minds of all the political cant which
would tell us that we have either ‘natural enemies’
or ‘natural allies’ in any of the powers now
warring. When it is said that we ought to unite to protect our shores
against the ‘foreign enemy’ I confess to be unable
to follow that line of reasoning, as I know of no foreign enemy of this
country except the British Government and know that it is not the
British Government that is meant.[18](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note018.html'))


In the second place we ought to seriously
consider that the evil effects of this war upon Ireland will be simply
incalculable, that it will cause untold suffering and misery amongst the
people, and that as this misery and suffering have been brought upon us
because of our enforced partisanship with a nation whose government
never consulted us in the matter, we are therefore perfectly at liberty
morally to make any bargain we 


---

p.415


 may see fit, or that may
present itself in the course of events.


Should a German army land
in Ireland to-morrow we would be perfectly justified in joining it if by
doing so we could rid this country once and for all from its connection
with the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly into this war.


Should the working class of Europe, rather than slaughter each other
for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed to-morrow to erect
barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the
transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly
justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid
to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the
world.


But pending either of these consummations it is our
manifest duty to take all possible action to save the poor from the
horrors this war has in store.


Let it be remembered that there is
no natural scarcity of food in Ireland. Ireland is an agricultural
country, and can normally feed all her people under any sane system of
things. But prices are going up in England and hence there will be an
immense demand for Irish produce. To meet that demand all nerves will be
strained on this side, the food that ought to feed the people of Ireland
will be sent out of Ireland in greater quantities than ever and *famine prices will come in Ireland to be immediately
followed by famine itself*. Ireland will starve, or rather the
townspeople of Ireland will starve, that the British army and navy and
jingoes may be fed. Remember, the Irish farmer like all other farmers
will benefit by the high prices of the war, but these high prices will
mean starvation to the labourers in the towns. But without these
labourers the farmers' produce cannot leave Ireland without the help of
a garrison that England cannot now spare. We must consider at once
whether it will not be our duty to refuse to allow agricultural produce
to leave Ireland until provision is made for the Irish working
class.


Let us not shrink from the consequences. This may mean 


---

p.416


 more than a transport strike, it may mean armed battling in the
streets to keep in this country the food for our people. But whatever it
may mean it must not be shrunk from. It is the immediately feasible
policy of the working-class democracy, the answer to all the weaklings
who in this crisis of our country's history stand helpless and
bewildered crying for guidance, when they are not hastening to betray
her.


Starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European
conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last
capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of
the last war lord.


- Irish Worker , August 8, 1914*.*



---

p.417


ON
GERMAN MILITARISM
--------------------


Finally, as a word of warning. Do not let
anyone play upon your sympathies by denunciation of the German military
bullies. German military bullies, like all tyrannies among civilised
people need fear nothing so much as native (German) democracy. Attacks
from outside only strengthen tyrants within a nation. If we had to
choose between strengthening the German bully or the Russian autocrat
the wise choice would be on the side of the German. For the German
people are a highly civilised people, responsive to every progressive
influence, and rapidly forging weapons of their own emancipation from
native tyranny, whereas the Russian Empire stretches away into the
depths of Asia, and relies on an army largely recruited from amongst
many millions of barbarians who have not yet felt the first softening
influence of civilisation. German thought is abreast of the best in the
world; German influences have shaped for good the hopes of the world,
but the thought and the hopes of the best in Russia was but the other
day drowned in blood by Russia's worst.


To help Britain is to
help Russia to the dominance of Europe, to help the barbarian to crush
the scientist. That is the reflection of the wise revolutionist of
to-day.


Meanwhile the Orange enemy of Irish freedom wisely stays
at home and conserves his forces, and the Irish Nationalist is
encouraged by his leaders to rush abroad and shed his blood in a quarrel
not his own, the simplest elements of which he does not understand.


- Irish Worker , August 22, 1914.



---

p.418


THE WAR UPON THE GERMAN NATION
------------------------------


Now that the first
drunkenness of the war fever is over, and the contending forces are
locked in deadly combat upon the battlefield, we may expect that the
sobering effect of the reports from the front will help to restore
greater sanity to the minds of the people. There are thousands of Irish
homes to-day from which, deluded by the foolish declaration of Mr.
Redmond that Ireland was as one with the Empire in this struggle, and
the still more foolish and criminal war whoops of the official Home Rule
press, there went forth sons and fathers to recruit the armies of
England. If to those thousands of Irish homes from which the call of Mr.
Redmond drew forth young Irishmen we add the tens of thousands of homes
from which reservists were drawn, we have a vast number of Irish homes
in which from this day forward gibbering fear and heartbreaking anxiety
will be constantly present—forever present at the fireside,
unbidden guests at the table, loathsome spectres in the darkness
grinning from the pillows and the coverlet.


Each day some one of
these homes, some days thousands of these homes will be stricken from
the field of battle, and news will come home that this young son or that
loving father has met his doom, and out there under a foreign sky the
mangled remains, twisted, blown and gashed by inconceivable wounds will
lie, each of them in all their ghastly horror crying out to Heaven for
vengeance upon the political tricksters who lured them to their
fate.


Poor and hunger-harassed as are the members of the Irish
Transport & General Workers' Union, is there one of them who
to-day has not a happier position and a clearer conscience than the
so-called leaders of the Irish race, who are responsible 


---

p.419



for deluding into enlisting to fight England's battles the thousands of
Irish youths whose corpses will ere many months be manuring the soil of
a foreign country, or whose mangled bodies will be contemptuously tossed
home to starve—a burden and a horror to all their kith and
kin?


Read this report from the Daily
News and Leaderof the 25th inst. of the statement of an
Alsatian peasant who saw some of the fighting in Alsace. He says:

> 
> The effects of artillery fire are terrific. The shells
> burst, and where you formerly saw a heap of soldiers you then see a heap
> of corpses or a number of figures writhing on the ground, torn and
> mutilated by the exploded fragments.
> 
> 
> 




And when
you have read that then think of the many thousands of our
boys—for God help us and them, they are still our brave Irish boys
though deluded into fighting for the oppressor—around whom such
shells will be falling by day and by night for many a long month to
come. Think of them, and think also of the multitude of brave German
boys who never did any harm to them or to us, but who rather loved us
and our land, and our tongue and our ancient literature, and consider
that those boys of ours will be busy sending shot and shell and rifle
ball into their midst, murdering and mangling German lives and limbs,
widowing humble German women, orphaning helpless German children.


Such reflections will perhaps open the way for the more sane frame of
mind I spoke of at the beginning of this article. To help in clarifying
the thought of our people that such sanity may be fruitful in greater
national as well as individual wisdom, permit me, then, to present a few
facts to those whose attitude upon the war has been so far determined by
the criminal jingoism of the daily press. I wish to try and trace *the real origin of this war upon the German nation*,
for despite all the truculent shouts of a venal press and conscienceless
politicians, 


---

p.420


 this war is not a war upon German militarism,
but upon the industrial activity of the German nation.


If the
reader was even slightly acquainted with the history of industry in
Europe he would know that as a result of the discovery of steam as a
motive power, and the consequent development of machine industry
depending upon coal, Great Britain towards the close of the eighteenth
century began to dominate the commercial life of the world. Her large
coal supply helped her to this at a time when the coal supply of other
countries had not yet been discovered or exploited. Added to this was
the fact that the ruling class of England by a judicious mixing in
European struggles, by a dexterous system of alliances and a thoroughly
unscrupulous use of her sea power was able to keep the Continent
continually embroiled in war whilst her own shores were safe. Whilst the
cities and towns of other countries were constantly the prey of rival
armies, their social life crushed under the cannon wheels of contending
forces, and their brightest young men compelled to give to warfare the
intellect that might have enriched their countries by industrial
achievements, England was able peacefully to build up her industries, to
spread her wings of commerce, and to become the purveyor-general of
manufactured goods to the civilised and uncivilised nations of the
world. In her own pet phrase she was ‘the workshop of
the world’, and other nations were but as so many agricultural
consumers of the products of England's factories and workshops.


Obviously such a state of matters was grossly artificial and
unnatural. It could not be supposed by reasonable men that the civilised
nations would be content to remain for ever in such a condition of
tutelage or dependence. Rather was it certain that self-respecting
nations would begin to realise that the industrial over-lordship by
England of Europe meant the continued dependence of Europe upon
England—a most humiliating condition of affairs.




---

p.421


So other nations began quietly to challenge the unquestioned
supremacy of England in the markets. They began first to produce for
themselves what they had hitherto relied upon England to produce for
them, and passed on from that to enter into competition with English
goods in the markets of the world. Foremost and most successful European
nation in this endeavour to escape from thraldom of dependence upon
England's manufactures stands the German nation. To this contest in the
industrial world it brought all the resources of science and
systematised effort. Early learning that an uneducated people is
necessarily an inferior people, the German nation attacked the work of
educating its children with such success that it is now universally
admitted that the Germans are the best educated people in Europe. Basing
its industrial effort upon an educated working class, it accomplished in
the workshop results that this half-educated working class of England
could only wonder at. That English working class trained to a slavish
subservience to rule-of-thumb methods, and under managers wedded to
traditional processes saw themselves gradually outclassed by a new rival
in whose service were enrolled the most learned scientists co-operating
with the most educated workers in mastering each new problem as it
arose, and unhampered by old traditions, old processes or old equipment.
In this fruitful marriage of science and industry the Germans were
pioneers, and if it seemed that in starting both they became unduly
handicapped it was soon realised that if they had much to learn they had
at least nothing to unlearn, whereas the British remained hampered at
every step by the accumulated and obsolete survivals of past industrial
traditions.


Despite the long hold that England has upon industry,
despite her pre-emption of the market, despite the influence of her
far-flung empire, German competition became more and more a menace to
England's industrial supremacy; more and 


---

p.422


 more German goods
took the place of English. Some few years ago the cry of ‘Protection’ was raised in England in the hopes that
English trade would be thus saved by a heavy customs duty against
imported commodities. But it was soon realised that as England was
chiefly an exporting country a tax upon imported goods would not save
her industrial supremacy. From the moment that realisation entered into
the minds of the British capitalist we may date the inception of this
war.


It was determined that since Germany could not be beaten in
fair competition industrially, it must be beaten unfairly by organising
a military and naval conspiracy against her. British methods and British
capitalism might be inferior to German methods and German capitalism;
German scientists aided by German workers might be superior to British
workers and tardy British science, but the British fleet was still
superior to the German in point of numbers and weight of artillery.
Hence it was felt that if the German nation could be ringed round with
armed foes upon its every frontier until the British fleet could strike
at its ocean-going commerce, then German competition would be crushed
and the supremacy of England in commerce ensured for another generation.
The conception meant calling up the forces of barbaric powers to crush
and hinder the development of the peaceful powers of industry. It was a
conception worthy of fiends, but what do you expect? You surely do not
expect the roses of honour and civilisation to grow on the thorn tree of
capitalist competition—and that tree planted in the soil of a
British ruling class.


But what about the independence of Belgium?
Aye, what about it?


Remember that the war found England
thoroughly prepared, Germany totally unprepared. That the British fleet
was already mobilised on a scale never attempted in times of peace, and
the German fleet was scattered in isolated units all over the seven
seas. That all the leading British commanders were at home 


---

p.423



ready for the emergency, and many German and Austrian officers, such as
Slatin Pasha, have not been able to get home yet. Remember all this and
realise how it reveals that the whole plan was ready prepared; and hence
that the cry of ‘Belgium’ was a mere subterfuge to
hide the determination to crush in blood the peaceful industrial
development of the German nation. Already the British press is chuckling
with joy over the capture of German trade. All capitalist journals in
England boast that the Hamburg-American Line will lose all its steamers,
valued at twenty-millions sterling. You know what that means! It means
that a peaceful trade built up by peaceful methods is to be struck out
of the hands of its owners by the sword of an armed pirate. You remember
the words of John Mitchel descriptive of the British Empire, as ‘a
pirate empire, robbing and plundering upon the high seas’.


Understand the game that is afoot, the game that Christian England is
playing, and when next you hear apologists for capitalism tell of the
wickedness of Socialists in proposing to ‘confiscate’ property*,*
remember the plans of British and Irish capitalists to steal German
trade—the fruits of German industry and German science.


Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of
the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class. The British
capitalist class have planned this colossal crime in order to ensure its
uninterrupted domination of the commerce of the world. To achieve that
end it is prepared to bathe a continent in blood, to kill off the flower
of the manhood of the three most civilised great nations of Europe, to
place the iron heel of the Russian tyrant upon the throat of all
liberty-loving races and peoples from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and
to invite the blessing of God upon the spectacle of the savage Cossack
ravishing the daughters of a race at the head of Christian
civilisation.


Yes, this war is the war of a pirate upon the
German nation.




---

p.424


And up from the blood-soaked graves
of the Belgian frontiers the spirits of murdered Irish soldiers of
England call to Heaven for vengeance upon the Parliamentarian tricksters
who seduced them into the armies of the oppressor of their country.


