LABOUR IN IRISH 
 HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES CONNOLLY 
 
 1919 
 THE DONNELLY PRESS 
 
 164 EAST 37TH STREET 
 
 NEW YORK 
 All Rights Reserved
 
 HP 
 
 ?3< 
 
 J4
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FOREWORD . 5 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY . .... 13 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE JACOBITES AND THE IRISH PEOPLE .... 18 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 PEASANT REBELLIONS 24 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 SOCIAL REVOLTS AND POLITICAL KITES AND CROWS . 29 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 35 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 CAPITALIST BETRAYAL OF THE IRISH VOLUNTEERS . 39 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE UNITED IRISHMEN 52 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 UNITED IRISHMEN AS DEMOCRATS AND INTERNATION- 
 ALISTS 57 
 
 3
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE EMMET CONSPIRACY 
 
 69 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE FIRST IRISH SOCIALIST: A FORERUNNER OF MARX 74 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 AN IRISH UTOPIA 83 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 A CHAPTER OF HORRORS : DANIEL O'CONNELL AND THE 
 
 WORKING CLASS . 96 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 OUR IRISH GIRONDINS SACRIFICE THE IRISH PEAS- 
 ANTRY UPON THE ALTAR OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 104 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 SOCIALISTIC TEACHING OF YOUNG IRELANDERS : THE 
 
 THINKERS AND THE WORKERS . . 113 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 SOME MORE IRISH PIONEERS OF THE SOCIALIST MOVE- 
 MENT . . 123 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE WORKING CLASS: THE INHERITORS OF THE IRISH 
 IDEALS OF THE PAST THE REPOSITORY OF THE 
 HOPES OF THE FUTURE
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 IN her great work, "The Making of Ireland and its Undoing," 
 the only contribution to Irish history we know of which conforms 
 to the methods of modern historical science, the authoress, Mrs. 
 Stopford Green, dealing with the effect upon Ireland of the 
 dispersion of the Irish race in the time of Henry VIII. and 
 Elizabeth, and the consequent destruction of Gaelic culture, and 
 rupture with Gaelic tradition and law, says that the Irishmen 
 educated in schools abroad abandoned or knew nothing of the lore 
 of ancient Erin, and had no sympathy with the spirit of the 
 Brehon Code, nor with the social order of which it was the 
 juridical expression. She says they "urged the theory, so antag- 
 onistic to the immemorial laiv of Ireland, that only from polluted 
 sinks of heretics could come the idea that the people might elect 
 a ruler, and confer supreme authority on whomsoever pleased 
 them." In other words the new Irish, educated in foreign 
 standards, had adopted as their own the feudal-capitalist system 
 of which England was the exponent in Ireland, and urged it upon 
 the Gaelic Irish. As the dispersion of the clans, consummated 
 by Cromwell, finally completed the ruin of Gaelic Ireland, all the 
 higher education of Irishmen thenceforward ran in this foreign 
 groove, and was coloured with this foreign colouring. 
 
 In other words, the Gaelic culture of the Irish chieftainry 
 was rudely broken off in the seventeenth century, and the con- 
 tinental Schools of European despots implanted in its place in 
 the minds of the Irish students, and sent them back to Ireland 
 to preach a fanatical belief in royal and feudal prerogatives, as 
 foreign to the genius of the Gael as was the English ruler to 
 Irish soil. What a light this sheds upon Irish history of the 
 seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries! And what a 
 commentary it is upon the real origin of that so-called "Irish 
 veneration for the aristocracy," of which the bourgeois charlatans 
 of Irish literature write so eloquently ! That veneration is seen
 
 6 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 to be as much of an exotic, as much of an importation, as the 
 aristocratic caste it venerated. Both were 
 
 ". . . foul foreign blossoms 
 Blown hither to poison our plains." 
 
 But so deeply has this insidious lie about the aristocratic 
 tendencies of the Irish taken root in Irish thought that it will 
 take a long time to eradicate it from the minds of the people, or 
 to make the Irish realise that the whole concept of orthodox 
 Irish history for the last 200 years was a betrayal and abandon- 
 ment of the best traditions of the Irish race. Yet such is 
 undoubtedly the case. Let us examine this a little more closely I 
 
 Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, 
 so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral 
 level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives 
 its inspiration. If we would understand the national literature 
 of a people we must study their social and political status, keep- 
 ing in mind the fact that their writers were a product thereof, 
 and that the children of their brains were conceived and brought 
 forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland at the same time 
 as she lost her ancient social system, also lost her language as the 
 vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result 
 of this twofold loss the nation suffered socially, nationally and 
 intellectually from a prolonged arrested development. During 
 the closing years of the seventeenth century, all the eighteenth, 
 and the greater part of the nineteenth, the Irish people were the 
 lowest helots in Europe, socially and politically. The Irish 
 peasant, reduced from the position of a free clansman owning his 
 tribelands and controlling its administration in common with 
 his fellows, was a mere tenant-at-will subject to eviction, dis- 
 honour and outrage at the hands of an irresponsible private pro- 
 prietor. Politically he was non-existent, legally he held no rights, 
 intellectually he sank under the weight of his social abasement, 
 and surrendered to the downward drag of his poverty. He had 
 been conquered, and he suffered all the terrible consequences of 
 defeat at the hands of a ruling class and nation who have always 
 acted upon the old Roman maxim of "Woe to the vanquished." 
 
 To add to his humiliation, those of his name and race who 
 had contrived to escape the general ruin, and sent their children 
 to be educated in foreign schools, discovered with the return of 
 those "wild geese" to their native habitat that they who had sailed 
 for France, Italy or Spain, filled with hatred of the English
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 7 
 
 Crown and of the English landlord garrison in Ireland, returned 
 as mere Catholic adherents of a pretender to the English throne, 
 using all the prestige of their foreign schooling to discredit the 
 Gaelic ideas of equality and democracy, and instead instilling 
 into the minds of the growing generation feudal ideas of the 
 divine right of kings to rule, and of subjects to unquestioningly 
 obey. The Irish students in the universities of the Continent 
 were the first products of a scheme which the Papacy still pursues 
 with its accustomed skill and persistence a persistence which 
 recks little of the passing of centuries a scheme which looks 
 upon Catholic Ireland simply as a tool to be used for the spir- 
 itual re-conquest of England to Catholicity. In the" eighteenth 
 century this scheme did its deadliest work in Ireland. It failed 
 ridiculously to cause a single Irish worker in town or country to 
 strike a blow for the Stuart cause in the years of the Scottish 
 Rebellions in 1715 and 1745, but it prevented them from striking 
 any blows for their own cause, or from taking advantage of the 
 civil feuds of their enemies. It did more. It killed Gaelic 'Ire- 
 land ; an Irish-speaking Catholic was of no value as a missionary 
 of Catholicism in England, and an Irish peasant who treasured 
 the tongue of his fathers might also have some reverence for the 
 principles of the social polity and civilisation under which his 
 forefathers had lived and prospered for unnumbered years. And 
 such principles were even more distasteful to French, Spanish or 
 Papal patrons of Irish schools of learning on the Continent than 
 they were to English monarchs. Thus the poor Irish were not 
 only pariahs in the social system of their day, but they were also 
 precluded from hoping for a revival of intellectual life through 
 the achievements of their children. Their children were taught 
 to despise the language and traditions of their fathers. 
 
 It was at or during this period, when the Irish peasant had 
 been crushed to the very lowest point, when the most he could 
 hope for was to be pitied as animals are pitied ; it was during this 
 period Irish literature in English was born. Such Irish literature 
 was not written for Irishmen as a real Irish literature would be, 
 it was written by Irishmen, about Irishmen, but for English or 
 Anglo-Irish consumption. 
 
 Hence the Irishman in English literature may be said to have 
 been born with an apology in his mouth. His creators knew 
 nothing of the free and independent Irishman of Gaelic Ireland, 
 but they did know the conquered, robbed, slave-driven, brutalised, 
 demoralised Irishman, the product of generations of landlord 
 and capitalist rule, and him they seized upon, held up to the gaze
 
 8 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 of the world, and asked the nations to accept as the true Irish 
 type. 
 
 If he crouched before a representative of royalty with an 
 abject submission born of a hundred years of political outlawry 
 and training in foreign ideas, his abasement was pointed to proudly 
 as an instance of the "ancient Celtic fidelity to hereditary mon- 
 archs;" if with the memory of perennial famines, evictions, jails, 
 hangings, and tenancy-at-will beclouding his brain he humbled 
 himself before the upper class, or attached himself like a dog 
 to their personal fortunes, his sycophancy was cited as a mani- 
 festation of "ancient Irish veneration for the aristocracy," and if 
 long-continued insecurity of life begat in him a fierce desire for 
 the ownership of a piece of land to safeguard his loved ones 
 in a system where land was life, this new-born land-hunger was 
 triumphantly trumpeted forth as a proof of the "Irish attachment 
 to the principle of private property." Be it understood we are 
 not talking now of the English slanderers of the Irishman, but of 
 his Irish apologists. The English slanderer never did as much 
 harm as did these self-constituted delineators of Irish character- 
 istics. The English slanderer lowered Irishmen in the eyes of the 
 world, but his Irish middle class teachers and writers lowered 
 him in his own eyes by extolling as an Irish virtue every syco- 
 phantic vice begotten of generations of slavery. Accordingly, as 
 an Irishman, peasant, labourer, or artisan, banded himself with 
 his fellows to strike back at their oppressors in defence of their 
 right to live in the land of their fathers, the "respectable" classes 
 who had imbibed the foreign ideas publicly deplored his act, and 
 unctuously ascribed it to the "evil effects of English misgovern- 
 ment upon the Irish character ;" but when an occasional Irishman, 
 abandoning all the traditions of his race, climbed up upon the 
 backs of his fellows to wealth or position, his career was held up 
 as a sample of what Irishmen could do under congenial or favour- 
 able circumstances. The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries were, indeed, the Via Dolorosa of the Irish race. In 
 them the Irish Gael sank out of sight, and in his place the middle 
 class politicians, capitalists and ecclesiastics laboured to produce 
 a hybrid Irishman, assimilating a foreign social system, a foreign 
 speech, and a foreign character. In the effort to assimilate the 
 first two the Irish were unhappily too successful, so successful 
 that to-day the majority of the Irish do not know that their 
 fathers ever knew another system of ownership, and the Irish 
 Irelanders are painfully grappling with their mother tongue 
 with the hesitating accent of a foreigner. Fortunately the Irish
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 9 
 
 character has proven too difficult to press into respectable foreign 
 moulds, and the recoil of that character from the deadly embrace 
 of capitalist English conventionalism, as it has already led to a 
 revaluation of the speech of the Gael, will in all probability also 
 lead to a re-study and appreciation of the social system under 
 which the Gael reached the highest point of civilisation and culture 
 in Europe. 
 