- Irish Worker , August 29, 1914.



---

p.425


THE GERMAN OR THE BRITISH EMPIRE?
---------------------------------


**The following reply to a correspondent is a
terse summary of Connolly's views in the two preceding
articles*.*


Nothing warms the cockles of my old heart so
much as when some British Socialist kind-heartedly approves of my
attitude—approves of it ‘except’, ‘but’, and ‘only for’.
Especially am I pleased when I learn from his letter that he has only read one copy
of the Workers' Republic, is only
just arrived in Ireland, but nevertheless understands our position
thoroughly, and is only filled with pity for the ‘sweet
innocence’ that inspires our little mistakes in such matters as a
desire to vindicate the character of the enemies of the British
capitalist Government.


Perhaps after he has been here as many
years as he has been days he will begin to understand that the instinct
of the slave to take sides with whoever is the enemy of his own
particular slave-driver is a healthy instinct, and makes for freedom.
That every Socialist who knows what he is talking about must be in
favour of freedom of the seas, must desire that private property shall
be immune from capture at sea during war, must realise that as long as
any one nation dominates the water highways of the world neither peace
nor free industrial development is possible for the world. If the
capitalists of other nations desire the freedom of the seas for selfish
*reasons* of their own that does not affect
the matter. Every Socialist anxiously awaits and prays for that full
development of the capitalist system which can alone make Socialism
possible, but can only come into being by virtue of the efforts of the
capitalists inspired by selfish reasons.


The German Empire is a
homogeneous Empire of self-governing 


---

p.426


 peoples; the British
Empire is a heterogeneous collection in which a very small number of
self-governing communities connive at the subjugation, by force, of a
vast number of despotically ruled subject populations.


We do not
wish to be ruled by either empire, but we certainly believe that the
first named contains in germ more of the possibilities of freedom and
civilisation than the latter.


- Workers' Republic , March 18, 1916.



---

p.427


THE REAL SITUATION IN
IRELAND
-----------------------------


In these days of conflict Ireland occupies a unique
position. For the first time in history an Irish leader has publicly
pledged the support of the Irish nation to Great Britain in an armed
struggle. But it would be a mistake to imagine that his act has indeed
received the universal assent the newspapers claim. On the contrary,
there is a very strong and influential body of opinion in the country
which holds that the act of Mr. Redmond in proffering to the Government
the armed co-operation of the Volunteers was an act sadly lacking in the
first principles of statesmanship. It is felt and freely asserted by
that section that Mr. Redmond gave too much and got too little in
return; indeed, it is stated that he got nothing in return. His offer of
co-operation with the Ulster Volunteers has been laughed at by that
body, and the Government on its part had not promised to withdraw the
Amending Bill, nor yet to modify it in any way favourable to the
Nationalists.


Great Britain was about to engage in the greatest
war in her history, in a war that must inevitably strain her every
resource—military and commercial—and she found herself in
this position at the very moment when Ireland possessed a large force of
men drilled and organised on a military basis and partially armed. When,
at the close of Sir Edward Grey's speech, and *the* pronouncements of Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. Asquith*,* the assembled Tories and Liberals in the
House of Commons began to clamour for ‘Redmond,
Redmond’, it was a recognition of the fact that Ireland was in a
strong tactical position. Had Mr. Redmond at that moment sat still and
let them clamour away, had he refused to be drawn into speech at that
juncture, it is felt that before the night was over he would have been
able to dictate his terms to the Government. Or had he 


---

p.428


 been
desirous to avoid seeming haste, and called in Ireland a Convention of
his followers, or preferably of the Volunteers, to consider what action
should be taken in view of the war, it is certain that such concessions
would have been made by the Government as would have been infinitely
preferable even to the Home Rule Bill in its present form.


But
the malign spirit that prompted Mr. Redmond to capture the Volunteers
and make himself solely responsible for its activity now impelled him to
rush into speech and commit the whole people of Ireland to aggressive
warfare upon Germany, solely upon Mr. Redmond's own responsibility or
the responsibility of his Party, and without being able even to indicate
any gain as a *quid pro quo*
for their action.


At first the country seemed quite swept off its
feet by this action. All the kept newspapers of the United Irish League
immediately constituted themselves recruiting agents for the British
Army, and every effort was made to stampede the Volunteers into
unconditional acceptance of Mr. Redmond's blatant offer. Many thousands
of recruits were obtained for the British Army during the first week or
fortnight of the jingo fever promoted by the Home Rule press and
wirepullers, companies of Irish Volunteers marched in parade order to
see reservists off by the train and ship, their bands, to the
astonishment of everyone and the horror of most, played
‘God Save the King’, and all sorts of erstwhile
rack-renting landlords and anti-Irish aristocrats rushed in to officer
these Irish Volunteers whom they had formerly despised. But gradually
the nation is swinging back to sanity. The independent elements are
everywhere asserting themselves, and there has already developed a
fierce fight to prevent the Irish Volunteers being—as Mr. Redmond
intended—handed over to the War Office.


Up to the time of
writing, the Provisional Committee of the Irish Volunteers has stood
firm. They have refused the offer of the War Office to supply officers
to the Irish Volunteers, and 


---

p.429


 insisted upon being officered
by men of their own choosing under their own control, and they have
stated that they prefer to buy and own their own arms rather than get
them from Lord Kitchener and know that they are subject to his
recall.


Along with this a strong propaganda is being carried on
showing that Ireland has no quarrel with the German nation; that on the
contrary, Irish culture and Irish literature owe very much indeed to
German friendship and to German research.


Upon the economic field
a common ground has been found which is going far towards uniting all
the unofficial parties and providing a common basis of action for all
whose love of country as more than a political shibboleth, and for all
whose conception of freedom is wider than is indicated by a mere change
in administrative methods. This common ground is furnished by the
question of the foodstuffs. It is realised that Ireland is able to
sustain herself with her own food, but that the demand for food to feed
the army and to provision Great Britain will lead to an enormous
increase of prices and, perhaps to famine in the Irish towns.


The
Irish farmer will sell gladly, but the prices he will obtain from the
Government will send up the cost upon the poorly paid Irish workers in
urban areas, and it is feared that should provisions not be available in
Great Britain, should any of the trade routes be closed and grain and
agricultural produce generally not be available in sufficient
quantities, the British Government would commandeer the foodstuffs of
Ireland as ruthlessly as it commandeered the railways during the
dispatch of the Expeditionary Force of the past two weeks. It is
determined on all hands that should this be done resistance will be
offered, and the export of this food fought against even to the extent
of armed resistance.


- Forward , September 5, 1914.



---

p.430


THE FRIENDS OF SMALL NATIONALITIES
----------------------------------


The
‘war on behalf of small nationalities’ is still going
merrily on in the newspapers. That great champion of oppressed races;
Russia, is pouring her armies into East Prussia and offering freedom and
deliverance to all and sundry if they will only take up arms on her
behalf—without undue delay. She is to be the judge after the war
as to whether they did or did not delay unduly . . ..


. . .. The Russian
Socialists have issued a strong manifesto denouncing the war, and
pouring contempt upon the professions of the Czar in favour of oppressed
races, pointing out his suppression of the liberties of Finland, his
continued martyrdom of Poland, his atrocious tortures and massacres in
the Baltic provinces, and his withdrawal of the recently granted
parliamentary liberties of Russia. And to that again add the fact that
the Polish Nationalists have warned the Poles against putting any faith
in a man who has proven himself incapable of keeping his solemnly
pledged faith with his own people, and you will begin to get a saner
view of the great game that is being played than you can ever acquire
from the lying press of Ireland and England.


Of course, that
should not blind you to the splendid stand which the British Government,
we are assured, is making against German outrages and brutality and in
favour of small nationalities. The Russian Government is admitted by
every publicist in England to be a foul blot upon civilisation. It was
but the other day that when the Russian Duma was suppressed by force and
many of its elected representatives imprisoned and exiled, an English
Cabinet Minister defiantly declared in public, in spite of international
courtesies:


‘The Duma is dead! Long live the Duma’!




---

p.431


But all that is forgotten now, and the Russian Government
and the British Government stand solidly together in favour of small
nationalities everywhere except in countries now under Russian and
British rule.


Yes, I seem to remember a small country called
Egypt, a country that through ages of servitude has painfully evolved to
a conception of national freedom, and under leaders of its own choosing
essayed to make that conception a reality. And I think I remember how
this British friend of small nationalities bombarded its chief seaport,
invaded and laid waste its territory, slaughtered its armies, imprisoned
its citizens, led its chosen leaders away in chains, and reduced the
new-born Egyptian nation into a conquered, servile British province.


And I think I remember how, having murdered this new-born soul of
nationality amongst the Egyptian people, it signalised its victory by
the ruthless hanging at Denshawai of a few helpless peasants who dared
to think their pigeons were not made for the sport of British
officers.[19](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note019.html'))


Also,
if my memory is not playing me strange tricks, I remember reading of a
large number of small nationalities in India, whose evolution towards a
more perfect civilisation in harmony with the genius of their race, was
ruthlessly crushed in blood, whose lands were stolen, whose education
was blighted, whose women were left to the brutal lusts of the
degenerate soldiery of the British Raj.


Over my vision comes also
grim remembrances of two infant republics in South Africa, and I look on
the map in vain for them to-day. I remember that the friend of small
nationalities waged war upon them—a war of insolent aggression at
the instance of financial bloodsuckers. Britain sent her troops to
subjugate them, to wipe them off the map; and although they resisted
until the veldt ran red with British and Boer blood, the end of the war
saw two small nationalities less in the world.


When I read the
attempts of the prize Irish press to work up 


---

p.432


 feeling
against the Germans by talk of German outrages at the front, I wonder if
those who swallow such yarns ever remember the facts about the exploits
of the British generals in South Africa. When we are told of the horrors
of Louvain, when the only damage that was done was the result of
civilians firing upon German troops from buildings which those troops
had in consequence to attack, I remember that in South Africa Lord
Roberts issued an order that whenever there was an attack upon the
railways in his line of communication every Boer house and farmstead
within a radius of ten square miles had to be destroyed.


When I
hear of the unavoidable killing of civilians in a line of battle 100
miles long in a densely populated country, being of, as it were, part of
the German plan of campaign, I remember how the British swept up the
whole non-combatant Boer population into concentration camps, and kept
it there until the little children died in thousands of fever and
cholera; so that the final argument in causing the Boers to make peace
was the fear that at the rate of infant mortality in those concentration
camps there would be no new generation left to inherit the republic in
which their elders were fighting.


This vicious and rebellious
memory of mine will also recur to the recent attempt of Persia to form a
constitutional government, and it recalls how, when that ancient nation
shook off the fetters of its ancient despotism, and set to work to
elaborate the laws and forms in the spirit of a modern civilised
representative state, Russia, which in solemn treaty with England had
guaranteed its independence, at once invaded it, and slaughtering all
its patriots, pillaging its towns and villages, annexed part of its
territories, and made the rest a mere Russian dependency. I remember how
Sir Edward Grey, who now gushes over the sanctity of treaties, when
appealed to to stand by and make Russia stand by the treaty guaranteeing
the independence of Persia, coolly refused to interfere.




---

p.433


Oh, yes, they are great fighters for small nationalities,
great upholders of the sanctity of treaties!


And the Irish Home
Rule press knows this, knows all these things that a poor workman like
myself remembers knows them all, and is cowardly and guiltily silent,
and viciously and fiendishly evil.


Let us hope that all Ireland
will not some day have to pay an awful price for the lying attacks of
the Home Rule press upon the noble German nation.


Let our readers
encourage and actively spread every paper, circular, leaflet or
manifesto which in these dark days dares to tell the truth.


Thus
our honour may be saved; thus the world may learn that the Home Rule
press is but a sewer-pipe for the pouring of English filth upon the
shores of Ireland.


- Irish Worker , September 12, 1914.



---

p.434


SOME PERVERTED BATTLE
LINES
---------------------------


Nothing is more remarkable in this war than the manner
in which the ruling class in the countries of the Triple Alliance have
appropriated and used for their own purposes every phrase and rallying
cry that their political opponents had coined against them. For years
the Socialists have preached against war, and preached with such
vehemence and argumentative persuasiveness that their anti-militarist
campaign had profoundly influenced public opinion in Europe and raised
hopes that the era of international blood-letting was past. Vain
delusion! As soon as the capitalist class of England concluded that the
time was ripe for the destruction of their German competitors, so far
from finding the Peace campaign of the Socialists a hindrance it
proceeded to use it as a useful asset in the militarist business. With
perfectly fiendish and sardonic humour it took up the rallying cries of
the Peace Party and used them as its very own. It called upon the Labour
Parties, the Socialists, the humanitarians among the Liberals and
Radicals to rally to the aid of the British army to
‘make war upon war’, to ‘put an end to
militarism’, to ‘bring peace on earth and goodwill
among men’ at the point of British bayonets and to sweep German
commerce *off* the seas as a preliminary
to establishing brotherhood with the German peoples. With the honourable
exceptions of the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Labour
Party, the organised and unorganised Labour advocates of Peace in Great
Britain swallowed the bait and are now beating the war drums and
hounding their brothers on to the butchery of their German
comrades—and hounding them on with the cant of fraternity on their
lips.