 In the re-conversion of Ireland to the Gaelic principle of 
 common ownership by a people of their sources of food and main- 
 tenance, the worst obstacle to overcome will be the opposition 
 of the men and women who have imbibed their ideas of Irish 
 character and history from Anglo-Irish literature. That litera- 
 ture, as we have explained, was born in the worst agonies of the 
 slavery of our race; it bears all the birth-marks of such origin 
 upon it, but irony of ironies, these birth-marks of slavery are 
 hailed by our teachers as "the native characteristics of the Celt." 
 
 One of these slave birth-marks is a belief in the capitalist 
 system of society; the Irishman frees himself from such a mark 
 of slavery when he realises the truth that the capitalist system 
 is the more foreign thing in Ireland. 
 
 Hence we have had in Ireland for over 250 years the remark- 
 able phenomenon of Irishmen of the upper and middle classes 
 urging upon the Irish toilers as a sacred national and religious 
 duty the necessity of maintaining a social order against which 
 their Gaelic forefathers had struggled, despite prison cells, fam- 
 ine, and the sword, for over 400 years. Reversing the procedure 
 of the Normans settled in Ireland, who were said to have become 
 "more Irish than the Irish," the Irish propertied classes became 
 more English than the English, and so have continued to our day. 
 
 Hence we believe that this book, attempting to depict the 
 attitude of the dispossessed masses of the Irish people in the 
 great crisis of modern Irish history, may justly be looked upon 
 as part of the literature of the Gaelic revival. As the Gaelic 
 language, scorned by the possessing classes, sought and found 
 its last fortress in the hearts and homes of the "lower orders," 
 to re-issue from thence in our own time to what the writer be- 
 lieves to be a greater and more enduring place in civilisation than 
 of old, so in the words of Thomas Francis Meagher, the same 
 "wretched cabins have been the holy shrines in which the tra- 
 ditions and the hopes of Ireland have been treasured and trans- 
 mitted. 
 
 The apostate patriotism of the Irish capitalist class, arising 
 as it does upon the rupture with Gaelic tradition, will, of course.
 
 10 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 reject this conception, and saturated with foreignism themselves, 
 they will continue to hurl the epithet of "foreign ideas" against 
 the militant Irish democracy. But the present Celtic revival in 
 Ireland, leading as it must to a reconsideration and more analytical 
 study of the laws and social structure of Ireland before the 
 English Invasion, amongst its other good results, will have this 
 one also, that it will confirm and establish the truth of this con- 
 ception. Hitherto the study of the social structure of Ireland 
 in the past has been marred by one great fault. For a descrip- 
 tion and interpretation of Irish social life and customs the 
 student depended entirely upon the description and interpretation 
 of men who were entirely lacking in knowledge of, and insight 
 into, the facts and spirit of the things they attempted to decsribe. 
 Imbued with the conception of feudalistic or capitalistic social 
 order, the writers perpetually strove to explain Irish institutions 
 in terms of an order of things to which those institutions were 
 entirely alien. Irish titles, indicative of the function in society 
 performed by their bearers, the writers explained by what they 
 supposed were analogous titles in the feudal order of England, 
 forgetful of the fact that as the one form of society was the 
 antithesis of the other, and not its counterpart, the one set of 
 titles could not possibly convey the same meaning as the other, 
 much less be a translation. 
 
 Much the same mistake was made in America by the early 
 Spanish conquistadores in attempting to describe the social and 
 political systems of Mexico and Peru, with much the same results 
 of introducing almost endless confusion into every attempt to 
 comprehend life as it actually existed in those countries before 
 the conquest. The Spanish writers could not mentally raise 
 themselves out of the social structure of continental Europe, and 
 hence their weird and wonderful tales of despotic Peruvian and 
 Mexican "Emperors" and "Nobles" where really existed the 
 elaborately organised family system of a people not yet fully 
 evolved into the political state. Not until the publication of 
 Morgan's monumental work on "Ancient Society" was the key 
 to the study of American native civilisation really found and 
 placed in the hands of the student. The same key will yet 
 unlock the doors which guard the secrets of our native Celtic 
 civilisation, and make them possible of fuller comprehension for 
 the multitude. 
 
 Meanwhile we desire to place before our readers the two 
 propositions upon which this book is founded propositions 
 which we believe embody alike the fruits of the experience of the
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 11 
 
 past and the matured thought of the present upon the points 
 under consideration. 
 
 First, that in the evolution of civilisation the progress of 
 the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must, perforce, 
 keep pace with the progress of the struggle for liberty of the 
 most subject class in that nation, and that the shifting of eco- 
 nomic and political forces which accompanies the development of 
 the system of capitalist society leads inevitably to the increasing 
 conservatism of the non-workingclass element, and to the revo- 
 lutionary vigour and power of the working class. 
 
 Second, that the result of the long drawn out struggle of 
 Ireland has been, so far, that the old chieftainry has disappeared, 
 or through its degenerate descendants has made terms with 
 iniquity, and become part and parcel of the supporters of the 
 established order; the middle class, growing up in the midst of 
 the national struggle, and at one time, as in 1798, through the 
 stress of the economic rivalry of England almost forced into the 
 position of revolutionary leaders against the political despotism 
 of their industrial competitors, have now also bowed the knee to 
 Baal, and have a thousand economic strings in the shape of 
 investments binding them to English capitalism as against every 
 sentimental or historic attachment drawing them toward Irish 
 patriotism ; only the Irish working class remain as the incorrupti- 
 ble inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland. 
 
 To that unconquered Irish working class this book is dedi- 
 cated by one of their number. 
 
 JAMES CONNOLLY.
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY. 
 
 "What is History but a fable agreed upon." 
 
 Napoleon I. 
 
 IT is in itself a significant commentary upon the subordinate place 
 allotted to labour in Irish politics that a writer should think it 
 necessary to explain his purpose before setting out to detail for 
 the benefit of his readers the position of the Irish workers in 
 the past, and the lessons to be derived from a study of that 
 position in guiding the movement of the working class to-day. 
 Were history what it ought to be, an accurate literary reflex 
 of the times with which it professes to deal, the pages of history 
 would be almost entirely engrossed with a recital of the wrongs 
 and struggles of the labouring people, constituting, as they have 
 ever done, the vast mass of mankind. But history, in general, 
 treats the working class as the manipulator of politics treats the 
 working man that is to say with contempt when he remains 
 passive, and with derision, hatred and misrepresentation when- 
 ever he dares evince a desire to throw off the yoke of political 
 or social servitude. Ireland is no exception to the rule. Irish 
 history has ever been written by the master class in the interests 
 of the master class. 
 
 Whenever the social question cropped up in modern Irish 
 history, whenever the question of labour and its wrongs figured 
 in the writings or speeches of our modern Irish politicians, it was 
 simply that they might be used as weapons in the warfare against 
 a political adversary, and not at all because the person so using 
 them was personally convinced that the subjection of labour was 
 in itself a wrong. 
 
 The present series of articles are intended primarily to 
 
 13
 
 14 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 prove that contention. To prove it by a reference to the evidence 
 documentary and otherwise adduced illustrating the state of 
 the Irish working class in the past, the almost total indifference 
 of our Irish politicians to the sufferings of the mass of the people, 
 and the true inwardness of many of the political agitations which 
 have occupied the field in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
 turies. Special attention is given to the period preceding the 
 Union and evidence brought forward relative to the state of 
 Ireland before and during the continuance of Grattan's Parlia- 
 ment; to the condition of the working people in town and coun- 
 try, and the attitude towards labour taken up by politicians of 
 all sides, whether patriot or ministerialist. In other words, we 
 propose to do what in us lies to repair the deliberate neglect of 
 the social question by our historians, and to prepare the way in 
 order that other and abler pens than our own may demonstrate 
 to the reading public the manner in which economic conditions 
 have controlled and dominated our Irish history. 
 
 But as a preliminary to this essay on our part it becomes 
 necessary to recapitulate here some of the salient facts of history 
 we have elsewhere insisted upon as essential to a thorough grasp 
 of the "Irish Question." 
 
 Politically, Ireland has been under the control of England 
 for the past 700 years, during the greater part of which time the 
 country has been the scene of constant wars against her rule 
 upon the part of the native Irish. Until the year 1649, these wars 
 were complicated by the fact that they were directed against both 
 the political and social order recognised by the English invader. 
 It may surprise many readers to learn that up to the date above- 
 mentioned the basis of society in Ireland, except within the Pale 
 (a small strip of territory around the Capital city, Dublin) rested 
 upon communal or tribal ownership of land. The Irish chief, 
 although recognised in the courts of France, Spain, and Rome, 
 as the peer of the reigning princes of Europe, in reality held his 
 position upon the sufferance of his people, and as an administrator 
 of the tribal affairs of his people, while the land or territory of 
 the clan was entirely removed from his private jurisdiction. In 
 the parts of Ireland where for 400 years after the first conquest 
 (so-called) the English governors could not penetrate except 
 at the head of a powerful army, the social order which prevailed 
 in England feudalism was unknown, and as this comprised the 
 greater portion of the country, it gradually came to be understood 
 that the war against the foreign oppressor was also a war against 
 private property in land. But with the forcible break up of the
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 15 
 
 elan system in 1649, the social aspect of the Irish struggle sank 
 out of sight, its place being usurped by the mere political expres- 
 sions of the fight for freedom. Such an event was, of course, 
 inevitable in any case. Communal ownership of land would, 
 undoubtedly, have given way to the privately owned system of 
 capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland had remained an independ- 
 ent country, but coming as it did in obedience to the pressure of 
 armed force from without, instead of by the operation of eco- 
 nomic forces within, the change has been bitterly and justly 
 resented by the vast mass of the Irish people, many of whom still 
 mix with their dreams of liberty longings for a return to the 
 ancient system of land tenure now organically impossible. The 
 dispersion of the clans, of course, put an end to the leadership 
 of the chiefs, and in consequence, the Irish aristocracy being all 
 of foreign or traitor origin, Irish patriotic movements fell entirely 
 into the hands of the middle class, and became, for the most part, 
 simply idealised expressions of middle class interest. 
 
 Hence the spokesmen of the middle class, in the Press and 
 on the platform, have consistently sought the emasculation of the 
 Irish National movement, the distortion of Irish history, and, 
 above all, the denial of all relation between the social rights 
 of the Irish toilers and the political rights of the Irish nation. 
 It was hoped and intended by this means to create what is termed 
 "a real National movement" i.e., a movement in which each 
 class would recognise the rights of the other classes and laying 
 aside their contentions would unite in a national struggle against 
 the common enemy England. Needless to say, the only class 
 deceived by such phrases was the working class. When ques- 
 tions of "class" interests are eliminated from public controversy 
 a victory is thereby gained for the possessing, conservative class, 
 whose only hope of security lies in such elimination. Like a 
 fraudulent trustee, the bourgeois dreads nothing so much as an 
 impartial and rigid inquiry into the validity of his title deeds. 
 Hence the bourgeois press and politicians incessantly strive to 
 inflame the working class mind to fever heat upon questions out- 
 side the range of their own class interests. War, religion, race, 
 language, political reform, patriotism apart from whatever in- 
 trinsic merits they may posses all serve in the hands of the 
 possessing class as counter-irritants, whose function it is to avert 
 the catastrophe of social revolution by engendering heat in such 
 parts of the body politic as are farthest removed from the seat of 
 economic enquiry, and consequently of class consciousness on 
 the part of the proletariat. The bourgeois Irishman has long
 
 16 
 
 been an adept at such manoeuvring, and has, it must be confessed, 
 found in his working class countrymen exceedingly pliable ma- 
 terial. During the last hundred years every generation in Ireland 
 has witnessed an attempted rebellion against English rule. Every 
 such conspiracy or rebellion has drawn the majority of its adher- 
 ents from the lower orders in town and country, yet under the 
 inspiration of a few middle class doctrinaires the social question 
 has been rigorously excluded from the field of action to be 
 covered by the rebellion if successful; in hopes that by such 
 exclusion it would be possible to conciliate the upper classes 
 and enlist them in the struggle for freedom. The result has in 
 nearly every case been the same. The workers, though furnish- 
 ing the greatest proportion of recruits to the ranks of the revolu- 
 tionists, and consequently of victims to the prison and the scaf- 
 fold, could not be imbued en masse with the revolutionary fire 
 necessary to seriously imperil a dominion rooted for 700 years 
 in the heart of their country. They were all anxious enough for 
 freedom, but realising the enormous odds against them, and 
 being explicitly told by their leaders that they must not expect any 
 change in their condition of social subjection, even if successful, 
 they as a body shrank from the contest, and left only the purest 
 minded and most chivalrous of their class to face the odds and 
 glut the vengeance of the tyrant a warning to those in all coun- 
 tries who neglect the vital truth that successful revolutions are 
 not the product of our brains, but of ripe material conditions. 
 
 The upper class also turned a contemptuously deaf ear to 
 the charming of the bourgeois patriot. They (the upper class) 
 naturally clung to their property, landed and otherwise ; under 
 the protecting power of England they felt themselves secure in 
 the possession thereof, but were by no means assured as to the 
 fate which might befall it in a successful revolutionary uprising. 
 The landlord class, therefore, remained resolutely loyal to Eng- 
 land, and while the middle class poets and romancists were 
 enthusing on the hope of a "union of class and creeds," the aris- 
 tocracy were pursuing their private interest against their tenants 
 with a relentlessness which threatened to depopulate the country, 
 and led even an English Conservative newspaper, the London 
 Times, to declare that "the name of an Irish landlord stinks in 
 the nostrils of Christendom." 
 
 It is well to remember, as a warning against similar foolish- 
 ness in future, that the generation of Irish landlords which had 
 listened to the eloquent pleadings of Thomas Davis was the same 
 as that which in the Famine years "exercised its rights with a rod
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY V 
 
 of iron and renounced its duties with a front of brass." 
 
 The lower middle class gave to the National cause in the 
 past many unselfish patriots, but, on the whole, while willing and 
 ready enough to please their humble fellow-countrymen, and to 
 compound with their own conscience by shouting louder than 
 all others their untiring devotion to the cause of freedom, they, 
 as a class, unceasingly strove to divert the public mind upon the 
 lines of constitutional agitation for such reforms as might remove 
 irritating and unnecessary officialism, while leaving untouched 
 the basis of national and economic subjection. This policy 
 enables them to masquerade as patriots before the unthinking 
 multitude, and at the same time lends greater force to their 
 words when as "patriot leaders" they cry down any serious 
 revolutionary movement that might demand from them greater 
 proofs of sincerity than can be furnished by the strength of 
 their lungs, or greater sacrifices than would be suitable to their 
 exchequer. '48 and '67, the Young Ireland and the Fenian 
 Movements, furnish the classic illustrations of this policy on 
 the part of the Irish middle class. 
 
 Such, then, is our view of Irish politics and Irish history. 
 Subsequent chapters will place before our readers the facts upon 
 which such a view is based.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE JACOBITES AND THE IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 "If ever there was a time when it behooved men in public stations to 
 be explicit, if ever there was a time when those scourges of the human 
 race called politicians should lay aside their duplicity and finesse, it is 
 the present moment. Be assured that the people of this country will no 
 longer bear that their welfare should be the sport of a few family factions ; 
 be assured they are convinced their true interest consists in putting down 
 men of self creation, who have no object in view but that of aggrandising 
 themselves and their families at the expense of the public, and in setting 
 up men who shall represent the nation, who shall be accountable to the 
 nation, and who shall do the business of the nation." Arthur O'Connor 
 in Irish House of Commons, May 4, 1795. 
 
 Modern Irish History properly understood may be said to 
 start with the close of the Williamite Wars in the year 1691. All 
 the political life of Ireland during the next 200 years draws its 
 colouring from, and can only be understood in the light of that 
 conflict between King James of England and the claimant for 
 his throne, William, Prince of Orange. Our Irish politics even 
 to this day and generation have been and are largely determined 
 by the light in which the different sections of the Irish people 
 regarded the prolonged conflict which closed with the surrender 
 of Sarsfield and the garrison of Limerick to the investing forces 
 of the Williamite party. Yet never in all the history of Ireland 
 has there been a war in which the people of Ireland had less 
 reason to be interested either on one side or the other. It is 
 unfortunately beyond all question that the Irish Catholics of 
 that time did fight for King James like lions. It is beyond all 
 question that the Irish Catholics shed their blood like water 
 and wasted their wealth like dirt in an effort to retain King 
 James upon the throne. But it is equally beyond all question 
 that the whole struggle was no earthly concern of theirs; that 
 King James was one of the most worthless representatives of a 
 worthless race that ever sat upon a throne; that the "pious glo- 
 
 18
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 19 
 
 rious and immortal" William was a mere adventurer fighting 
 for his own hand, and his army recruited from the impecunious 
 swordsmen of Europe who cared as little for Protestantism as 
 they did for human life ; and that neither army had the slightest 
 claim to be considered as a patriot army combating for the 
 freedom of the Irish race. So far from the paeans of praise 
 lavished upon Sarsfield and the Jacobite army being justified, 
 it is questionable whether a more enlightened or patriotic age 
 than our own will not condemn them as little better than traitors 
 for their action in seducing the Irish people from their allegiance 
 to the cause of their country's freedom to plunge them into a 
 war on behalf of a foreign tyrant a tyrant who, even in the 
 midst of their struggles on his behalf, opposed the Dublin Parlia- 
 ment in its efforts to annul the supremacy of the English Parlia- 
 ment. The war between William and James offered a splendid 
 opportunity to the subject people of Ireland to make a bid for 
 freedom while the forces of their oppressors were rent in civil 
 war. The opportunity was cast aside, and the subject people 
 took sides on behalf of the opposing factions of their enemies. 
 The reason is not hard to find. The Catholic gentlemen and 
 nobles who had the leadership of the people of Ireland at the 
 time were, one and all, men who possessed considerable property 
 in the country, property to which they had, notwithstanding their 
 Catholicity, no more right or title than the merest Cromwellian 
 or Williamite adventurer. The lands they held were lands which 
 in former times belonged to the Irish people in other words, 
 they were tribe-lands. As such, the peasantry then reduced to 
 the position of mere tenants at will were the rightful owners 
 of the soil, whilst the Jacobite chivalry of King James were 
 either the descendants of men who had obtained their property 
 in some former confiscation as the spoils of conquest; of men 
 who had taken sides with the oppressor against their own coun- 
 trymen and were allowed to retain their property as the fruits 
 of treason; or finally, of men who had consented to seek from 
 the English Government for a grant giving them a personal 
 title to the lands of their clansmen. From such a combination 
 no really national action could be expected, and from first to 
 last of their public proceedings they acted as an English faction, 
 and as an English faction only. In whatever point they might 
 disagree with the Williamites, they were at least in perfect accord 
 with them on one point viz., that the Irish people should be 
 a subject people ; and it will be readily understood that even had 
 the war ended in the complete defeat of William and the triumph
 
 20 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 of James, the lot of the Irish, whether as tillers of the soil or 
 as a nation, would not have been substantially improved. The 
 undeniable patriotism of the rank and file does not alter the 
 truthfulness of this analysis of the situation. They saw only 
 the new enemy from England, the old English enemy settled in 
 Ireland they were generously, but foolishly, ready to credit with 
 all the virtues and attributes of patriotic Irishmen. 
 
 To further illustrate our point regarding the character of 
 the Jacobite leaders in Ireland we might adduce the result of 
 the great land settlement of Ireland in 1675. Eleven million 
 acres had been surveyed at that time, of which four million acres 
 were in the possession of Protestant settlers as the result of 
 previous confiscations. 
 
 Lands so held were never disturbed, but the remainder 
 were distributed as follows: 
 
 Acres 
 
 To soldiers who had served in the Irish wars 2,367,715 
 
 To 49 officers 497,001 
 
 To adventurers (who had lent money) 707,321 
 
 To provisors (to whom land had been promised) 477,873 
 
 To Duke of Ormond and Colonel Butler 257,518 
 
 To Duke of York 169,436 
 
 To Protestant Bishops 31,526 
 
 The lands left to the Catholics were distributed among the 
 Catholic "gentlemen" as follows : 
 
 Acres 
 To those who were declared "innocent" that is to say, 
 
 those who had not fought for freedom, but had 
 
 sided with the Government 1,176,570 
 
 To provisors (land promised) 497,001 
 
 Nominees in possession 68,260 
 
 Restitutions 55,396 
 
 To those transferred to Connaught, under James I. ... 541,330 
 
 It will thus be seen that, with the exception of the lands 
 held in Connaught, all the lands held by the Catholic gentry 
 throughout Ireland were lands gained in the manner we have 
 before described as the spoils of conquest or the fruits of 
 treachery. Even in that province the lands of the gentry were 
 held under a feudal tenure from the English Crown, and there- 
 fore their owners had entered into a direct agreement with the 
 invader to set aside the rights of the clan community in favour 
 of their own personal claims. Here then was the real reason
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 21 
 
 for the refusal of the Irish leaders of that time to raise the 
 standard of the Irish nation instead of the banner of an English 
 faction. They fought, not for freedom for Ireland, nor for the 
 restitution of their rights to the Irish people, but rather to secure 
 that the class who then enjoyed the privilege of robbing the Irish 
 people should not be compelled to give way in their turn to a fresh 
 horde of land thieves. Much has been made of their attempts 
 to repeal Poyning's Law* and in other ways to give greater legis- 
 lative force to the resolutions of the Dublin Parliament, as if such 
 acts were a proof of their sincere desire to free the country, and 
 not merely to make certain their own tenure of power. But such 
 claims on the part of some writers are only another proof of the 
 difficulty of comprehending historical occurrences without having 
 some central principle to guide and direct in the task. 
 