---

p.435


For a generation the French Government has
made war upon the secular power of the Catholic Church in France. It
abolished the Concordat between Church and State, made public property
of the churches, did away with religious teaching in its schools,
removed all religious emblems from its courts of law and public
buildings, seized and auctioned off property the Church claimed as its
own, and exercised its power with such relentlessness that many
religious orders abandoned the country and removed themselves and all
their belongings to Ireland, America, Belgium and other more friendly
countries. Whether it was in its right or not, is immaterial—the
material point is that in its defence the Church through all its organs
represented France as a Godless Atheistical country which God in His own
good time would doubtless punish in order to avenge His persecuted
faithful.


But when it became necessary to go to war with Germany,
France joined England in raising a newspaper wail over the sufferings of
‘poor Catholic Belgium’, planted machine guns in
the churches at Louvain and field artillery before the Cathedral at
Rheims, and when the Germans in self-defence trained their own artillery
upon these sacred buildings in order to destroy the French fire the
resultant damage was made the basis of an allegation that the Germans
were making war upon religion which the pious French Government were
nobly defending. To aid this business of representing this French
Government as noble crusaders in defence of the Catholic faith hundreds
of little Belgium children have been deported to Great Britain and
Ireland, and are now being scattered up and down the land so that
Catholics may be moved by sympathy with their suffering to go out and
fight for the French Government, which a few months ago they were being
taught to curse in the name of Catholicity.


Just as the peace
campaign in England became a weapon in the hands of the war party, so
the Catholic propaganda in 


---

p.436


 Ireland and England has been
made a valuable tool in the services of the freethinking rulers of
France.


The small conquered nations of Europe have in a thousand
ways fought to propagate the idea of nationality, to emphasise the value
of small nations and their special contributions to civilisation. Part
and parcel of their propaganda has of necessity been directed against
those two Empires which in Europe stand alone in the unenviable position
of suppressing national existences and insisting upon small nations
conforming to the mould in which these empires would cast them. But as
soon as these two empires, England and Russia—the only two empires
in Europe, we repeat, which do not respect the formation of small
empires[20](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note020.html'))
within their borders—as soon as England and Russia go to war they,
with the effrontery of a Satan, raise the slogans of small nationalities
as their battle cries, and call upon the world to admire them as the
deliverers of the oppressed nations.


And to crown all we see
Ireland, which for centuries has whined to Europe for relief against
England, now being led by its elected leader to fight for England, that
the British Empire might continue to keep its navy as a sword at the
throat of Europe


The irony of it all.


- Irish Worker , September 26, 1914.



---

p.437


RULING BY FOOLING: ‘HOME RULE ON THE
STATUTE BOOK’
--------------------------------------------------


The greatest strategic move by the British
Forces this week took place, not on the fields of Belgium or France, but
on the floor of the House of Commons. In that fortress the forces of the
enemy are too firmly entrenched to fear defeat, and therefore their
strategic move was crowned with brilliant success. The problem was not
how to defeat a nation in arms battling for all that makes life worth
living, but how to fool a nation without arms into becoming the
accomplice of its oppressor. And the strategic move in question is
already being hailed as a great landmark of national progress.


As
the reader guesses I am alluding to the great debate on Home Rule, to
the great fight between Home Rulers and Unionists and the dramatic
march-out of Mr. Bonar Law and his followers. And as the reader must
also guess I believe the whole thing to have been a carefully-staged
pantomime to fool Nationalist Ireland. All the evidence points in that
direction. Listen. To any reader of the Irish
Worker who can point out any real difference between the
proposal of Messrs. Asquith and Redmond on the one hand and that of
Bonar Law and Carson on the other I will give the first brass farthing
with their name upon it I find floating down the Liffey on a
grindstone.


Now, Mr. Printer, will you please: put the proposals
of the two parties side by side that the readers might get an
opportunity of judging them apart from the lying rant of the Party
Press:—




---

p.438





| CARSON'S PROPOSAL | ASQUITH-REDMOND
PROPOSAL |
| --- | --- |
| That the Home Rule Bill should not
be put on the statute book until the end of the war, and should then be
considered along with an Amending Bill. | That the Home
Rule Bill should be put on the statute book, but ‘no steps taken to
put it into practical operation’ till the end of the war, when an
Amending Bill will be passed to ‘alter, modify and qualify’ its
provision. |






Again I ask, will some person
tell me please what is the difference? There is none! What, then, was
the reason for the great ‘scene’ in the House of Commons?


The reason, simpleton, why the reason is plain. When
Carson consented to encourage his Volunteers to enlist in return for a
promise on the part of the Government that the Home Rule Bill would be
hung up high and dry he had to agree not to betray the fact of the
compact to the public lest it destroy the chances of recruiting in the
Nationalist district. And for the same reason it was necessary that the
Tories who are delighted at Asquith's surrender should pretend to be
indignant. The scene in the House and the alleged disappointment of the
Tories will be a great help to recruiting. Lord Crewe declared

> 
> He was quite confident that when the Government of
> Ireland Bill had been placed on the Statute Book there would be a rush
> to enlist in the army on the part of the whole of Ireland. (Ministerial
> cheers).
> 
> 
> 




And the matchless leader of the Irish
race, John E. Redmond, alluding to the recruiting mission of Mr.
Asquith, hastened to hold out the same hopes of an inexhaustible supply
of Irish food for powder. He said 


---

p.439



> 
> The
> Premier had announced that he was going to address a meeting in Dublin.
> Let him beg him to go soon. He hoped to have the honour to stand on the
> platform beside him, and he could promise him that he would have an
> enthusiastic response to his appeal.
> 
> 
> 




The great
American humorist, Artemus Ward, declared during the American Civil War
that he was prepared to sacrifice all his wife's relations in the sacred
cause of the American Union. Our leaders are better than that. They are
prepared to sacrifice all the sons of the poor, and all the soul and
honour of their nation for the deferred promise of a shadow of
liberty.


And so the great scene in the House of Commons was but a
fresh staging of the old game of treachery and intrigue making its own
price with compromise and weakness: That is understandable, but that
compromise and weakness should masquerade as patriotism and
statesmanship is for Irishmen a humiliating confession.


Home Rule
is postponed until after the war. After the war the game will be
entirely in the hands of Sir Edward Carson, according to the following
words of Mr. Asquith 
> 
> It might be said that those whom
> Sir Edward Carson represented had been put at a disadvantage by the
> patriotic action they had taken. The employment of force for what was
> called the ‘coercion of Ulster’ was an absolutely
> unthinkable thing. As far as he and his colleagues were concerned it was
> a thing which they would never countenance or consider.
> 
> 
> 




These words were a plain intimation to the Orange
forces and their leader that if they stand firm they will win. A hint
they are surely wise enough to take.


Meanwhile the official Home
Rule press and all the local J.P.'s., publicans, land-grabbers,
pawnbrokers and slum landlords 


---

p.440


 who control the United Irish
League will strain every nerve in an endeavour to recruit for England's
army, to send forth more thousands of Irishmen and boys to manure with
their corpses the soil of a foreign country, to lose their lives and
their souls in the work of murdering men who never harboured an evil
thought of Irish men or women, to expend in the degradation of a
friendly nation that magnificent Irish courage which a wiser patriotism
might better employ in the liberation of their own.


Yes, ruling
by fooling, is a great British art—with great Irish fools to
practise on.


- Irish Worker , September 19, 1914.



---

p.441


REDMOND CANNOT DELIVER THE GOODS
--------------------------------


The
action of the Provisional Committee of the Irish Volunteers in
repudiating the nominees of Mr. John Redmond, and proceeding to re-take
that control which they ought never to have abandoned sent a thrill of
joy through the heart of every true man and woman in the country. It was
felt that the ground was at last being cleared for action, and that the
insidious attempt to betray the Volunteers into the clutch of the Empire
had received a staggering blow at the very outset of the campaign.


Never was the peril of Irish Nationality greater, never were the
forces of national and social freedom more in danger of death from moral
asphyxiation than at the outset of this Redmond-Asquith conspiracy.
Every force capable of influencing and confusing the people had been
corrupted successfully beforehand; the recruiters came with a carefully
doctored scheme of political liberty in the one hand and an enlistment
form in the other, and to all and sundry it was suggested that the
realisation of Ireland's hopes of political freedom depended upon her
response to the call to enlist in England's army. All through the
country the innumerable agencies, subject to manipulation at the hands
of the Home Rule wirepullers, were busy preparing the ground by whispers
and artfully-framed suggestions. It was freely alleged in the North that
Sir Edward Carson was in league with the Kaiser and that, therefore, it
was the duty of every Nationalist capable of bearing arms to enlist for
service against the Germans. To a people who have lived for generations
under the domination of Orangism as the Nationalists of North-East
Ulster have done, that was an almost irresistible appeal. And when it
was coupled with a declaration that ‘Home Rule was now upon the
Statute Book’ the poor workers of Belfast and district were
momentarily swept off their feet. No mention was made of the fact that
Mr. 


---

p.442


 Asquith had definitely promised that the Amending Bill
would go into operation as soon as the Home Rule Bill, nor yet that he
had pledged his word that the coercion of the Carsonites was to him and
his colleagues absolutely unthinkable; or, as it was excellently put by
the Provisional Committee, that they would not dream of coercing the
Unionists of Ulster, but that they were quite ready to coerce the
Nationalists of Ulster.


Not perhaps till the Great Day of
Reckoning will we discover how many thousands of brave young Irishmen
have been betrayed to their deaths on Continental battlefields by those
treacherous tactics of Redmond and Devlin and their local wirepullers.
But long ere that many thousands of Irish mothers, wives and children
will fervently curse the dastard leaders and newspapers whose lying
words induced their breadwinners to desert home and family to fight the
battles of the enemies of their class and country.


In the
remainder of Ireland the point depended upon most was the traditional
alliance with France, and the careful exploitation of the supposed
German atrocities upon Catholic churches in Belgium and France. The word
having been given as to the lines upon which the campaign of slander was
to be conducted, the Home Rule and Unionist Press vied with each other
in artful appeals to the sympathies of the Irish people. Never in the
history of warfare did any nation sink to such a dishonourable campaign
against the character of an enemy as Great Britain has sunk in this war.
I believe that the poster headed ‘Remember
Belgium’, and embellished by a supposed representation of a German
soldier standing upon the body of a prostrate woman, is the most
infamous public appeal to which any government lent its name.


All
this campaign was designed to find its crown and apex in the recruiting
meeting in the Mansion House. Observe the steps in the campaign. First
the Volunteers were threatened with a rival force, then their
Provisional Committee was packed 


---

p.443


 by Mr. Redmond with men
who were prepared to sell Ireland to the Empire, then all the forces at
their command were employed in order to corrupt the public mind and to
stampede into the pro-British ranks as many as possible. Then, from
pledging the help of the Volunteers to defend Ireland for the Empire,
Mr. Redmond proceeded to offer the Volunteers for service abroad, and
finally it was hoped by the Mansion House meeting to stampede the
Provisional Committee and bully, seduce or confuse the Volunteers into
an *en masse* enrolment as
soldiers of the British army. It was all well planned—the most
gigantic, deep-laid and loathsome attempt in history to betray the soul
of a people.


The unconquerable spirit of the Dublin Nationalists,
the acute political insight of the Dublin workers and the Napoleon-like
stroke of the old Provisional Committee in resuming control at the
psychological moment saved the situation for the country at large, as
the magnificently defiant demonstration at the head of Grafton and
Dawson streets by the Citizen Army, saved the situation for Dublin
itself.


We may now confidently expect the Redmondites to make the
fight of their lives to resume control of the Volunteer movement. For
that end they will flood the country with agents, for that end they will
spend money like water—and as it is in the cause of England they
will have money enough to spend—and for that end they will leave
no stone unturned, no slander unused, no man or woman's character
unassailed. It is a fight to a finish.


For some of us the finish
may be on the scaffold, for some in the prison cell, for others more
fortunate upon the battlefields of an Ireland in arms for a real
republican liberty. We bespeak for the Provisional Committee the support
of all ready to face whatever that fight may entail, in the
determination that we shall show the world that, though Redmond may sell
Ireland he cannot deliver the goods!


- Irish Worker , October 3, 1914.



---

p.444


A FORWARD POLICY FOR VOLUNTEERS
-------------------------------


I wish to-day to
write something about the necessity of a ‘Forward’
policy for the Irish Volunteers and all those who agree with the revolt
of that body against the unscrupulous intrigues of the official Home
Rule Party. That some Forward policy must be evolved, and when evolved,
acted upon with swiftness and determination, must surely be clear to
anyone who understands the present situation in Ireland. The Redmondite
forces are at work all over the country in an endeavour to recapture
their lost prestige, and to demonstrate their ability to deliver the
goods to the British Empire in the shape of lusty young Irishmen to
swell the ranks of its sorely depleted army. No stone will be left
unturned. North, South, East and West the emissaries are already at work
spreading insidious lies, retailing unprintable slanders, inventing
every hour fresh excuses for, and explanations of, the transformation of
Irish M.P.'s into English recruiting sergeants.


The scriptural
injunction to be all things to all men is being interpreted and
practised by these agents of Messrs. Redmond and Devlin in a thousand
ways unthought of by the holy writer. To those who really believe that
Ireland is irrevocably bound by nature and destiny to the car of the
British Empire these agents whisper that every effort must be made to
secure an Irish Brigade to serve at the front, that Ireland's credit as
a loyal part of that Empire may be firmly established in the British
mind. To those whose loyalty to all the high ideals that Irish
Nationalism has hitherto stood for makes service in England's army seem
an act of treason to Ireland, the agents of Messrs. Redmond and Devlin
whisper that this appeal for recruits is all a stage play, that the
‘Party’ does not want the Volunteers to enlist, that
they only make that call in order not 


---

p.445


 to be outdone by
Carson, and that if the Volunteers will only affirm their loyalty to
Redmond they are welcome to stay at home as much as they like. No
mention is made to these Volunteers of the hundreds of young Irishmen
who have taken Messrs. Redmond and Devlin's appeal for recruits at their
face value and offered themselves up for England as these gentlemen
advised, nor yet is any attempt made to explain in what manner people
can know whether the party politicians are lying in their open
professions of loyalty to the Empire, or lying in their secret
professions of loyalty to the cause of Irish Nationalism. Lying in
either case they must be, and yet this is the chief stock-in-trade of
the wirepullers in their endeavour to recapture the Volunteers—and
with these double-edged lies upon their lips they stand up and sing with
Davis that 
> 1. Righteous men must make
> our land
>   
> A Nation Once Again.
> 





Face to face with such unscrupulous opponents the Volunteers must
recognise that their fight is a struggle to the death, that the prize at
stake is the soul of a Nation, and that therefore every ounce of energy,
every bright coinage of the brain, must be flung at once into the
struggle. The Volunteers must realise that against the shamelessly vile
methods of the politician there is but one effective weapon—the
daring appeal of the Revolutionist.


You cannot fight the devil
with brimstone; you cannot beat the politicians at their own game. The
secret methods of character assassination, elaborated by hordes of ward
politicians and perfected by the foul manipulators of Hibernian lodges,
cannot be countered by any mere policy of marking time, nor defeated by
any organisation that hesitates to attack in the open the organisations
that are everywhere in secret striking at our very life.


Let us
be plain-spoken! The United Irish League, the 


---

p.446


 Parliamentary
Party, the Board of Erin Hibernians have at the present moment a
thousand foul agencies at work to destroy the Volunteers who dared to
spoil their attempt to betray Ireland into the grasp of British
Imperialism. The hatred of these organisations for the men and women who
dared to prefer Ireland to the Empire, who dared to prefer the memories
of a glorious past and the hopes of a glorious future to the sordid
service of England—that hatred is as deep and as implacable as is
ever the hatred of the traitor spoiled of the fruits of his treachery.
Here and there in the Volunteer ranks are some who, whilst true to
Ireland, are not yet sufficiently convinced of the treachery of their
leaders to forsake their old allegiance to them. The presence of such
persons will be, and is being used as an argument against the Volunteers
taking aggressive action. It is argued that these good men must be
converted more fully before the Volunteers can do more than remain on
the defensive, else they will be lost. To this it must be answered that
in politics as in military affairs the attack is ever the best defence.
The Provisional Committee must attack aggressively, resolutely, openly,
or they and their followers will be wiped out of existence. Aggressive
action will convert the waverers better than a thousand speeches, or a
hundred printed proclamations.


Again let me repeat it, let us
never forget it: This fight against Redmondism and Devlinism is a fight
to save the soul of the Irish Nation.


Volunteers, your policy
must be that of the old German Marshal, Blucher—
‘Forward’! ‘Forward’! ‘Forward’!


In what way can that policy best be
formulated?


I have neither the ability nor the authority to
formulate the fighting policy of the Irish Volunteers, but I would
respectfully suggest that there are certain things which the Volunteers
might at once initiate a campaign for, with the certainly of winning the
adhesion of everyone worth their salt in Ireland. 


---

p.447


 They
might 
> 
> Pledge the Irish Volunteers to remain in armed
> service in Ireland for Ireland, and to resist all attempts of any other
> nation to deprive Ireland of their services,
> 
> 
> Pledge the services
> of their armed forces to Ireland to enforce the repeal of all clauses in
> the Home Rule Act denying to Ireland powers of self-government now
> enjoyed by South Africa, Australia or Canada.
> 
> 
> 




These two articles would appeal to all true Irishmen and women as the
very minimum of a National programme for a Volunteer force. If the
Provisional Committee would adopt some such pledges, and begin to
educate and organise public opinion on its side, it would be provided
with a basis of attack upon its opponents that would effectually place
upon these gentry the onus of defending things morally and politically
indefensible.


It would compel them either to defend the
recruiting consistently, or to abandon it.


It would compel them
to defend all the worst iniquities in the Home Rule Act, or else to join
in the attacks upon them.


Such a policy would attract the best
elements in the country. But it would need to be carried out vigorously
by public agitation, as the Volunteers of 1782 agitated for Free Trade
and for the Reform of the Franchise. Merely to indicate the adhesion of
the Volunteers to such a pledge will not be enough. It will be necessary
everywhere to support and push forward the agitation.


The
Volunteers, I will be told, are only a military body, not an agitation.
But even the army of an established government requires the support of a
public agitation in its campaign, as the English Government well
exemplifies at this present moment.




---

p.448


Agitation for a
definite object is the best recruiting campaign that the Volunteers can
carry on; their pledge to fight for that object will be the guarantee of
their success in their fight for the soul of Ireland.


Volunteers,
*FORWARD! FORWARD!! FORWARD!!*


- Irish Worker , October 10, 1914.



---

p.449


THE BALLOT OR THE BARRICADES
----------------------------


Towards the close of
last week the British Government flew a kite in Ireland. Flying a kite
when practised by a Government means getting some person or paper to
issue a statement that the Government contemplates taking certain
action. If the announcement arouses no hostility of a serious nature the
action is forthwith taken. If, on the contrary, the announcement is met
with a storm of hostility the Government declares it did not authorise
and does not contemplate any such action as was announced, and that it
regrets that any such statement should have been made by unauthorised
persons. Having flown its kite to learn how the wind blows, the
Government then proceeds to do a little more spade work to prepare the
ground better for taking the action it has just declared it does not
intend to take.


The kite flown last week was the announcement
that the Militia Ballot Act was to be enforced in Ireland. As it evoked
hostility the Government proceeded to officially repudiate it. The
ground was not well prepared, the game was too shy. But nevertheless the
iniquitous proposal is only temporarily abandoned. In some form or
another conscription is inevitable.


The only thing that can avert
conscription is the speedy collapse of the German army—a thing as
remote as the conversion of England's rulers to Christian principles.
Already a responsible authority, Sir Thomas Barclay, has declared that
England will, before the close of the war, have two million men with the
colours, an army impossible without conscription. In addition to this we
have the fact that the slaughter at the front is almost inconceivable. A
great surgeon, Dr. Haden Guest, says, that at present the military sick
and wounded in France number half a million. Thus the gaps in the firing
line 


---

p.450


 require the presence of a continually increasing army
of support to fill them. Where and how are all those soldiers to be got,
if not by and through some form of conscription?


The truth about
the Germany army is that its position becomes more secure every day. At
the beginning of the war the Allies joyfully declared that time was on
their side, that every day gained was equal to the winning of a battle,
that the Allies could afford to wait and the Germans could not. It is
now beginning to penetrate the heads of the military experts of Fleet
Street that the boot is on the other leg. The Russians were the great
hope of England. Unless the Russians can achieve victory before the
closing in of the terrible Russian winter that hope is gone. It will be
impossible to maintain in the field the enormous masses of Russian
troops, to provision them, to keep them supplied with munitions of war,
to handle all the elaborate, cumbrous but necessary machinery of
transport and commissariat, whilst the snow king has his grip upon
Russian railroads and rivers. Add to this the terrible cost of the
maintenance of such an army as Russia requires to face the
Germans—the most uneducated nation in Europe to face the most
educated, and we see at once that England cannot hope to see Russia win
the war for her. She must produce the men herself. Russia is bankrupt.
The Czar was only able to crush the Russian Revolution because of the
loans from France and England. Now these countries need all their moneys
for their own salvation.


Thus on the side of Germany there
are fighting the influences of time and of money, of superior equipment,
and of wise provision for the future.


Therefore the Militia
Ballot Act or some form of conscription will come. Are we, like our
rulers, to await the evil day, and then ‘muddle
through’ with ineffective protests? Or are we to make provision
beforehand for the fight that will be necessary?




---

p.451


We
of the Irish Transport & General Workers' Union, we of the
Citizen Army, have our answer ready. We will resist the Militia Ballot
Act, or any form of conscription, and we begin now to prepare our
resistance. Upon the Volunteers we urge similar resolves, similar
preparations.


Understand what this means. It means a complete
overhauling and remodelling of all the training and instruction hitherto
given to those corps. It means that the corps shall be taught how to act
and fight when acting against an enemy equipped with superior weapons,
instead of all teaching being based upon the ideas of British military
text books which always presume an equality of weapons, or even a
superiority upon the British side. It means that much that has been
taught will be worse than useless if acted upon, as such teaching
presupposed that the corps receiving instructions were to form part of a
regular army in the field, an army properly supported and reinforced by
complete arms of the service. The resistance to the Militia Ballot Act
must of necessity take the form of insurrectionary warfare, if the
resisters are determined to fight in Ireland for Ireland, instead of on
the Continent for England. Such insurrectionary warfare would be
conducted upon lines and under conditions for which text books made no
provision.


In short, it means barricades in the streets,
guerrilla warfare in the country.


To all who are prepared to face
that ordeal rather than shed their blood for the tyrant and exploiter we
appeal to join our Citizen Army. We propose to make that force the best
equipped mentally in Ireland. We want no parade ground soldiers. We want
young men prepared to die for Freedom in Ireland. If the Government
proposes to force us to fight against our consciences and our desire we
propose to challenge it upon its own ground; and if it wants us it must
take us by force.


From this date greater decision and promptitude
in action will be enforced in our army though even now it is an example


---

p.452



 to follow. All those who fell away because we had not
rifles enough are requested to enrol at once and take a course in the
preliminary training in the new course of instruction on the lines we
have indicated.


The rifles will come all right. And there are
other modern weapons of warfare.


The Citizen Army Offices at
Liberty Hall, Aungier Street, Inchicore, Thomas Street, and elsewhere
are open every night for enrolment. We want a new muster of men prepared
to face the worst and to take the best if taken it can be . . ..


- Irish Worker , October 24, 1914.



---

p.453


THE HOPE OF
IRELAND
-------------------


The present crisis in Ireland is shattering many
reputations and falsifying many predictions, but to the careful observer
it is becoming daily apparent that it will leave intact at least one
reputation, that of those who pinned their faith to the working class as
the anchor and foundation of any real nationalism that this country can
show. Here and there the working class may waver, here and there local
influences may exert sufficient pressure to weaken or corrupt the
manhood of the workers, but speaking broadly it remains true that in
that class lay the only hope of those who held fast to the faith that
this Ireland of ours is a nation distinct and apart from all others, and
capable of working out its own destiny and living its own life.


The working class has ever refused to be drawn into any mere
anti-English feeling; it refuses to be drawn into it now. It has always
refused to consider that hatred of England was equivalent to love of
Ireland, or that true patriotism required an Irishman or woman to bear
enmity to the toiling masses of the English population. It still holds
that position.


The working class of Ireland, when grown conscious
of its true dignity, does not consider that it owes to the British
Empire any debt except that of hatred. But it also realises that the
best services it can render to the British people is due to them, and
that service will be and will take the form of as speedy as possible a
destruction of the foul governmental system that has made the British
people an instrument of the enslavement of millions of the human race,
of the extirpation of whole tribes and nations, of the devastation of
vast territories. Enslaved socially at home the British people have been
taught that what little political liberty they do enjoy can only be
bought at the price of the national destruction of every people 


---

p.454


 rising into social or economic rivalry with the British master
class. If it requires war to free the minds of the British working class
from that debasing superstition then war we shall have, for the world
cannot progress industrially whilst so important a nation in Europe is
perverted mentally by a belief so hostile to fraternal progress; if it
requires insurrection in Ireland and through all the British dominions
to teach the English working class they cannot hope to prosper
permanently by arresting the industrial development of others then
insurrection must come, and barricades will spring up as readily in our
streets as public meetings do to-day.