 For the benefit of our readers we may here set forth the 
 Socialist key to the pages of history in order that it may be the 
 more readily understood why in the past the governing classes 
 have ever and always aimed at the conquest of political power as 
 the guarantee for their economic domination or, to put it more 
 plainly, for the social subjection of the masses and why the 
 freedom of the workers, even in a political sense, must be incom- 
 plete and insecure until they wrest from the governing classes the 
 possession of the land and instruments of wealth production. 
 This proposition, or key to history, as set forth by Karl Marx, the 
 greatest of modern thinkers and first of scientific Socialists, is as 
 follows : 
 
 "That in every historical epoch the prevailing method of 
 economic production and exchange, and the social organisation 
 necessarily following from it, forms the basis upon which alone 
 can be explained the political and intellectual history of that 
 epoch." 
 
 In Ireland at the time of the Williamite war the "prevailing 
 method of economic production and exchange" was the feudal 
 method based upon the private ownership of lands stolen from the 
 Irish people, and all the political struggles of the period were 
 built upon the material interests of one set of usurpers who wished 
 to retain, and another set who wished to obtain, the mastery of 
 those lands in other words, the application of such a key as the 
 above to the problem furnished by the Jacobite Parliament of 
 King James at once explains the reason of the so-called patriotic 
 efforts of the Catholic gentry. Their efforts were directed to the 
 
 * Poyning's Law made the Dublin Parliament subordinate to the Parlia- 
 ment in London.
 
 22 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 conservation of their own rights of property, as against the right 
 of the English Parliament to interfere with or regulate such rights. 
 The so-called Patriot Parliament was in reality, like every oth 
 Parliament that ever sat in Dublin, merely a collection of land 
 thieves and their lackeys ; their patriotism consisted in an eft 
 to retain for themselves the spoils of the native peasantry; the 
 English influence against which they protested was the influence 
 of their fellow-thieves in England hungry for a share of the spoil ; 
 and Sarsfield and his followers did not become Irish patriots 
 because of their fight against King William's government any 
 more than an Irish Whig out of office becomes a patriot because 
 of his hatred to the Tories who are in. The forces which battled 
 beneath the walls of Derry or Limerick were not the forces of 
 England and Ireland, but were the forces of two English political 
 parties fighting for the possession of the powers of government; 
 and the leaders of the Irish Wild Geese on the battlefields of 
 Europe were not shedding their blood because of their fidelity to 
 Ireland, as our historians pretend to believe, but because they had 
 attached themselves to the defeated side in English politics. This 
 fact was fully illustrated by the action of the old Franco-Irish 
 at the time of the Frnech Revolution. They in a body volunteered 
 into the English army to help to put down the new French Repub- 
 lic, and as a result Europe witnessed the spectacle of the new 
 republican Irish exiles fighting for the French Revolution, and the 
 sons of the old aristocratic Irish exiles fighting under the banner 
 of England to put down that Revolution. It is time we learned 
 to appreciate and value the truth upon such matters, and to brush 
 from our eyes the cobwebs woven across them by our ignorant or 
 unscrupulous history-writing politicians. 
 
 On the other hand, it is just as necessary to remember that 
 King William, when he had finally subdued his enemies in 
 Ireland, showed by his actions that he and his followers were ani- 
 mated throughout by the same class feeling and considerations 
 as their opponents. When the war was over William confiscated 
 a million and a half acres, and distributed them among the aristo- 
 cratic plunderers who followed him as follows : 
 
 He gave Lord Bentinck, 135,300 acres; Lord Albemarle, 
 103,603; Lord Conningsby, 59,667; Lord Romney, 49,517; Lord 
 Galway, 36,142; Lord Athlone, 26,840; Lord Rochford, 49,512; 
 Dr. Leslie, 16,000; Mr. F. Keighley, 12,000; Lord Mountjoy, 
 12,000; Sir T. Prendergast, 7,083; Colonel Hamilton, 5,886 acres. 
 
 These are a few of the men whose descendants some presuma- 
 bly sane Irishmen imagine will be converted into "nationalists" by
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 23 
 
 preaching "a union of classes." 
 
 It must not be forgotten, also, if only as a proof of his reli- 
 gious sincerity, that King William bestowed 95,000 acres, plun- 
 dered from the Irish people, upon his paramour, Elizabeth Villiers, 
 Countess of Orkney. But the virtuous Irish Parliament inter- 
 fered, took back the land, and distributed it amongst their im- 
 mediate friends, the Irish Loyalist adventurers.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 PEASANT REBELLIONS. 
 
 "To permit a small class, whether alien or native, to obtain a monopoly 
 of the land is an intolerable injustice; its continued enforcement is neither 
 more nor less than a robbery of the hard and laborious earnings of the 
 p 00r ." Irish People (Organ of the Fenian Brotherhood), July 30, 1864. 
 
 In the preceding chapter we pointed out that the Williamite 
 war in Ireland, from Derry to Limerick, was primarily a war 
 for mastery over the Irish people, and that all questions of 
 national or industrial freedom were ignored by the leaders on 
 both sides as being presumably what their modern prototypes 
 would style "beyond the pale of practical politics." 
 
 When the nation had once more settled down to the pur- 
 suits of peace, and all fear of a Catholic or Jacobite rising had 
 departed from the minds of even the most timorous squireen, the 
 unfortunate tenantry of Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant, 
 were enlightened upon how little difference the war had made 
 to their position as a subject class. The Catholic who had been 
 so foolish as to adhere to the army of James could not, in the 
 nature of things, expect much consideration from his conquerors 
 and he received none but he had the consolation of seeing 
 that the rank and file of his Protestant enemies were treated 
 little, if at all, better than himself. When the hungry horde of 
 adventurers who had brought companies to the service of Willia/n 
 had glutted themselves with the plunder for which they had 
 crossed the Channel they showed no more disposition to remem- 
 ber the claims of the common soldier by the aid of whose 
 sword they had climbed to power than do our present rulers 
 when they consign to the workhouse the shattered frames of the 
 poor fools who, with murder and pillage, have won for their 
 masters empire in India or Africa. 
 
 Before long the Protestant and Catholic tenants were suf- 
 fering one common oppression. The question of political su- 
 
 24
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 25 
 
 premacy having been finally decided, the yoke of economic 
 slavery was now laid unsparingly upon the backs of the labouring 
 people. All religious sects suffered equally from this cause. The 
 Penal Laws then in operation against the Catholics did indeed 
 make the life of propertied Catholics more insecure than would 
 otherwise have been the case; but to the vast mass of the popu- 
 lation the misery and hardship entailed by the working out of 
 economic laws were fraught with infinitely more suffering than 
 it was at any time within the power of the Penal Laws to inflict. 
 As a matter of fact, the effect of the latter code in impoverishing 
 wealthy Catholics has been much overrated. The class interests 
 which at all times unite the propertied section of the community 
 operated, to a large extent, to render impossible the application 
 of the power of persecution to its full legal limits. Rich Catholics 
 were quietly tolerated, and generally received from the rich 
 Protestants an amount of respect and forbearance which the 
 latter would not at any time extend to their Protestant tenantry 
 or work-people. So far was this true that, like the Jew, some 
 Catholics became notorious as moneylenders, and in the year 1763 
 a bill was introduced into the Irish House of Commons to give 
 greater facilities to Protestants wishing to borrow money from 
 Catholics. The bill proposed to enable Catholics to become 
 mortgages of landed estates in order that Protestants wishing 
 to borrow money could give a mortgage upon their lands as se- 
 curity to the Catholic lender. The bill was defeated, but its in- 
 troduction serves to show how little the Penal Laws had oper- 
 ated to prevent the accumulation of wealth by the Catholic 
 propertied classes. 
 
 But the social system thus firmly rooted in the soil of Ireland 
 and accepted as righteous by the ruling class irrespective of 
 religion was a greater enemy to the prosperity and happiness 
 of the people than any legislation religious bigotry could devise. 
 Modern Irish politicians, inspired either by a blissful unconscious- 
 ness of the facts of history, or else sublimely indifferent to its 
 teaching, are in the habit of tracing the misery of Ireland to the 
 Legislative Union as its source, but the slightest possible ac- 
 quaintance with ante-Union literature will reveal a record of 
 famine, oppression, and injustice, due to economic causes, unsur- 
 passed at any other stage of modern Irish history. Thus Dean 
 Swift, writing in 1729, in that masterpiece of sarcasm entitled 
 "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor 
 People in Ireland from becoming a Burden on their Parents or 
 Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Public," was so
 
 36 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 moved by the spectacle of poverty and wretchedness that, al- 
 though having no love for the people, for whom, indeed, he had 
 no better name than "the savage old Irish," he produced the 
 most vehement and bitter indictment of the society of his day 
 and the most striking picture of hopeless despair literature 
 has yet revealed. Here is in effect his "Proposal" : 
 
 "It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this 
 great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, 
 the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female 
 sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and 
 importuning every passenger for an alms. ... I do, therefore, 
 offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty 
 thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be 
 reserved for breed . . . that the remaining hundred thousand 
 may at a year old be offered in sale to the persons of quality 
 and fortune through the kingdom, always advising the mother 
 to let them suck plentifully in the last month so as to render 
 them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two 
 dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines 
 alone the fore or hind quarters will make a reasonable dish ; and 
 seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on 
 the fourth day, especially in winter. ... I have already com- 
 puted the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I 
 reckon all cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths of the farmers), 
 to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I be- 
 lieve no gentleman would refuse to give ten shillings for the 
 carcase of a good, fat child, which, as I have said, will make 
 four dishes of excellent, nutritious meat." 
 