Those who hold that the
British people must learn this lesson are not necessarily enemies of the
British people, of the British democracy. Rather do they hold with John
Mitchel they are the truest friends of the British people who are the
greatest enemies of the British Government. The Irish working class see
no abandonment of the principles of the Labour Movement in this fight
against this war and all it implies; see no weakening of international
solidarity in their fierce resolve to do no fighting except it be in
their own country to secure the right to hold that country for its own
sons and daughters. Rather do they joy in giving this proof that the
principles of the Labour Movement represent the highest form of
patriotism, and that true patriotism will embody the broadest principles
of Labour and Socialism.


The Labour Movement in Ireland stands
for the ownership of all Ireland by all the Irish; it therefore fights
against all things calculated to weaken the hold of the Irish upon
Ireland, as it fights for all things calculated to strengthen the grasp
of the Irish people upon Ireland and all things Irish. It has no war
with Germany, it welcomes the German as a brother struggling towards the
light. It believes that the blood guiltiness of this war lies chiefly at
the door of that British Empire whose ‘far-flung battle
line’ is a far-flung shadow upon the face of civilized 


---

p.455



progress. And so believing, it counsels the Irish race to stand aloof
from the battle, since it cannot intervene as a nation on the only side
that honour and interest dictates.


Alone in Ireland the working
class has no ties that bind it to the service of the Empire. Hunger and
the fear of hunger have driven thousands of our class into the British
army; but for whatever pay or pension such have drawn therefrom they
have given service, and owe neither gratitude nor allegiance. For those
still held to that accursed bargain as reservists, etc., we have no
feelings except compassion; the British Shylock will hold them to the
bond. Other classes serve England for the sake of dividends, profits,
official positions and sinecures—a thousand strings drawing them
to England for the one patriotic tie that binds them to Ireland. The
Irish working class as a class can only hope to rise within Ireland.


Equally true is it that Ireland cannot rise to Freedom except upon
the shoulders of a working class knowing its rights and daring to take
them.


That class of that character we are creating in Ireland.
Wherever then in Ireland flies the banner of the Irish Transport
& General Workers' Union there flies also to the heavens the
flag of the Irish working class, alert, disciplined, intelligent,
determined to be free.


- Irish Worker , October 31, 1914.



---

p.456


RALLY FOR
LABOUR
----------------


Signs are not wanting in Ireland to-day that there are
strenuous and exciting times before the forces of organised Labour. The
fever and excitement of the war is practically over, the talk of certain
victory and a short war has disappeared from the conversation of even
the most optimistic of the employing class, and everywhere we see that
the class that rules and robs us is making preparations to take whatever
advantage the war may offer to increase its profits, and increase its
power over our lives. Capitalist society is so built that the clash of
interests is inevitable; here and there at all times, and all over for a
short time, these clashing interests may be forgotten in a wave of
patriotism or a frenzy of religious enthusiasm; but such unity never
survives for long the constant attrition of the divergent interests of
the various classes and individuals. Sooner or later the old war of
self-interest resumes its domination, and the conflict inherent in
capitalist society with all its ugliness and horror, assumes control and
direction of the minds, passions and lives of men and women.


When
this war broke out there was in England, and amongst those whose outlook
on life is that of England, a fine simulation of the self-abnegation of
patriotism. Employers in England told their employees that the firm
would make up the wages of each man volunteering to the front, and
workers left wives and families to trust to the tender mercies of their
masters and their government. They were all out against the
‘common enemy’, and all distinctions, rivalries and
clashing interests were laid aside. It was fine!


But it was too
fine to last. Already the Government has shown its bias against trade
unionism, and against the working class. The demand of the Parliamentary
Labour Party for £1 


---

p.457


 per week for soldiers is treated
with the contempt earned by its sponsors when they delivered the goods
before they stipulated for a price—went recruiting for the army
first, and only thought of demanding proper payment for recruits after
thousands upon thousands had surrendered their liberty and became food
for cannon. All through England and Ireland committees under various
names are engaged in procuring the manufacture of goods for the army by
voluntary labour, whilst the persons—mainly women and
girls—normally employed at the manufacture of those goods are
turned out on the streets to starve, or else compelled to seek a
livelihood by begging these committees to supply them with work under
conditions they would scorn if offered at other times by private
employers.


A moratorium suspending payment of large sums has been
granted to and is freely availed of by the rich, whilst eviction notices
are descending as thick as snowflakes upon the helpless poor, and wives
and widows of England's soldiery every day throng the police courts
begging for permission to keep together a little longer the household
gathered by the loving labours of the ‘heroes at the
front’. Relief of Distress Committees in their work seem to unite in
regarding every applicant as a degraded criminal upon whom every insult
can be heaped that class hatred can devise, until poor women resolve to
die in their slums rather than have their wretchedness marked by the
insulting questions and insinuations of the investigators. In Ireland
the demand of organised labour for representation upon such committees
is made subordinate to the whims and prejudices of every little mind
from Lord Mayor Sherlock down to the toadies whose delight it is to eat
dirt that has been trodden on by the feet of Lady Aberdeen.


A
consignment of flour is sent here from Canada, and the Government
ostentatiously gives the work of discharging it to the lowest collection
of blacklegs that has ever disgraced Dublin. A law is on the Statute
Book empowering the Corporation 


---

p.458


 of Dublin to feed the
children starving at school, and the Corporation mocks the law and the
children by appointing on that committee the bitterest enemies of the
measure, and a chairman who has made up his mind that it shall never be
enforced, whilst the claim of the Dublin Trades Council to be
represented is met with a flat refusal, as is also the claim of the
Ladies' Committee which for years has fed the children of two of our
Dublin schools.


War is ever the enemy of progress. It is only
possible when humanity is stifled*,* when
the common interests of the human race are denied. The first blast of
the bugles of war is also the requiem note of human brotherhood. It is
but a step, and a short step, from exulting in the sufferings of a
foreign enemy to contemptuous indifference to the sights and sounds of
suffering amongst our own poor in our own streets. The poor of the world
would be well advised, upon the declaration of war in any country, as
their first steps to peace, to hang the Foreign Minister and Cabinet
whose secret diplomacy produced such a result. If each country hanged
its own Foreign Minister and Cabinet before setting out to the front,
wars would not last long; and if a jingo editor were hanged each week it
lasted, the most jingo being the first to hang, not many angry passions
would be stirred up to make the work of peaceful understanding
difficult.


Wanting such a desirable result the workers must
realise now that all the machinery of the State, and all the extra
machinery now being set up to aid the State, are being deliberately
utilised to accentuate the weakness of the individual worker, to
intensify the dependence of his dear ones upon charitable and
anti-labour organisations, to concentrate in the hands of the enemies of
his class all the new agencies of government as well as the old, and in
short, to weaken, discredit and destroy every power that the workers
have hitherto built up as weapons for their peaceful social
regeneration.




---

p.459


Our trade unions are attacked by every
insidious weapon, our standard of life is menaced in a thousand evil
ways, a corrupt press calls aloud for the suppression of every Irish
journal that refuses to prostitute itself. The time is ripe for a
forward move against all those gathering forces of evil; every man and
woman who has reaped the advantages which organised Labour has won in
the past must now rally to the flag. All jealousies must be forgotten,
all rivalries laid aside.


Labour is the only force that can save
Labour. Rally then to save Labour from its encircling enemies, and know
that in saving Labour you save the most effective force for the
redemption of Ireland.


- Irish Worker , November 14, 1914.



---

p.460


COURTSMARTIAL AND
REVOLUTION
----------------------------


- Irish Worker ,[21](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note021.html'))


---

p.464


 19th
December, 1914.


> 
> The Earl of Halsbury said
> that in deference to the wishes of the Government he would not press his
> objections, but he thought the proposal of this Bill was the most
> unconstitutional thing that had ever happened.
> 
> 
> 




The foregoing sentence is from a report of a debate in the House of
Lords on the Defence of the Realm Consolidation
Act, on Friday, November
27th. This precious Act gives the military authorities power to
arrest civilians and try them by Courts-martial, sets aside all the
ordinary safeguards of civil liberty, and empowers these Courts-martial
to inflict the death penalty or any lesser sentence. In other words, and
plainer language, it establishes Martial Law as the law of the land, and
places the lives and liberties of all in the power of a military
unaccustomed to the restraints of civilised courts of justice, and
ignorant of the laws of evidence.


A German, a French, an Italian
or an Austrian Government would have openly and honourably sought to
attain those ends by a declaration of Martial Law; the hypocritical and
cowardly gang of assassins who control the Government of the British
Empire seek to achieve the same objects by clandestinely and
treacherously destroying civil liberties whilst professing a desire to
safeguard and protect them. This is but a fitting culmination to all the
anti-democratic and liberty-hating diplomacy which brought about this
war, and now seeks to destroy every agency which would help to unmask
its injurious conspiracy against mankind, or tell the truth about the
terrors that accompany it. As a result of this Act there is no longer
liberty in Ireland—liberty of speech, liberty of association, 


---

p.461


 liberty of the press, liberty of the subject are all gone. No
longer may a man or woman demand to be tried by his or her peers in an
open court-room, before the eyes and hearing of his or her fellows. At
any time any man or woman may be arrested, day or night, and dragged off
in secret, to be tried in secret, and condemned and assassinated in
secret by the hired assassins of the British Empire.


Aye, there
is no break in the continuity of the methods of British Imperial Rule in
Ireland. Dublin Castle is always Dublin Castle, the same at all times,
loathsome, lying, hypocritical, *murderous*.


Of course we have the word of this Government that no death sentences
will be carried out until Parliament meets, and of course we all know
what the word of the Government is worth. Belgium knows it now, knows
that this Government pledged its honour to maintain Belgian neutrality,
and then manoeuvred to leave Belgium irrevocably committed to sink or
swim with one side in this struggle in which she was supposed to remain
neutral. Ireland knows it, knows that the Liberal Government pledged its
word to give Home Rule to all Ireland, then pledged its word to Carson
not to force Home Rule upon all Ireland, pledged its word to place a
representative of Labour upon the Commission of Inquiry into the Dublin
police outrages, then deliberately breaks its solemn word, and appointed
no such representatives; pledged its word to appoint an independent
Commission of Inquiry into the Bachelor's Walk massacre, and yet
declared in Parliament beforehand that the said Commission would
exonerate the uniformed murderers of peaceful citizens. Aye, Ireland
knows the value of a Government promise, as our fathers knew it in the
past!


But let ‘messieurs,
the assassins’, beware. There are in Ireland to-day many scores of
thousands of earnest men neither committed to the British Empire nor to
the cause of revolution. For the most part these are men who, wearied of
the chaos of 


---

p.462


 Irish politics, gave a grudging adhesion to
the parliamentary attempt to secure some form of Home Rule as an
organised legal expression of Irish nationhood. Loyalty to the party
entrusted with that task has kept these men silent and inactive even
whilst that party was betraying their trust, and besmirching their
ideals. Always the hope persisted that eventually Home Rule would come,
and then these traitors would be punished by an outraged people. But if
the British Government once more throws off the mask of
constitutionalism and launches its weapons of repression against those
who dare to differ from it, if once more it sets in motion its jails,
its courts-martial, its scaffolds, then the last tie that binds those men
to the official Home Rule gang will snap. On that day we will see once
again all the best and brightest in Ireland definitely arraying itself
on the side of revolution, fully realising that freedom and the British
Empire cannot co-exist in this country.


The constitutional mask,
the simulacrum of civil liberty still paralyses the activities and holds
the hand of many a true Irish patriot, as the boasted freedom of
contract of the wage-system still hides from many a worker the reality
of his slavery. But once let the Government drop that mask, or abandon
that pretence of civil liberty, and then the result will see such a
resurrection of Irish revolutionary spirit such as has not been seen for
generations.


A resurrection! Aye, out of the grave of the first
Irish man or woman murdered for protesting against Ireland's
participation in this thrice-accursed war there will arise anew the
spirit of Irish revolution. 
> 1. The
> graves of those murdered for freedom bear seed for freedom
>   
> Which
> the winds carry afar and re-sow.
> 





Yes, my
lords and gentlemen, our cards are all on the table! If you leave us at
liberty we will kill your recruiting, save our 


---

p.463


 poor boys
from your slaughter-house, and blast your hopes of Empire. If you strike
at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still
evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and, mayhap, raise a force that
will destroy you.


We defy you! Do your worst!