 Sarcasm, truly, but how terrible must have been the misery 
 which made even such sarcasm permissible ! Great as it undoubt- 
 edly was, it was surpassed twelve years later in the famine of 
 1740, when no less a number than 400,000 are estimated to have 
 perished of hunger or of the diseases which follow in the wake 
 of hunger. This may seem an exaggeration, but the statement 
 is amply borne out by contemporary evidence. Thus Bishop 
 Berkeley, of the Anglican Church, writing to a Mr. Thomas 
 Prior, of Dublin, in 1741, mentions that "The other day I heard 
 one from the county of Limerick say that whole villages were 
 entirely dispeopled. About two months since I heard Sir Richard 
 Cox say that five hundred were dead in the parish, though in a 
 country, I believe, not very populous." And a pamphlet entitled, 
 "The Groans of Ireland," published in 1741, asserts, "The uni- 
 versal scarcity was followed by fluxes and malignant fevers,
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 27 
 
 which swept off multitudes of all sorts, so that whole villages 
 were laid waste." 
 
 This famine, be it remarked, like all modern famine, was 
 solely attributable to economic causes; the poor of all religions 
 and politics were equally sufferers; the rich of all religions and 
 politics were equally exempt. It is also noteworthy, as illustrat- 
 ing the manner in which the hireling scribes of the propertied 
 classes have written history, that while a voluminous literature 
 has arisen round the Penal Laws a subject of merely posthu- 
 mous interest a matter of such overwhelming importance, both 
 historically and practically, as the predisposing causes of Irish 
 famine can, as yet, claim no notice except scanty and unavoidable 
 references in national history. 
 
 The country had not recovered from the direful effects of 
 this famine when a further economic development once more 
 plunged the inhabitants into the blackest despair. Disease having 
 attacked and destroyed great quantities of cattle in England, 
 the aristocratic rulers of that country fearful lest the ensuing 
 high price of meat should lead to a demand for higher wages 
 on the part of the working class in England removed the em- 
 bargo off Irish cattle, meat, butter and cheese at the English 
 ports, thus partly establishing free trade in those articles between 
 the two countries. The immediate result was that all such pro- 
 visions brought such a price in England that tillage farming in 
 Ireland became unprofitable by comparison, and every effort was 
 accordingly made to transform arable land into sheep-walks or 
 grazing lands. The landlord class commenced evicting their 
 tenants; breaking up small farms, and even seizing upon village 
 common lands and pasture grounds all over the country with the 
 most disastrous results to the labouring people and cottiers gen- 
 erally. Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from 
 their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of 
 large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places. Im- 
 mediately there sprang up throughout Ireland numbers of secret 
 societies in which the dispossessed people strove by lawless acts 
 and violent methods to restrain the greed of their masters, and 
 to enforce their own right to life. They met in large bodies, 
 generally at midnight, and proceeded to tear down enclosures; 
 to hough cattle ; to dig up and so render useless the pasture lands ; 
 to burn the houses of shepherds; and in short, to terrorise their 
 social rulers into abandoning the policy of grazing in favour of 
 tillage, and to give more employment to the labourers and more 
 security to the cottier. These secret organisations assumed dif-
 
 28 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 ferent names and frequently adopted different methods, and it is 
 now impossible to tell whether they possessed any coherent or- 
 ganisation or not. Throughout the South they were called 
 Whiteboys, from the practice of wearing white shirts over their 
 clothes when on their nocturnal expeditions. About the year 
 1762 they posted their notices on conspicuous places in the coun- 
 try districts notably, Cork, Waterford, Limerick, and Tip- 
 perary threatening vengeance against such persons as had in- 
 curred their displeasure as graziers, evicting landlords, &c. 
 
 These proclamations were signed by an imaginary female, 
 sometimes called "Sive Oultagh" sometimes "Queen Sive," some- 
 times they were in the name of "Queen Sive and Her Subjects." 
 Government warred upon these poor wretches in the most vindic- 
 tive manner; hanging, shooting, transporting without mercy; 
 raiding villages at dead of night for suspected Whiteboys, and 
 dragging the poor creatures before magistrates who never con- 
 descended to hear any evidence in favour of the prisoners, but 
 condemned them to whatever punishments their vindictive class 
 spirit or impaired digestion might prompt. 
 
 The spirit of the ruling class against those poor slaves ir 
 revolt may be judged by two incidents exemplifying how Cath- 
 olic and Protestant proprietors united to fortify injustice and 
 preserve their privileges, even at a time when we have been led 
 to believe that the Penal Laws formed an insuperable barrier 
 against such union. In the year 1762 the Government offered 
 the sum of 100 for the capture of the first five Whiteboy Chiefs. 
 The Protestant inhabitants of the city of Cork offered in addition 
 300 for the Chief, and 50 for each of his first five accomplices 
 arrested. Immediately the wealthy Catholics of the same city 
 added to the above sums a promise of 200 for the chief and 40 
 for each of his first five subordinates. This was at a time when 
 an English governor, Lord Chesterfield, declared that if the 
 military had killed half as many landlords as they did Whiteboys 
 they would have contributed more effectually to restore quiet, a 
 remark which conveys some slight idea of the carnage made 
 among the peasantry. Yet, Flood, the great Protestant "patriot," 
 he of whom Davis sings 
 
 "Bless Harry Flood, who nobly stood 
 By us through gloomy years." 
 
 in the Irish House of Commons of 1763 fiercely denounced the 
 Government for not killing enough of the Whiteboys. He called 
 it "clemency."
 
 SOCIAL REVOLTS AND POLITICAL KITES AND CROWS. 
 
 "When the aristocracy come forward the people fall backward ; when 
 the people come forward the aristocracy, fearful of being left behind, 
 insinuate themselves into our ranks and rise into timid leaders or treacher- 
 ous auxiliaries." Secret Manifesto of Projectors of United Irish So- 
 ciety, 1791. 
 
 In the North of Ireland the secret organisations of the 
 peasantry were known variously as Oakboys and Hearts of 
 Steel or Steelboys. The former directed their efforts mainly 
 against the system of compulsory road repairing by which they 
 were required to contribute their unpaid labour for the upkeep 
 of the country roads; a system, needless to say, offering every 
 opportunity to the county gentry to secure labour gratuitously 
 for the embellishment of their estates and private roads on the 
 pretext of serving public ends. The Oakboy organisation was 
 particularly strong in the counties of Monaghan, Armagh, and 
 Tyrone. In a pamphlet published about the year 1762, an account 
 is given of a "rising" of the peasantry in the first-named county 
 and of the heroic exploits of the officer in command of the troops 
 engaged in suppressing said rising, in a manner which irresistibly 
 recalls the present day accounts in the English newspapers of the 
 punitive expeditions of the British army against the "marauding" 
 hill tribes of India or Dacoits of Burmah. The work is entitled 
 the "True and Faithful Account of the Late Insurrections in 
 the North, with a narrative of Colonel Coote's Campaign amongst 
 the Oakboys in the County Monaghan," &c. The historian tells 
 how, on hearing of the "rising," the brave British officer set off 
 with his men to the town of Castleblayney; how on his way 
 thither he passed numerous bodies of the peasantry proceeding 
 in the same direction, each with an oak bough or twig stuck in 
 his hat as a sign of his treasonable sympathies ; how on entering 
 Castleblayney he warned the people to disperse, and only received 
 
 29
 
 30 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 defiant replies, and even hostile manifestations; how he then 
 took refuge in the Market House and prepared to defend it if 
 need be; and how, after occupying that stronghold all night, he 
 found next morning the rebels had withdrawn from the town. 
 Next, there is an account of the same valiant General's entry 
 into the town of Ballybay. Here he found all the houses shut 
 against him, each house proudly displaying an oak bough in its 
 windows, and all the people seemingly prepared to resist to the 
 uttermost. Apparently determined to make an example, and so 
 to strike terror, the valiant soldier and his men proceeded to 
 arrest the ringleader, and, after a severe struggle, did succeed in 
 breaking into some of the cabins of the poor people, :nd arrest- 
 ing some person, who was accordingly hauled off to the town of 
 Monaghan, there to be dealt with according to the forms of a 
 law from which every consideration of justice was rigorously 
 excluded. In the town of Clones, we are informed, the people 
 openly withstood the Royal forces in the market place, but were, 
 of course, defeated. The Monaghan Oakboys were then driven 
 across the borders of their own county into Armagh, where they 
 made a last stand, but were attacked and defeated in a "pitched 
 battle," the severity of which may be gauged from the fact that 
 no casualties were reported on the side of the troops. 
 
 But the general feeling of the people was so pronouncedly 
 against the system of compulsory and unpaid labour on the roads 
 that Government subsequently abolished the practice, and insti- 
 tuted a road rate providing for payment for such necessary labour 
 by a tax upon owners and occupiers of property in the district. 
 Needless to say, the poor peasants who were suffering martyrdom 
 in prison for their efforts to remedy what the Government had 
 by such remedial legislation admitted to be an injustice, were left 
 to rot in their cells the usual fate of pioneers of reform. 
 
 The Steelboys were a more formidable organisation, and 
 had their strongholds in the counties of Down and Antrim. They 
 were for the most part Presbyterian or other dissenters from the 
 Established Church, and, like the Whiteboys, aimed at the aboli- 
 tion or reduction of tithes and the restriction of the system of 
 consolidating farms for grazing purposes. They frequently 
 appeared in arms, and moved with a certain degree of discipline, 
 coming together from widely separated parts in obedience, ap- 
 parently, to the orders of a common centre. In the year 1772 six 
 of their number were arrested and lodged in the town jail of 
 Belfast. Their associates immediately mustered in thousands, 
 and in the open day marched upon that city, made themselves
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 31 
 
 masters thereof, stormed the jail, and released their comrades. 
 This daring action excited consternation in the ranks of the 
 governing classes, troops were despatched to the spot, and every 
 precaution taken to secure the arrest of the leaders. Out of the 
 numerous prisoners made a batch were selected for trial, but 
 whether as a result of intimidation or because of their sympathy 
 with the prisoners it is difficult to tell, the jury in Belfast refused 
 to convict, and when the venue of the trial was changed to Dub- 
 lin, the Government was equally unfortunate. The refusal of 
 the juries to convict was, probably, in a large measure due to 
 the unpopularity of the Act then just introduced to enable the 
 Government to put persons accused of agrarian offences on 
 trial in a different county to their own. When this Act was 
 repealed the convictions and executions went on as merrily as 
 before. Many a peasant's corpse swung on the gibbet, and many 
 a promising life was doomed to blight and decay in the foul con- 
 fines of the prison hell, to glut the vengeance of the dominant 
 classes. Arthur Young, in his Tour of Ireland, thus describes the 
 state of matters against which those poor peasants revolted. 
 
 "A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a 
 servant, labourer, or cottier dares to refuse to execute. . . . Dis- 
 respect, or anything tending towards sauciness he may punish 
 with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A 
 poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand 
 in his own defence. . . . Landlords of consequence have assured 
 me that many of their cottiers would think themselves honoured 
 by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their 
 master a mark of slavery which proves the oppression under 
 which such people must live." 
 