Whether this
death sentence upon Irish prisoners of these new Courts-martial will or
will not be carried out will depend, not upon the plighted honour or
solemn assurances of Cabinet Ministers already foresworn and discredited
even in their own country, nor yet upon any action of the degenerate
Irish Members of Parliament who sat still and helped to destroy the
constitutional rights of which they prate so loudly; nor yet upon the
British Labour Members who, like all apostates, are readiest to stab and
destroy all those who remain true to that ideal of democratic freedom
they have deserted and dishonoured. No, the question of life and death
will depend solely upon the temper of the people of Ireland. If they
remain dumb, nerveless, lacking in intrepidity, quivering too mutely in
the leash laid upon them by the apostles of ‘caution
and restraint’, then the blow will fall in increasing severity and
ferocity, arrest will follow arrest, blow will follow blow, and
sentences will increase in savagery in exact proportion to the tameness
of the Irish people, until at last the death penalty will once more
strike down those who embody the rebellious people of the Irish race.
Oh, it is all well planned. Their fathers in Hell could not have planned
it better!


- Irish Work , December 19, 1914.



---

p.465


### APPENDICES: 
PROGRAMMES AND MANIFESTOES

1. The Irish Socialist Republican Party,
 1896.
2. Declaration of Principles, Irish Socialist
 Federation, 1908.
3. The Socialist Party of Ireland,
 1910-1911.
4. Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 1897.
5. Coronation of King Edward VII, 1902.
6. Visit of King George V, 1911.
7. I.L.P. of Ireland, ‘Ireland Upon the
 Dissecting Table’, 1914.
8. War. What it Means to You. (Irish Citizen Army,
 Belfast, 1914.)
9. Appeal to the Irish Working Class, 1914.




---

p.466


Appendix 1
----------


### IRISH SOCIALIST REPUBLICAN PARTY

‘The great appear great to us only because we are on
 our knees; LET US RISE’.
### OBJECT


Establishment of AN IRISH SOCIALIST REPUBLIC based upon
 the public ownership by the Irish people of the land, and
 instruments of production, distribution and exchange.
 Agriculture to be administered as a public function, under
 boards of management elected by the agricultural
 population and responsible to them and to the nation at
 large. All other forms of labour necessary to the
 well-being of the community to be conducted on the same
 principles.


### PROGRAMME


As a means of organising the forces of the Democracy in
 preparation for any struggle which may precede the
 realisation of our ideal, of paving the way for its
 realisation, of restricting the tide of emigration by
 providing employment at home, and finally of palliating
 the evils of our present social system, we work by
 political means to secure the following measures:—
 1. Nationalisation of railways and
 canals.
2. Abolition of private banks and money-lending
 institutions and *establishment* of state
 banks, under popularly elected boards of directors,
 issuing loans at cost.
3. Establishment at public expense of rural
 depots for the most improved agricultural machinery,
 to be lent out to the agricultural population at a
 rent covering cost and management alone.


---

p.467

6. Graduated income tax on all incomes over
 £400 per annum in order to provide funds for
 pensions to the aged, infirm and widows and
 orphans.
7. Legislative restriction of hours of labour
 to 48 per week and establishment of a minimum
 wage.
8. Free maintenance for all children.
9. Gradual extension of the principle of public
 ownership and supply to all the necessaries of
 life.
10. Public control and management of National
 schools by boards elected by popular ballot for that
 purpose alone.
11. Free education up to the highest university
 grades.
12. Universal suffrage.



### THE IRISH SOCIALIST REPUBLICAN PARTY HOLDS:


That the agricultural and industrial system of a free
 people, like their political system, ought to be an
 accurate reflex of the democratic principle by the people
 for the people, solely in the interests of the people.


That the private ownership, by a class, of the land and
 instruments of production, distribution and exchange, is
 opposed to this vital principle of justice, and is the
 fundamental basis of all oppression, national, political
 and social.


That the subjection of one nation to another, as of
 Ireland to the authority of the British Crown, is a
 barrier to the free political and economic development of
 the subjected nation, and can only serve the interests of
 the exploiting classes of both nations.




---

p.468


That, therefore, the national and economic freedom of the
 Irish people must be sought in the same direction, viz.,
 the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic, and the
 consequent conversion of the means of production,
 distribution and exchange into the common property of
 society, to be held and controlled by a democratic state
 in the interests of the entire community.


That the conquest by the Social Democracy of political
 power in Parliament, and on all public bodies in Ireland,
 is the readiest and most effective means whereby the
 revolutionary forces may be organised and disciplined to
 attain that end.


BRANCHES WANTED EVERYWHERE. ENQUIRIES INVITED. ENTRANCE
 FEE, 6*d*. MINIMUM WEEKLY SUBSCRIPTION
 1*d*.


*Offices*: 67 MIDDLE ABBEY STREET, DUBLIN.


- 1896



---

p.469


Appendix 2
----------


### DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES OF THE IRISH SOCIALIST
 FEDERATION


The Irish Socialist Federation is composed of members of
 the Irish race in America, and is organised to assist the
 revolutionary working-class movement in Ireland by a
 dissemination of its literature; to educate the
 working-class Irish of this country into a knowledge of
 Socialist principles and to prepare them to co-operate with
 the workers of all other races, colours and nationalities in
 the emancipation of labour.


It affirms its belief that political and social freedom are
 not two separate and unrelated ideas, but are two sides of
 the one great principle, each being incomplete without the
 other.


The course of society politically has been from warring but
 democratic tribes within each nation to a united government
 under an absolutely undemocratic monarchy. Within this
 monarchy again developed revolts against its power, revolts
 at first seeking to limit its prerogatives only, then
 demanding the inclusion of certain classes in the governing
 power, then demanding the right of the subject to criticise
 and control the power of the monarch, and finally, in the
 most advanced countries, this movement culminated in the
 total abolition of the monarchial institution and the
 transformation of the subject into the citizen.


In industry a corresponding development has taken place.
 The independent producer, owning his own tools and knowing
 no master, has given way before the more effective
 productive powers of huge capital, concentrated in the hands
 of the great capitalist. The latter, recognising no rights
 in his workers, ruled as an absolute monarch in his factory.
 But within the realm of capital developed a revolt against
 the power of the 


---

p.470



 capitalist. This revolt, taking the form of trade unionism,
 has pursued in the industrial field the same line of
 development as the movement for political freedom has
 pursued in the sphere of national government. It first
 contented itself with protests against excessive exactions,
 against all undue stretchings of the power of the
 capitalist, then its efforts broadened out to demands for
 restrictions upon the absolute character of such power,
 i.e., by claiming for trade unions the right to make rules
 for the workers in the workshop; then it sought still
 further to curb the capitalist's power by shortening the
 working day and so limiting the period during which the
 toiler may be exploited. Finally, it seeks by Boards of
 Arbitration to establish an equivalent in the industrial
 world for that compromise in the political world by which,
 in constitutional countries, the monarch retains his
 position by granting a parliament to divide with him the
 duties of governing, and so hides while securing his power.
 And as in the political history of the race, the logical
 development of progress was found in the abolition of the
 institution of monarchy and not in its mere restriction, so
 in industrial history the culminating point to which all
 efforts must at last converge lies in the abolition of the
 capitalist class and not in the mere restriction of its
 power.


It recognises in all past history a preparation for this
 achievement, and in the industrial tendencies of to-day it
 hails the workings out of those laws of human progress which
 bring that object within our reach.


The concentration of capital in the form of trusts
 simplifies the task we propose that society shall undertake
 and the industrial organisation of labour resultant
 therefrom drills and prepares the force necessary to its
 accomplishment.


As to-day the organised power of the State theoretically
 guarantees to every individual his political rights, so in
 the Socialist Republic the power and productive forces of
 organised society will stand between every individual and
 want, guaranteeing 


---

p.471


 that right to life without which all other
 rights are but mockery.


The Irish Socialist Federation, recognising these two phase
 of human development, pledges its members to fealty to the
 principles resultant therefrom, politically rejecting the
 domination of nation over nation as of man over man; it on
 the field of Irish politics is organised against every party
 recognising British rule in Ireland in any form or manner,
 in all its moods and modifications; and as the final
 solution of the Irish, as of every other struggle for
 freedom, it seeks the Workers' Republic—the
 administration of all the land and instruments of labour,
 all social property in which all shall be co-heirs and
 owners.


- *New York*, January,
 1908.



---

p.472


Appendix 3
----------

[22](javascript:footNote('E900002-003/note022.html'))
### SOCIALIST PARTY OF IRELAND

### (*Headquarters*: 42e Great Brunswick Street,
 Dublin).

#### ITS AIMS AND METHODS


The SOCIALIST PARTY OF IRELAND seeks to organise the
 workers of this country, irrespective of creed or race, into
 one great PARTY OF LABOUR. It believes that the dependence
 of the working class upon the owners of capitalist property,
 and the desire of these capitalists and landowners to keep
 the vast mass of the people so subject and dependent, is the
 great and abiding cause of all our modern social and
 political evils—of nearly all modern crime, mental
 degradation, religious strife, and political tyranny.
 Recognising this, it counsels the Irish working class to
 follow the example of the workers in every civilised country
 in the world, whether subject or free, and organise itself
 industrially and politically with the end in view of gaining
 control and mastery of the entire resources of the
 country.


Such is our aim: such is Socialism. Our method is:
 Political organisation at the Ballot Box to secure the
 election of representatives of Socialist principles to all
 the elective governing Public Bodies of this country, and
 thus to gradually transfer the political power of the State
 into the hands of those who will use it to further and
 extend the principle of common or public ownership. *We
 mean to make the people of Ireland the sole and sovereign
 owners of Ireland*, but leave ourselves free to
 adapt our methods to suit the development of the times. The
 Socialist Party of Ireland may, as the occasion seems to
 warrant, either enter the political battlefield with
 candidates of our own or else assist in furthering every
 honest attempt on the part of Organised Labour to obtain
 representation through independent working 


---

p.473



 class
 candidates pledged to a progressive policy of social reform.
 *We know that every victory won for progress to-day is
 a victory for Socialism*, even when the victors most
 anxiously repudiate our cause.


We live in times of political change, and even of political
 revolution. More and more civic and national responsibility
 is destined to be thrust upon, or won by, the people of
 Ireland. Old political organisations will die out and new
 ones must arise to take their place; old party rallying
 cries and watchwords are destined to become obsolete and
 meaningless, and the fires of old feuds and hatreds will
 pale and expire before the newer conceptions born of a
 consciousness of our common destiny. In this great awakening
 of Erin, Labour, if guided by the lamp of Socialist
 teaching, may set its feet firmly and triumphantly upon the
 path that leads to its full emancipation. But if Labour does
 not rise to the occasion, and allows itself to be swallowed
 up in and identified with new political alignments,
 scattering and dissipating its forces instead of
 concentrating them upon Socialist lines, then indeed will
 our last state be worse than our first.


We therefore appeal to all workers, and to all honest
 friends of progress in any rank of life, to throw in their
 lot with the Socialist Party of Ireland, and assist it in
 giving force, clearness and effectiveness to the gathering
 Working Class Movement of this country. And on its part that
 Party, conscious of its high mission, pledges itself to
 pursue, unfalteringly and undeviatingly, its great
 object—common ownership of the means of producing and
 distributing all wealth. In other words, common ownership of
 our common country, the material basis of the higher
 intellectual and moral development of the future.




---

p.474


Appendix 4
----------


### QUEEN VICTORIA'S DIAMOND JUBILEE, 1897

‘The great appear great to us, only because we are on
 our knees: LET US RISE’.Fellow Workers,


The loyal subjects of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and
 Ireland, Empress of India, etc., celebrate this year the
 longest reign on record. Already the air is laden with
 rumours of preparations for a wholesale manufacture of sham
 ‘popular rejoicings’ at this glorious (?)
 commemoration.


Home Rule orators and Nationalist Lord Mayors, Whig
 politicians and Parnellite pressmen, have ere now lent their
 prestige and influence to the attempt to arouse public
 interest in the sickening details of this Feast of
 Flunkeyism. It is time then that some organised party in
 Ireland—other than those in whose mouths Patriotism
 means Compromise, and Freedom, High Dividends—should
 speak out bravely and honestly the sentiments awakened in
 the breast of every lover of freedom by this ghastly farce
 now being played out before our eyes. Hence the Irish
 Socialist Republican Party—which, from its inception,
 has never hesitated to proclaim its unswerving hostility to
 the British Crown, and to the political and social order of
 which in these islands that Crown is but the
 symbol—takes this opportunity of hurling at the heads
 of all the courtly mummers who grovel at the shrine of
 royalty the contempt and hatred of the Irish Revolutionary
 Democracy. We, at least, are not loyal men; we confess to
 having more respect and honour for the raggedest child of
 the poorest labourer in Ireland to-day than for any, even
 the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of
 murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the
 throne of England.




---

p.475


During this glorious reign Ireland has seen 1,225,000 of
 her children die of famine, starved to death whilst the
 produce of her soil and their labour was eaten up by a
 vulture aristocracy, enforcing their rents by the bayonets
 of a hired assassin army in the pay of the ‘best of the
 English Queens’; the eviction of 3,668,000, a multitude
 greater than the entire population of Switzerland; and the
 reluctant emigration of 4,186,000 of our kindred, a greater
 host than the entire people of Greece. At the present moment
 78 per cent. of our wage-earners receive less than £1
 per week, our streets are thronged by starving crowds of the
 unemployed, cattle graze on our tenantless farms and around
 the ruins of our battered homesteads, our ports are crowded
 with departing emigrants, and our poorhouses are full of
 paupers. Such are the constituent elements out of which we
 are bade to construct a National Festival of rejoicing!


Working-class of Ireland: We appeal to you not to allow
 your opinions to be misrepresented on this occasion. Join
 your voice with ours in protesting against the base
 assumption that we owe to this Empire any other debt than
 that of hatred of all its plundering institutions. Let this
 year be indeed a memorable one as marking the date when the
 Irish workers at last flung off that slavish dependence on
 the lead of ‘the gentry’, which has paralysed the arm
 of every soldier of freedom in the past.


The Irish landlords, now as ever the enemy's garrison,
 instinctively support every institution which, like
 monarchy, degrades the manhood of the people and weakens the
 moral fibre of the oppressed; the middle-class, absorbed in
 the pursuit of gold, have pawned their souls for the
 prostitute glories of commercialism and remain openly or
 secretly hostile to every movement which would imperil the
 sanctity of their dividends. The working class alone have
 nothing to hope for save in a revolutionary reconstruction
 of society; they, and they alone, are capable of that
 revolutionary initiative which, with all the political and
 economic development of the time 


---

p.476


 to aid it,
 can
 carry us forward into the promised land of perfect Freedom,
 the reward of the agelong travail of the people.


To you, workers of Ireland, we address ourselves. AGITATE
 in the workshop, in the field, in the factory, until you
 arouse your brothers to hatred of the slavery of which we
 are all the victims. EDUCATE, that the people may no longer
 be deluded by illusory hopes of prosperity under any system
 of society of which monarchs or noblemen, capitalists or
 landlords form an integral part. ORGANISE, that a solid,
 compact and intelligent force, conscious of your historic
 mission as a class, you may seize the reins of political
 power whenever possible and, by intelligent application of
 the working-class ballot, clear the field of action for the
 revolutionary forces of the future. Let the ‘canting, fed
 classes’ bow the knee as they may, be you true to your
 own manhood, and to the cause of freedom, whose hope is in
 you, and, pressing unweariedly onward in pursuit of the high
 destiny to which the Socialist Republic invites you, let the
 words which the poet puts into the mouth of Mazeppa console
 you amid the orgies of the tyrants of to-day:—

> 1. But time at last makes all things even,
>   
> And if we do but watch the hour,
>   
> There never yet was human power
>   
> That could evade, if unforgiven,
>   
> The patient *hate* and vigil long,
>   
> Of those who treasure up a wrong.
> 






---

p.477


Appendix 5
----------


### CORONATION OF KING EDWARD VII, 1902

Fellow-Workers,


Unless *unforeseen*
 accidents intervene to prevent this consummation, His
 Majesty, Edward VII, King and Emperor, will be crowned on
 June 26th. Were we able to
 follow our own inclinations in the matter we would be
 inclined to treat it with contempt as being of but little
 importance to the cause for which we stand, or to the
 workers with whose interests we are concerned. To us, as
 Socialists, it is but of little moment who may for the time
 being wear the trappings of royalty; that we are compelled
 to acquiesce in his rule by the bayonets of his hireling
 soldiery and police is for us sufficient; and to us, as
 workers, the personality of the head of the Capitalist
 system in these islands is of small concern when we realise
 that our exploitation by the master class would proceed
 apace even if King Edward VII were a Christian gentleman
 instead of a—


But although we would rather treat the matter thus
 philosophically, we find that the machinations of those in
 power do not leave us that possibility; with them, and
 because of them, the festivities attending the Coronation
 have taken on the aspect not merely of a huge parade of pomp
 and magnificence—cloaking the festering sores of that
 slave society on which it is built—but have also
 become an elaborately contrived and astutely worked piece of
 Royalist and Capitalist propaganda, designed to captivate
 the imagination of the unthinking multitude, and thus lead
 them to look askance upon every movement which would set up
 as an ideal to work for something less gorgeously
 spectacular, even if more solidly real. The evil effects of
 private ownership of industries is thus illustrated once
 more in a manner that ought to appeal to those patriots in
 our 


---

p.478


 midst who still dread the innovating
 effects of Socialism on the National spirit of the Irish
 people.


Because of this private ownership and control of our
 newspapers, of our shops, of our manufactures, we find our
 Home Rule press devoting columns to descriptions of all the
 preparations for the Coronation, nauseating the thinking
 portion of its readers, but insidiously sapping the manhood
 of the weak and vulgar, and preparing their minds for the
 worship of the foul gods of Imperialism. We find our shops
 stocked with every kind of article, from the toy of the babe
 in arms to the dress patterns of our womankind dedicated by
 name to the Coronation; and we find our manufacturers able
 by their economic power over the bread and butter of their
 employees, to enforce observance of this saturnalia of
 tyranny, even upon those workers whose whole beings are hot
 with revolt against it. Hence we are compelled to speak,
 lest by those who have trusted us by their adherence, or by
 those who have honoured us by their hatred for our
 unflinching championship of the workers' cause, our silence
 should be construed either into an approval or even into
 weakness in front of this demonstration of the power of the
 enemy, or the imbecility of its slaves.


We are Socialist Republicans; we work for the realisation
 of that time when kings and emperors will be no more, when
 they will be remembered by mankind as the strong man
 awakened remembers the hideous nightmare which oppressed him
 as he slept. As Socialist Republicans we desire the
 application to society in all its relations, industrial and
 political, of the freest republican principles. We
 unceasingly devote our energies to awakening in the minds of
 the workers consciousness of the sufficiency of their own
 manhood and of the dignity of their class; and we hope and
 believe in the rapid approach of that time when those ideas
 and that consciousness will have so far leavened the minds
 of the workers as to justify us in calling upon them to
 rally up for that final struggle, the issue of which 


---

p.479


 will assuredly usher in the era of free and
 enfranchised labour, instead of the barbaric splendour of
 military and financial castes. Meanwhile, animated by such
 hopes, inspired by such principles, looking forward
 impatiently to that time of glorious struggle, when the eyes
 of the world are turned upon that City of London, when
 Capital and its cringing slaves are united in adoration of
 the monarch who has been successful in uniting in his
 person, all the baser attributes of the mediaeval monarch
 and the modern stockjobbing capitalist; we also in
 imagination hasten thither in order to offer to King Edward,
 in the name of ourselves and our class, the only homage we
 owe him—*OUR HATRED*.


We are neither awed by the *magnificence* of the robbers,
 daunted by the bayonets of their hired assassins, nor
 dismayed by the plaudits of the multitude. The magnificence
 of the robbers but serves to fire our hearts with a greater
 hatred when we think of the squalid surroundings and
 miserable homes of our class. The glitter of the sunlight on
 the bayonets of its hired assassins reveals to the vision of
 the humanist the moral hideousness of a society propped by
 such means, and the plaudits of the multitude are but useful
 to him who desires to sound the depths to which such a
 system can degrade a people.


Let those who are pleased, and those who are dismayed, by
 the pressure of gaping, cheering crowds of witless ones,
 remember the pregnant words of Cromwell in the same city on
 a similar occasion, ‘My Lord Protector’, said one of
 his attendants, as Cromwell rode through London, ‘how the
 people crowd to see you’. ‘Yes’, replied Cromwell,
 ‘but how many thousands more would crowd to see me hanged
 ’!


Appendix 6
----------




---

p.480


Appendix 7
----------


### VISIT OF KING GEORGE V, 1911

Fellow-Workers,


As you are aware from reading the daily and weekly
 newspapers, we are about to be blessed with a visit from
 King George V.


Knowing from previous experience of Royal Visits, as
 well as from the Coronation orgies of the past few
 weeks, that the occasion will be utilised to make
 propaganda on behalf of royalty and aristocracy against
 the oncoming forces of democracy and National freedom,
 we desire to place before you some few reasons why you
 should unanimously refuse to countenance this visit, or
 to recognise it by your presence at its attendant
 processions or demonstrations. We appeal to you as
 workers, speaking to workers, whether your work be that
 of the brain or of the hand—manual or mental
 toil—it is of you and your children we are
 thinking; it is your cause we wish to safeguard and
 foster.


The future of the working class requires that all
 political and social positions should be open to all men
 and women; that all privileges of birth or wealth be
 abolished, and that every man or woman born into this
 land should have an equal opportunity to attain to the
 proudest position in the land. The Socialist demands
 that the only birthright necessary to qualify for public
 office should be the birthright of our common
 humanity.


Believing as we do that there is nothing on earth more
 sacred than humanity, we deny all allegiance to this
 institution of royalty, and hence we can only regard the
 visit of the King as adding fresh fuel to the fire of
 hatred with which we regard the plundering institutions
 of which he is the representative. Let the capitalist
 and landlord class flock to exalt him; he is 


---

p.481


 theirs; in him they see embodied the idea of
 caste and class; they glorify him and exalt his
 importance that they might familiarise the public mind
 with the conception of political inequality, knowing
 well that a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of
 royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant
 democracy necessary for the attainment of social
 freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can
 easily be reconciled to social kings—capitalist
 kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships
 and the docks. Thus coronation and king's visits are by
 our astute never-sleeping masters made into huge
 Imperialist propagandist campaigns in favour of
 political and social schemes against democracy. But if
 our masters and rulers are sleepless in their schemes
 against us, so we, rebels against their rule, must never
 sleep in our appeal to our fellows to maintain as
 publicly our belief in the dignity of our class—in
 the ultimate sovereignty of those who labour.


What is monarchy? From whence does it derive its
 sanction? What has been its gift to humanity? Monarchy
 is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of
 greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest
 and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its
 only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the
 helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity
 are unknown, save as they can be measured in the
 pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless
 iniquities.


Every class in society save royalty, and especially
 British royalty, has through some of its members
 contributed something to the elevation of the race. But
 neither in science, nor in art, nor in literature, nor
 in exploration, nor in mechanical invention, nor in
 humanising of laws, nor in any sphere of human activity
 has a representative of British royalty helped forward
 the moral, intellectual or material improvement of
 mankind. But that royal family has opposed every forward
 move, fought every reform, persecuted every patriot, and
 intrigued against every good cause. Slandering every
 friend of 


---

p.482


 the people, it has befriended
 every oppressor. Eulogised to-day by misguided clerics,
 it has been notorious in history for the revolting
 nature of its crimes. Murder, treachery, adultery,
 incest, theft, perjury—every crime known to man
 has been committed by some one or other of the race of
 monarchs from whom King George is proud to trace his
 descent. 
> 1. His blood
>   
> Has crept through scoundrels since the
>  flood.
> 





We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors
 if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors;
 but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of
 descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder
 the responsibility for their crimes.


Fellow-workers, stand by the dignity of your class. All
 these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy,
 all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors,
 all these are but signs of disease in any social
 state—diseases which a royal visit brings to a
 head and spews in all its nastiness before our horrified
 eyes. But as the recognition of the disease is the first
 stage towards its cure, so that we may rid our social
 state of its political and social diseases, we must
 recognise the elements of corruption. Hence, in bringing
 them all together and exposing their unity, even a royal
 visit may help us to understand and understanding, help
 us to know how to destroy the royal, aristocratic and
 capitalistic classes who live upon our labour. Their
 workshops, their lands, their mills, their factories,
 their ships, their railways must be voted into our hands
 who alone use them, public ownership must take the place
 of capitalist ownership, social democracy replace
 political and social inequality, the sovereignty of
 labour must supersede and destroy the sovereignty of
 birth and the monarchy of capitalism.


Ours be the task to enlighten the ignorant among our
 class, to dissipate and destroy the political and social
 superstitions of 


---

p.483


 the enslaved masses and
 to hasten the coming day
 when, in the words of Joseph Brenan, the fearless
 patriot of '48, all the world will maintain—
 
> 1. The Right Divine of Labour
>   
> To be first of earthly things;
>   
> That the Thinker and the Worker
>   
> Are Manhood's only Kings.
> 






---

p.484


### INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY OF IRELAND

### IRELAND UPON THE DISSECTING TABLE

Fellow-Workers,


As the only political organisation in the North of
 Ireland which, seeking first the well-being and freedom
 of the working class, has yet at all times resolutely
 stood for the attainment of Irish Nationhood, we desire
 to appeal to you and the public generally to protest
 with all possible power and without loss of time against
 the proposal to allow the unity of Ireland to be placed
 at the mercy of the voters in a small part of Ireland.
 The Exclusion Proposals put forward by the Liberal
 Government and accepted by the Home Rule Party, mean
 that a vote is to be taken of the electors in the Ulster
 counties and in the two boroughs of Belfast and Derry on
 the question of whether these places will continue to be
 reckoned as part of Ireland, and therefore as subject to
 the Home Rule Bill. If the majority in any one of these
 places vote against Home Rule then that county or
 borough will be cut off politically from Ireland and the
 Home Rule Bill will not apply to it. This, in simple
 language, means that a local majority, in Belfast or
 Derry, for instance, are to be given the power to wreak
 their hatred upon Ireland by dismembering her, by
 cutting Ireland to pieces as a corpse would be cut upon
 the dissecting table.