 It will be observed by the attentive student that the "patriots" 
 who occupied the public stage in Ireland during the period we 
 have been dealing with never once raised their voices in protest 
 against such social injustice. Like their imitators today, they 
 regarded the misery of the Irish people as a convenient handle 
 for political agitation ; and, like their imitators today, they were 
 ver ready to outvie even the Government in their denunciation of 
 all those who, more earnest than themselves, sought to find a 
 radical cure for such misery. 
 
 Of the trio of patriots Swift, Molyneux and Lucas it may 
 be noted that their fight was simply a repetition of the fight 
 waged by Sarsfield and his followers in their day a change of 
 persons and of stage costume truly, but no change of character ; 
 a battle between the kites and the crows.
 
 32 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 They found themselves members of a privileged class, living 
 upon the plunder of the Irish people, but early perceived, to their 
 dismay, that they could not maintain their position as a privileged 
 class without the aid of the English army; and in return for 
 supplying that army the English ruling class were determined 
 to have the lion's share of the plunder. The Irish Parliament 
 was essentially an English institution ; nothing like it existed be- 
 fore the Norman Conquest. In that respect it was on the same 
 footing as is landlordism, capitalism, and their natural-born child 
 pauperism. England sent a swarm of adventurers to conquer 
 Ireland ; having partly succeeded these adventurers established a 
 Parliament to settle disputes among themselves, to contrive meas- 
 ures for robbing the natives, and to prevent their fellow-tyrants 
 who had stayed in England, from claiming the spoil. But in 
 course of time the section of land thieves resident in England did 
 claim a right to supervise the doings of the adventurers in Ireland, 
 and consequently to control their Parliament. Hence arose Poy- 
 ning's Law, and the subordination of Dublin Parliament to the 
 London Parliament. Finding this subordinate position of their 
 Parliament enabled the English ruling class to strip the Irish 
 workers of the fruits of their toil, the more far-seeing of the 
 privileged class in Ireland became alarmed lest the stripping 
 process should go too far, and leave nothing for them to fatten 
 upon, 
 
 At once they became patriots, anxious that Ireland which, 
 in their phraseology, meant the ruling class in Ireland should be 
 free from the control of the Parliament of England. Their 
 pamphlets, speeches, and all public pronouncements were devoted 
 to telling the world how much nicer, equitable, and altogether 
 more delectable it would be for the Irish people to be robbed in 
 the interests of a native-born aristocracy than to witness the 
 painful spectacle of that aristocracy being compelled to divide the 
 plunder with its English rival. Perhaps Swift, Molyneux, or 
 Lucas did not confess even to themselves that such was the basis 
 of their political creed. The human race has at all times shown 
 a proneness to gloss over its basest actions with a multitude of 
 specious pretences, and to cover even its iniquities with the 
 glamour of a false sentimentality. But we are not dealing with 
 appearances but realities, and, in justice to ourselves, we must 
 expose the flimsy sophistry which strives to impart to a sordid, 
 self-seeking struggle the appearance of a patriotic movement. In 
 opposition to the movement of the people the patriot politicians 
 and Government alike were an undivided mass.
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 33 
 
 In their fight against tithes the Munster peasantry, in 1786, 
 issued a remarkable document, which we here reprint as an illus- 
 tration of the thought of the people of the provinces of that time. 
 This document was copied into many papers at the time, and was 
 also reprinted in a pamphlet in October of that year. 
 
 LETTER ADDRESSED TO MUNSTER PEASANTRY. 
 
 "To obviate the bad impression made by the calumnies of 
 our enemies, we beg leave to submit to you our claim for the 
 protection of a humane gentry and humbly solicit yours, if said 
 claim shall appear to you founded in justice and good policy. 
 
 "In every age, country and religion the priesthood are al- 
 lowed to have been artful, usurping, and tenacious of their ill- 
 acquired prerogatives. Often have their jarring interests and 
 opinions deluged with Christian blood this long devoted isle. 
 
 "Some thirty years ago our unhappy fathers galled beyond 
 human sufferance like a captive lion vainly struggling in the 
 toils, strove violently to snap their bonds asunder, but instead 
 rivetted them to more tight. Exhausted by the bloody struggle, 
 the poor of this province submitted to their oppression, and fat- 
 tened with their vitals each decimating leech. 
 
 "The luxurious parson drowned in the riot of his table the 
 bitter groans of those wretches that his proctor fleeced, and the 
 poor remnant of the proctor's rapine was sure to be gleaned by 
 the rapacious priest; but it was blasphemy to complain of him; 
 Heaven, we thought, would wing its lightning to blast the wretch 
 who grudged the Holy Father's share. Thus plundered by either 
 clergy, we -had reason to wish for our simple Druids again. 
 
 "At last, however, it pleased pitying Heaven to dispel the 
 
 murky cloud of bigotry that hovered over us so long. Liberality 
 
 shot her cheering rays, and enlightened the peasant's hovel as well 
 
 as the splendid hall. O'Leary told us, plain as friar could, that a 
 
 of universal love would not confine His salvation to one 
 
 sect alone, and that the subject's election was the best title to the 
 
 A r n. 
 
 "Thus improved in our religion and our politics ... we re- 
 to evince on every occasion the change in our sentiments and 
 to succeed in our sincere attempts. We examine the double 
 cau.-,e of our grievances, and debated long how to get them re- 
 moved, until at length our resolves terminated in this general 
 peaceful remonstrance. 
 
 "Humanity, justice, and policy enforce our request. Whilst 
 the tithe farmer enjoys the fruit of our labours, agriculture must
 
 34 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 decrease, and while the griping priest insists on more from the 
 bridegroom than he is worth, population must be retarded. 
 
 "Let the legislature befriend us now and we are theirs for 
 ever. Our sincerity in the warmth of our attachment when once 
 professed was never questioned, and we are bold to say no such 
 imputation will ever fall on the Munster peasantry. 
 
 "At a very numerous and peaceable meeting of the delegates 
 of the Munster peasantry, held on Thursday, the 1st day of July, 
 1786, the following resolutions were unanimously agreed to, viz.: 
 
 "Resolved That we will continue to oppose our oppressors 
 by the most justifiable means in our power, either until they are 
 glutted with our blood or until humanity raises her angry voice 
 in the councils of the nation to protect the toiling peasant and 
 lighten his burden." 
 
 "Resolved That the fickleness of the multitude makes it 
 necessary for all and each of us to swear not to pay voluntarily 
 priest or parson more than as follows : 
 
 "Potatoes, first crop, 6s. per acre; do., second crop, 4s.; 
 wheat, 4s.; barley, 4s.; oats, 3s.; meadowing, 2s. 8d. ; marriage, 
 Ss. ; baptism, Is. 6d. ; each family confession, 2s. ; Par. Priest's 
 Sun. Mass, Is. ; any other, Is. ; Extreme Unction, Is. 
 "Signed by order, 
 
 "WILLIAM O'DRISCOL, 
 "General to the Munster Peasantry."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT. 
 
 "Dynasties and thrones are not half so important as workshops, farms 
 and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties and thrones, and even 
 provisional governments, are good for anything exactly in proportion as 
 they secure fair play, justice and freedom to those who labour." John 
 Mitchel, 1848. 
 
 WE now come to the period of the Volunteers. In this year, 
 1778, the people of Belfast, alarmed by rumours of intended 
 descents of French privateers, sent to the Irish Secretary of 
 State at Dublin Castle asking for a military force to protect their 
 town. But the English army had long been drafted off to the 
 United States then rebel American colonies of England and 
 Ireland was practically denuded of troops. Dublin Castle an- 
 swered Belfast in the famous letter which stated that the only 
 force available for the North would be "a troop or two of horse, 
 or part of a company of invalids." 
 
 On receipt of this news the people began arming themselves 
 and publicly organising Volunteer corps throughout the country. 
 In a short time Ireland possessed an army of some 80,000 citizen 
 soldiers, equipped with all the appurtenances of war; drilled, 
 organised, and in every way equal to any force at the command 
 of a regular Government. All the expenses of the embodiment of 
 this Volunteer army were paid by subscriptions of private indi- 
 viduals. As soon as the first alarm of foreign invasion had 
 passed, the Volunteers turned their attention to home affairs and 
 began formulating certain demands for reform demands which 
 the Government was not strong enough to resist. Eventually, 
 after a few years' agitation on the Volunteer side, met by intrigue 
 on the part of the Government, the "patriot" party, led by Grattan 
 and Flood, and supported by the moral (?) pressure of a Volun- 
 teer review outside the walls of the Parliament House, succeeded 
 in obtaining from the legislature a temporary abandonment of 
 
 35
 
 36 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 the claim set up by the English Parliament to force laws upon 
 the assembly at College Green. This and the concession of Free 
 Trade (enabling Irish merchants to trade on equal terms wit: 
 their English rivals) inaugurated what is known in Irish History 
 as Grattan's Parliament. At the present day our political agita- 
 tors never tire of telling us with the most painful iteration that 
 the period covered by Grattan's Parliament was a period of un- 
 exampled prosperity for Ireland, and that, therefore, we may 
 expect a renewal of this same happy state with a return of our 
 'native legislature" as they somewhat facetiously style that abor- 
 tive product of political intrigue Home Rule. 
 
 We might, if we choose, make a point against our political 
 historians by pointing out that prosperity such as they speak of 
 is purely capitalistic prosperity that is to say, prosperity gauged 
 merely by the volume of wealth produced, and entirely ignoring 
 the manner in which the wealth is distributed amongst the workers 
 who produce it. Thus in a previous article we quoted a manifesto 
 issued by the Munster Peasantry in 1786, in which four years 
 after Grattan's Parliament had been established they called upon 
 ihe legislature to. help them, and resolved if such help was not 
 forthcoming and it was not forthcoming to "resist our op- 
 pressors until they are glutted with our blood," an expression 
 which would seem to indicate that the "prosperity" of Grattan's 
 Parliament had not penetrated far into Munster. In the year 
 1794 a pamphlet published at 7 Chapel Street, Dublin, stated that 
 the average wage of a clay labourer in the County Meath reached 
 only 6d. per day in Summer, and 4d. per day in Winter; and in 
 the pages of the Dublin Journal, a ministerial organ, and the Dub- 
 lin Evening Post, a supporter of Grattan's party, for the month of 
 April, 1796, there is to be found an advertisement of a charity 
 sermon to be preached in the Parish Chapel, Meath Street, Dub- 
 lin, in which advertisement there occurs the statement that in 
 three streets of the Parish of St. Catherine's "no less than 2,000 
 souls had been found in a starving condition." Evidently "pros- 
 perity" had not much meaning to the people of St. Catherine's. 
 But this is not the ground we mean at present to take up. 
 We will rather admit, for the purpose of our argument, that the 
 Home Rule capitalistic definition of "prosperity" is the correct 
 one, and that Ireland was prosperous under Grattan's Parliament, 
 but we must emphatically deny that such prosperity was in any 
 but an infinitesimal degree produced by Parliament. Here again 
 the Socialist philosophy of history provides the key to the problem 
 points to the economic development as the true solution. The
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 37 
 
 sudden advance of trade in the period in question was almost 
 solely due to the introduction of mechanical power, and the conse- 
 quent cheapening of manufactured goods. It was the era of the 
 Industrial Revolution when the domestic industries we had in- 
 herited from the Middle Ages were finally replaced by the factory 
 system of modern times. The water frame, invented by Ark- 
 wright in 1769; the spinning jenny, patented by Hargreaves in 
 1770; Crampton's mechanical mule, introduced in 1779; and the 
 application in 1788 of the steam-engine to blast furnaces, all com- 
 bined to cheapen the cost of production, and so to lower the price 
 of goods in the various industries affected. This brought into the 
 field fresh hosts of customers, and so gave an immense impetus 
 to trade in general in Great Britain as well as in Ireland. Be- 
 tween 1782 and 1804 the cotton trade more than trebled its total 
 output; between 1783 and 1796 the linen trade increased nearly 
 threefold; in the eight years between 1788 and 1796 the iron 
 trade doubled in volume. The latter trade did not long survive 
 this burst of prosperity. The invention of smelting by coal in- 
 stead of wood in 1750, and the application of steam to blast- 
 furnaces, already spoken of, placed the Irish manufacturer at an 
 enormous disadvantage in dealing with his English rival, but in 
 the halcyon days of brisk trade between 1780 and 1800 this 
 was not very acutely felt. But, when trade once more assumed 
 its normal aspect of keen competition, Irish manufacturers with- 
 out a native coal supply,* and almost entirely dependent on im- 
 ported English coal, found it impossible to compete with their 
 trade rivals in the sister country who, with abundant supplies of 
 coal at their own door, found it very easy before the days of rail- 
 ways to undersell and ruin the unfortunate Irish. The same 
 fate, and for the same reason, befell the other important Irish 
 trades. The period marked politically by Grattan's Parliament 
 was a period of commercial inflation due to the introduction of 
 mechanical improvements into the staple industries of the country. 
 As long as such machinery was worked by hand Ireland could 
 hold her place on the markets, but with this application of steam 
 to the service of industry, which began on a small scale in 1785, 
 and the introduction of the power-loom, which first came into 
 general use about 1813, the immense natural advantage of an 
 indigenous coal supply finally settled the contest in favour of 
 English manufacturers. 
 
 A native Parliament might have hindered the subsequent de- 
 
 *At this time Ireland's coal resources had not been developed. English 
 capitalists have to this day prevented the workings of Irish mines.
 
 38 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 cay as an alien Parliament may have hastened it, but in either case,, 
 under capitalistic conditions, the process itself was as inevitable as 
 the economic evolution of which it was one of the most significant 
 signs. How little Parliament had to do with it may be gauged 
 by comparing the positions of Ireland and Scotland. In the year 
 1799, Mr. Foster in the Irish Parliament stated that the produc- 
 tion of linen was twice as great in Ireland as in Scotland. The 
 actual figures given were for the year 1796 23,000,000 yards 
 for Scotland as against 46,705,319 for Ireland. This discrepancy 
 in favour of Ireland he attributed to the native Parliament. But 
 by the year 1830, according to McCulloch's Commercial Diction- 
 ary, the one port of Dundee in Scotland exported more linen than 
 all Ireland. Both countries had been deprived of self-government. 
 Why had Scottish manufacture advanced whilst that of Ireland 
 had decayed? Because Scotland possessed a native coal supply, 
 and every facility for industrial pursuits which Ireland lacked. 
 The "prosperity" of Ireland under Grattan's Parliament was 
 almost as little due to that Parliament as the dust caused by the 
 revolutions of the coach-wheel was due to the presence of the 
 fly who, sitting on the coach, viewed the dust, and fancied him- 
 self the author therof. And, therefore, true prosperity cannot 
 be brought to Ireland except by measures somewhat more drastic 
 than that Parliament ever imagined.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 CAPITALIST BETRAYAL OF THE IRISH VOLUNTEERS 
 
 "Remember still, through good and ill, 
 How vain were prayers and tears. 
 How vain were words till flashed the swords 
 Of the Irish Volunteers." Thomas Davis. 
 
 THE theory that the fleeting "prosperity" of Ireland in the time 
 we refer to was caused by the Parliament of Grattan is only 
 useful to its propagators as a prop to their argument that the 
 Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland destroyed 
 the trade of the latter country, and that, therefore, the repeal ofi 
 that Union would lead to the re-establishment of Irish manu- 
 factures on a paying basis. The fact that the Union placed all 
 Irish manufactures upon an absolutely equal basis legally with 
 the manufactures of England is usually ignored, or, worse still, 
 is so perverted in its statement as to leave the impression that the 
 reverse is the case.* In fact many thousands of our countrymen 
 still believe that English laws prohibit mining in Ireland after 
 certain minerals, and the manufacture of certain articles. 
 
 A moment's reflection should remove such an idea. An 
 English capitalist will cheerfully invest his money in Timbuctoo 
 or China, or Russia, or anywhere that he thinks he can secure a 
 profit, even though it may be in the territory of his mortal enemy. 
 He does not invest his money in order to give employment to his 
 workers, but to make a profit, and hence it would be foolish to 
 expect that he would allow his Parliament to make laws pro- 
 hibiting him from opening mines or factories in Ireland to make 
 a profit out of the Irish workers. And there are not, and have 
 not been since the Union, any such laws. 
 
 If the student desires to continue the study of this remark- 
 able controversy in Irish history and to compare this Parliamen- 
 
 *It is true that legally Irish and English manufacturers are upon a 
 footing of equality, but it may be pointed out that Mr. Henry Ford had 
 to obtain a license in England before he could erect his Cork motor factory 
 in 1917. ED. 
 
 39
 
 40 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 tarian theory of Irish industrial decline with that we have just 
 advanced the Socialist theory outlined in our previous chapter- 
 he has an easy and effective course to pursue in order to bring 
 this matter to the test. Let him single out the most prominent 
 of the exponents of Parliamentarianism and propound the follow- 
 ing question : 
 
 Please explain the process by which the removal of Parlia- 
 ment from Dublin to London a removal absolutely unaccom- 
 panied by any legislative interference with Irish industry pre- 
 vented the Irish capitalist class from continuing to prouce goods 
 for the Irish market ? 
 
 He will get no logical answer to his question no answer 
 that any reputable thinker on economic questions would accept 
 for one moment. He will instead undoubtedly be treated to a 
 long enumeration of the number of tradesmen and labourers em- 
 ployed at manufactures in Ireland before the Union, and the 
 number employed at some specific period, 20 or 30 years after- 
 wards. This was the method adopted by Daniel O'Connell, the 
 Liberator, in his first great speech in favour of Repeal of the 
 Union, the speech in which he began his Repeal agitation, and has 
 been slavishly copied and popularised by all his imitators since. 
 But neither O'Connell nor any of his imitators have ever yet at- 
 tempted to analyse and explain the process by which those indus- 
 tries were destroyed. The nearest approach to such an explana- 
 tion ever essayed is the statement that the Union led to absentee 
 landlordism and the withdrawal of the custom of these absentees 
 from Irish manufacturers. Such an explanation is simply no 
 explanation at all. It is worse than childish. Who would seri- 
 ously contend that the loss of a few thousand aristocratic clients 
 killed, for instance, the leather industry, once so flourishing in 
 Ireland and now scarcely existent. The district in the city of 
 Dublin which lies between Thomas Street and the South Circular 
 Road was once a busy hive of men engaged in the tanning of 
 leather and all its allied trades. Now that trade has almost en- 
 tirely disappeared from this district. Were the members of the 
 Irish Parliament and the Irish landlords the only wearers of shoes 
 in Ireland? the only persons for whose use leather was tanned 
 and manufactured ? If not, how did their emigration to England 
 make it impossible for the Irish manufacturer to produce shoes 
 or harness for the millions of people still left in the country after 
 the Union? The same remark applies to the weavers, once so 
 flourishing a body in the same district, to the woolen trade, to the 
 fishing trade, to the iron trade, to the flour milling trade, and so
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 41 
 
 on down along the line. The people of Ireland still wanted all 
 these necessaries of life after the Union just as much as before, 
 yet the superficial historian tells us that the Irish manufacturer 
 was unable to cater to their demand, and went out of business 
 accordingly. Well, we Irish are credited with being gifted with a 
 strong sense of humour, but one is almost inclined to doubt it in 
 face of the gravity with which this Parliamentary theory has been 
 accepted by the masses of the Irish people. 
 
 It surely is an amusing theory when we consider that it im- 
 plies that the Irish manufacturers were so heartbroken grieving 
 over losing the trade of a few thousand rack-renting landlords 
 that they could not continue to make a profit by supplying the 
 wants of the millions of Irish people at their doors. The English 
 and the Scotch, the French and the Belgian manufacturers, miners, 
 merchants, and fishermen could and did wax fat and prosperous 
 by supplying the wants of the Irish commonalty, but the Irish 
 manufacturer could not. He had to shut up shop and go to the 
 poorhouse because my Lord Rackrent of Castle Rackrent, and 
 his immediate personal following, had moved to London. 
 
 If our Parliamentarian historians had not been the most 
 superficial of all recorders of history; if their shallowness had 
 not been so phenomenal that there is no equal to it to be found 
 except in the bigotry and stupidity of their loyalist rivals they 
 might easily have formulated from the same set of facts another 
 theory equally as useful to their cause, and more in consonance 
 with the truth. That other theory may be stated thus : 
 
 That the Act of Union was made possible because Irish man- 
 ufacture was weak, and, consequently, Ireland had not an ener- 
 getic capitalist class with sufficient public spirit and influence to 
 prevent the Union. 
 