Cromwell, in his worst days, the Orange Order in its
 most atrocious moments, never planned a more dastardly
 outrage upon the Irish nation than this. And remember
 that this is planned by the political parties who for a
 generation have taught you to believe that they hoped
 for and worked for *IRELAND A NATION*.




---

p.485


Yet in the moment when it was possible and easy to
 realise that ideal they consented to betray you, and to
 place your hopes and the unity of your nation at the
 mercy of the voters in the Ulster counties and boroughs,
 where the seeds of intolerance, bigotry and opposition
 to social progress have borne the most evil fruit and
 darkened the vision of the largest multitudes.


But we will be told that this Exclusion is to be only
 temporary, and Home Rule and Liberal politicians are
 whispering into your ears that they are resolutely
 opposed to any extension of the six years' limit. Do not
 be misled. Remember that no man can foretell the course
 of politics. Could any Home Ruler have foretold one year
 ago that the Home Rule Party would have consented even
 to discuss this dismemberment of the Irish Nation? He
 would have been driven in disgrace out of the A.O.H. or
 the U.L.L., if he had suggested a year ago that such a
 thing was possible. But to-day these organisations are
 loud in their approval of the proposal to put Ireland
 upon the dissecting table and to give into the hands of
 Sir Edward Carson and his dupes the knife with which to
 cut her up. But truth will out and even the politicians
 themselves let slip the fact about the real
 probabilities of the future. Read the speech of Mr. John
 Dillon, M.P., in the House of Commons on the night of
 Wednesday, April 1st, as
 reported in the Liberal Daily News and
 Leader of the following day. He laid stress
 upon the fact that two General Elections will take place
 within the six years. He said—

> 
> Ulster had been offered the safeguard of two
>  elections, and it would be an event unparalleled
>  in British history for the Unionist Party not to
>  win one of them.
> 
> 
> 




What would happen then, if the Unionist Party won one
 of these elections, as Mr. Dillon says they almost
 certainly would? On the same night the Solicitor-General
 supplied the answer. He said— 


---

p.486



> 
> If the other side came into power and brought
>  forward a Bill to exclude Ulster it would have a
>  royal and triumphal procession to the foot of the
>  throne.
> 
> 
> 




So that here you have two leading spokesmen of the
 Liberal and Home Rule Parties admitting that the six
 years' limit is only a form of speech—that in
 practical politics it will have no real existence. What
 this proposal is really doing is establishing the right
 of, and giving the power to, a small minority to destroy
 the nation as a nation to—we again repeat
 it—place Ireland upon the dissecting table, and
 give into the hands of Sir Edward Carson and his
 followers the knife with which to cut her up. No amount
 of speeches against Exclusion which the Home Rule
 politicians may hereafter make should be allowed to
 cover or hide their complicity in this damnable crime,
 or to obscure the fact that it was and is their
 acceptance of Mr. Asquith's proposal that alone makes
 Exclusion possible.


Think of all the measures needed by the workers in this
 part of the country which will be impossible if this
 Exclusion is allowed. The Nationalisation of Irish
 Railways, so badly needed, will be an impossibility; the
 Extension to Ireland of the Medical Benefits of the
 Insurance Act, the Provision of Meals to Children at
 School, the Abolition of Sweating, and the general
 safeguarding of the interests of Mill Workers and other
 forms of Labour needing Legal Protection, will all be
 delayed, if not absolutely lost, if any part of Ulster
 is cut off from Ireland as a nation. And in addition,
 all the old sectarian jealousies will be kept up,
 workers will be kept fighting with workers and progress
 will be impossible.


We appeal to you then to arouse yourselves to the
 gravity of the occasion. Make your protest in every
 possible way. Do not allow it to be said of you by the
 children of the future that your generation was the only
 generation in all the history of Ireland that consented
 to betray her, that granted to an 


---

p.487



 intolerant minority the power to
 destroy the unity of the country*,* to disrupt and dismember it, and that
 you granted this at the very moment when Labour
 elsewhere in Ireland was most assertive of its rights
 and most desirous of a Free Irish Nation as the natural
 guardian of those rights.


EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, Independent Labour
 Party of Ireland, Belfast Branch. *April*,
 1914.


---

p.488


### WAR

### WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU


You are asked to stop and consider what this war will
 mean to the working class of this city and country.


It already means that increased prices will be demanded
 for all food and household necessities. In every bite of
 food you eat you will be compelled to pay for the war;
 and as you are already poor and have at the best of
 times a struggle to live, the war will mean hunger and
 misery to thousands—less food on their tables,
 less clothes on their backs or beds, less coal for their
 fires, less boots and shoes on their children's feet and
 their own.


War will mean more unemployment and less wages. Already
 the mills of Belfast are put on short time, which means
 starvation wages, ware-rooms are closing down, and all
 foundries and engineering works which make machinery for
 the Continent, if they have not closed down already, are
 getting ready to do so.


Thus before a shot has been fired by the British army
 on land, before a battle has been fought at sea, ruin
 and misery are entering the homes of the working people.
 What will be your case? Many thousands of you will die
 of slow starvation, or perish of cold and long-drawn-out
 misery before the end of the war if you suffer so much
 before it is begun.


Some people tell you it will be over in a fortnight.
 They said the same about the Boer War, but it lasted
 three years. And the Boer War was a mere picnic compared
 to what this war will be.


Remember that Lord Kitchener tells all joining now that
 they must be prepared to serve three years. And he
 knows.




---

p.489


You women! Remember that it is the children you suckled
 at your breast, reared at your knees, whose little steps
 you watched and prayed over and were proud of, it is
 they who will be sent to fight the battles of the
 Empire—an Empire that despises you and
 them—an Empire under whose rule three million
 Irish people were thrown on the roadside to starve, four
 million driven like wild beasts out of their own
 country, an Empire under which in less than fifty years
 a million and a half of Irish men, women and children
 died of hunger in the midst of smiling harvests, and
 under which YOU have lived a lifetime of sweated misery
 and badly paid toil.


Women of Belfast. Will you send your husbands, fathers,
 sons or sweethearts to be slaughtered in defence of an
 Empire that stood quietly by and allowed the Orangemen
 to arm against you and against freedom for Ireland, but
 sent its soldiers to shoot down the unarmed people of
 Dublin when they attempted to arm in defence of Irish
 Nationality?


Remember, all you workers, that this war is utterly
 unjustifiable and unnecessary. Belgium would never have
 been in the slightest danger if France had not
 encouraged Russia to prepare to attack Germany. And
 France would never have given that encouragement to
 Russia had she not been urged to do so by the secret
 diplomacy of England. There would never have been war
 within two hundred and fifty miles of the Belgian
 frontier had not the French and English governments
 secretly resolved to attack Germany in order to help
 Russia—the greatest and most brutal foe of human
 liberty in the world. The gallant Belgians are being
 sacrificed that they may pull the chestnuts out of the
 fire for the unscrupulous capitalist government of
 England and the half-savage government of Russia. Should
 we allow ourselves to be sacrificed also? No! No!!
 No!!!


We have no foreign enemy except the treacherous
 government of England—a government that even
 whilst it is calling 


---

p.490


 upon us to die for
 it, refuses to
 give a straight answer to our demand for Home Rule.


VOLUNTEERS! Has the iron of slavery so far entered your
 souls that you will sing the songs, carry the flags and
 fight the battles of the Power that even in its
 extremity refuses to allow your Nation to take its place
 amongst the Nations of the earth?


Britain guaranteed the independence of Belgium. Yes, as
 she guaranteed the independence of Egypt, and then
 swallowed it up and slaughtered and imprisoned its
 patriot sons and daughters. Britain guaranteed the
 independence of Belgium. Yes, as she guaranteed the
 independence of Persia, and then encouraged her Russian
 ally to invade it and drown its freedom in a sea of
 blood.


Britain guaranteed the independence of Belgium. But who
 will win and guarantee the independence of Ireland? Will
 the Volunteers? Will the anti-Irish aristocrats who are
 rushing in to become your officers allow you to take a
 stand for Irish Nationality? Remember the words of Wolfe
 Tone— 
> 
> When the aristocracy come forward the people fall
>  backward; when the people come forward the
>  aristocracy, fearful of being left behind,
>  insinuate themselves into our ranks, and rise to
>  be timid leaders, or treacherous auxiliaries.
> 
> 
> 




WE WANT IRELAND, NOT FOR PEERS OR THE NOMINEES OF
 PEERS, BUT IRELAND FOR THE IRISH.


Irish Citizen Army (Belfast Division)
 1914.


---

p.491


### INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY OF IRELAND

### APPEAL TO THE IRISH WORKING CLASS

Fellow-workers.—


In the midst of the many appeals and manifestoes now
 being thrust upon your notice, we hope that you will
 find time to read this, the appeal of the only organised
 body of Socialists in Ireland who have at all times held
 to the principle that the true path to national
 redemption for this country led along the road of social
 progress; and that therefore they who worked for either
 cause could not but be of service to the other. As
 Socialists, we have ever taught that National Freedom
 could not be won by a population resigned to industrial
 slavery; and as believers in National Freedom we have
 ever taught that the real re-conquest of Ireland
 necessarily implied the redemption of the Irish worker
 from the slavery of the capitalist system.


This being our position, we desire now that Industrial
 Emancipation and National Freedom are alike in danger,
 to set before you our views of the present war, and your
 and our proper attitude towards it. We speak as workers
 to workers, and as lovers of our common country to all
 those who ought to love and cherish it.


Ask yourselves this question: What foreign enemies have
 the workers of Ireland; what country has ever done us
 any harm? With all the people of the world we have much
 in common; with none of them have we any just grounds
 for quarrel. All the workers of the world are like
 ourselves, beasts of burden to a propertied class, their
 lives ordered and ruled for them by the interests of
 that class, their countries stolen from them by the
 armed might of the hirelings of that class in the past,
 and kept from them by the superstitions of law 


---

p.492



 and tradition fostered by that class in the present.
 Their sufferings are as our sufferings, their hopes are
 our hopes—we are all brethren one of another. To
 take up arms in anger to kill any of the poor driven
 workers of another nation at the order of our rulers is
 as clearly an act of murder, an act worthy of Cain, as
 any crime of violence ever committed.


Now if we forget for a moment the vital distinction
 between a people and their rulers, and imagine that each
 of the countries outside Ireland is solid and with but
 one interest to conserve, that when we speak of England,
 we mean all England; of Germany, all Germany; of France,
 all France; of Russia, all Russia; if we imagine this
 current capitalist cant to be true, not even then can we
 conceive of any reason why Irish workers should fly to
 arms for the Empire. Has Germany ever harmed Ireland?
 No! Has England ever harmed Ireland? Yes! The whole
 history of our connection has been a history of English
 war upon Ireland. Are we then to take up arms and
 proceed to murder a nation that never harmed us, and do
 it at the call of a nation that destroyed our national
 life, murdered our civilisation, devastated our country,
 slew with famine untold millions of our people, hanged
 or imprisoned the best and bravest of our race, and even
 now refuses to put in operation the poor caricature of
 Home Rule so long promised?


We refuse to believe it. No, fellow-workers! The Empire
 is founded upon the misery of the toiling masses;
 security is based upon the submission of the
 dispossessed working-class. Its triumph will establish
 its industrial and political supremacy more firmly than
 ever. Its humiliation, on the contrary, will allow other
 peoples to take their rightful place among the nations
 of the world, and enable the working class to pursue
 their path to prosperity and freedom.


Out of such humiliation would come the peaceful growth
 of industry in Europe, and out of the travail of such
 humiliation for Empire there might arise an Ireland
 nationally free; an 


---

p.493


 Ireland able to
 develop a
 real civilisation based upon that broad democracy of
 common ownership which the Celtic civilisation of our
 forefathers foreshadowed.


We ask you then to let the Empire go its own way; let
 those who own it fight its battles. It is not yours, you
 are but its slaves, and surely there is nothing in
 creation meaner than slaves fighting for the source and
 basis of their enslavement.


Conserve your energies, guard the welfare of your own
 homes, study and work for the redemption of your class
 and nation. Watch and wait—in Ireland. For 
> 1. Time at last makes all things even
>   
> And if we do but watch the hour,
>   
> There never yet was human power
>   
> That could evade, if unforgiven,
>   
> The patient hate and vigil long
>   
> Of those who treasure up a wrong.
> 





1914.