 Industrial decline having set in the Irish capitalist class was 
 not able to combat the influence of the corruption fund of the 
 English Government, or to create and lead a party strong enough 
 to arrest the demoralisation of Irish public life. This we are 
 certain is the proper statement of the case. Not that the loss of 
 the Parliament destroyed Irish manufacture, but that the decline 
 of Irish manufacture, due to causes already outlined, made pos- 
 sible the destruction of the Irish Parliament. Had a strong, 
 enterprising and successful Irish capitalist class been in existence 
 in Ireland a Parliamentary reform investing the Irish masses 
 with the suffrage would have been won under the guns of the 
 Volunteers without a drop of blood being shed, and with a Par- 
 liament elected under such conditions the Act of Union would
 
 42 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 have been impossible. But the Irish capitalist class used the 
 Volunteers to force commercial reforms from the English Gov- 
 ernment and then, headed by Henry Grattan, forsook and de- 
 nounced the Volunteers when that body sought by reforming the 
 representative system to make it more responsive to the will of 
 the people, and thus to secure in peace what they had won by 
 the threat of violence. An Ireland controlled by popular suffrage 
 would undoubtedly have sought to save Irish industry while it 
 was yet time by a stringent system of protection, which would 
 have imposed upon imported goods a tax heavy enough to neu- 
 tralise the advantages accruing to the foreigner from his coal 
 supply, and such a system might have averted that decline of 
 Irish industry which, as we have already stated, was otherwise 
 inevitable. But the only hope of realising that Ireland lay then 
 in the armed force of the Volunteers, and as the capitalist class 
 did not feel themselves strong enough as a class to hold the ship 
 of state against the aristocracy on the one hand and the people 
 on the other they felt impelled to choose the only other alternative 
 viz., to elect to throw in their lot with one or other of the con- 
 tending parties. They chose to put their trust in the aristocracy, 
 abandoned the populace, and as a result were deserted by the 
 class whom they had trusted, and went down into bankruptcy and 
 slavery with the class they had betrayed. 
 
 A brief glance at the record of the Volunteer movement will 
 ilhistrate the far-reaching treachery with which the capitalist class 
 of Ireland emulated their aristocractic compatriots who 
 
 "Sold for place or gold 
 Their country and their God," 
 
 but, unlike them, contrived to avoid the odium their acts deserved. 
 At the inception of this movement Ireland was under the 
 Penal Laws. Against the Roman Catholic, statutes unequalled 
 in ferocity were still upon the statute books. Those laws, 
 although ostensibly designed to convert Catholics to the Pro- 
 testant Faith, were in reality chiefly aimed at the conversion of 
 Catholic-owned property into Protestant-owned property. The 
 son of a Catholic property holder could dispossess his own father 
 and take possession of his property simply by making affidavit 
 that he, the son, had accepted the Protestant religion. Thence- 
 forth the father would be by law a pensioner upon the son's 
 bounty. The wife of a Catholic could deprive her husband of 
 all control over his property by simply becoming a Protestant.
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 43 
 
 A Catholic could not own a horse worth more than 5. If he 
 did, any Protestant could take his horse from him in the light 
 of day and give him 5 in full payment of all rights in the horse. 
 On the head of a Catholic schoolmaster or a Catholic priest the 
 same price was put as on the head of a wolf. Catholics were 
 eligible to no public office, and were debarred from most of the 
 professions. 
 
 In fact the Catholic religion was an illegal institution. Yet 
 it grew and flourished, and incidentally it may be observed it 
 secured a hold upon the affections and in the hearts of the Irish 
 people as rapidly as it lost the same hold in France and Italy, 
 where the Catholic religion was a dominant state institution 
 a fact worth noting by those Catholics who are clamouring for 
 the endowment of Catholic institutions out of public funds. 
 
 It must be remembered by the student, however, that the 
 Penal Laws, although still upon the statute book, had been largely 
 inoperative before the closing quarter of the eighteenth century. 
 This was not due to any clemency on the part of the English Gov- 
 ernment, but was the result of the dislike of those laws felt by 
 the majority of intelligent Irish Protestants. The latter simply 
 refused to take advantage of them even to their personal ag- 
 grandisement, and there are very few cases on actual record 
 where the property of Catholics was wrested from them by their 
 Protestant neighbours as a result of the Penal Laws in the 
 generations following the close of the Williamite war. These 
 laws were in fact too horrible to be enforced, and in this matter 
 public opinion was far ahead of legislative enactment. All his- 
 torians agree upon this point. 
 
 Class lines, on the other hand, were far more strictly drawn 
 than religious lines, as they always were in Ireland since the 
 break up of the clan system, and as they are to this day. We 
 have the words of such an eminent authority as Archbishop 
 Whately in this connection which coming, as they do, from the 
 pen of a supporter of the British Government and of the Pro- 
 testant Establishment, are doubly valuable as a witness to the 
 fact that Irish politics and divisions turn primarily around ques- 
 tions of property and only nominally around questions of religion. 
 He says: 
 
 "Many instances have come to my knowledge of the most 
 furious Orangemen stripping their estates of a Protestant ten- 
 antry who had been there for generations and letting their land 
 to Roman Catholics . . . at an advance of a shilling an acre." 
 
 These Protestants so evicted, be it remembered, were the
 
 44 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 men and women whose fathers had saved Ireland for King Wil- 
 liam and Protestantism as against King James and Catholicity, 
 and the evictions here recorded were the rewards of their father's 
 victory and their own fidelity. In addition to this class line on 
 the economic field the political representation of the country 
 was the exclusive property of the upper class. 
 
 A majority of the members of the Irish Parliament sat as the 
 nominees of certain members of the aristocracy who owned the 
 estates on which the boroughs they "represented" were situated. 
 Such boroughs were called "Pocket Boroughs" from the fact 
 that they were as much under the control of the landed aristocrat 
 as if he carried them in his pocket. In addition to this, through- 
 out the entire island the power of electing members of Parliament 
 was the exclusive possession of a privileged few. The great mass 
 of the Catholic and Protestant population were voteless. 
 
 This- was the situation when the Volunteer movement arose. 
 There were thus three great political grievances before the Irish 
 public. The English Parliament had prohibited Irish trade with 
 Europe and America except through an English port, thus crip- 
 pling the development of Irish capitalism; representation in the 
 House of Commons in Dublin was denied alike to Protestant and 
 Catholic workers, and to all save a limited few Protestant capital- 
 ists, and the nominees of the aristocracy; and finally all Catholics 
 were suffering under religious disabilities. As soon as the Volun- 
 teers (all of whom were Protestants) had arms in their hands 
 they began to agitate for the removal of all these grievances. On 
 the first all were unanimous, and accordingly when they paraded 
 the streets of Dublin on the day of the assembling of Parliament, 
 they hung upon the mouths of their cannon placards bearing the 
 significant words : 
 
 FREE Tw ^LSE- 
 
 and the implied threat from a united people in arms won their 
 case. Free Trade was granted. And at that moment an Irish 
 Republic could have been won as surely as Free Trade. But 
 when the rank and file of the Volunteers proceeded to outline 
 their demands for the removal of their remaining political griev- 
 ances to demand popular representation in Parliament all their 
 leaders deserted. They had elected aristocrats, glib-tongued law- 
 yers and professional patriots to be their officers, and all the 
 higher ranks betrayed them in their hour of need. After the 
 granting of Free Trade a Volunteer convention was summoned
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 45 
 
 to meet in Dublin to consider the question of popular representation 
 in Parliament. Lord Charlemont, the commander-in-chief of the 
 body, repudiated the convention ; his example was followed by 
 all the lesser fry of the aristocratic officers, and finally when it did 
 meet Henry Grattan, whose political and personal fortunes the 
 Volunteers had made, denounced them in Parliament as "an 
 armed rabble." 
 
 The convention after some fruitless debate adjourned in con- 
 fusion, and on a subsequent attempt to convene another Conven- 
 tion the meeting was prohibited by Government proclamation and 
 the signers of the call for the assembly were arrested and heavily 
 fined. The Government, having made peace in America, with the 
 granting of American independence, had been able to mass troops 
 in Ireland and prepare to try conclusions with the Volunteers. 
 Its refusal to consider the demand for popular representation was 
 its gage of battle, and the proclamation of the last attempt at a 
 Convention was the sign of its victory. The Volunteers had, in 
 fact, surrendered without a blow. The responsibility for this 
 shameful surrender rests entirely upon the Irish capitalist class. 
 Had they stood by the reformers the defection of the aristocracy 
 would have mattered little, indeed it is certain that the radical ele- 
 ment must have foreseen and been prepared for that defection. 
 But the act of the merchants in throwing in their lot with the 
 aristocracy could not have been foreseen ; it was too shameful an 
 act to be anticipated by any but its perpetrators. It must not 
 be imagined, moreover, that these reactionary elements made no 
 attempt to hide their treason to the cause of freedom. 
 
 On the contrary, they were most painstaking in keeping up the 
 appearance of popular sympathies and in endeavouring to divert 
 public attention along other lines than those on which the real 
 issues were staked. There is a delicious passage in the "Life of 
 Henry Grattan," edited by his son, describing the manner in which 
 the Government obtained possession of the arms of the various 
 corps of Dublin Volunteers, which presents in itself a picture in 
 microcosm of very many epochs of Irish history and illustrates the 
 salient characteristics of the classes and the part they play in 
 Irish public life. 
 
 Dublin is Ireland in miniature; nay, Dublin is Ireland in con- 
 centrated essence. All that makes Ireland great or miserable, 
 magnificent or squalid, ideally revolutionary or hopelessly reaction- 
 ary, grandly unselfish or vilely treacherous, is stronger and more 
 pronounced in Dublin than elsewhere in Ireland. Thus the part 
 played by Dublin in any National crisis is sure to be simply a
 
 46 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 metropolitan setting for the role played by the same passions 
 throughout the Irish provinces. Hence the value of the follow- 
 ing unconscious contribution to the study of Irish history from 
 the pen of the son of Henry Grattan. 
 
 In Dublin there were three divisions of Volunteers corre- 
 sponding to the three popular divisions of the "patriotic" forces. 
 There was the Liberty Corps, recruited exclusively from the work- 
 ing class ; the Merchants Corps, composed of the capitalist class, 
 and the Lawyers Corps, the members of the legal fraternity. Henry 
 Grattan, Jr., telling of the action of the Government after the 
 passage of the "Arms and Gunpowder Bill" requiring the Volun- 
 teers to give up their arms to the authorities for safe keeping, 
 says the Government "seized the artillery of the Liberty Corps, 
 made a private arrangement by which it got possession of that 
 belonging to the Merchants Corps; they induced the lawyers 
 to give up theirs, first making a public procession before they were 
 surrendered." 
 
 In other words and plainer language, the Government had to 
 use force to seize the arms of the working men, but the capitalists 
 gave up theirs secretly as the result of a private bargain, the terms 
 of which we are not made acquainted with ; and the lawyers took 
 theirs through the streets of Dublin in a public parade to maintain 
 the prestige of the legal fraternity in the eyes of the credulous 
 Dublin workers, and then, whilst their throats were still husky 
 from publicly cheering the "guns of the Volunteers," privately 
 handed those guns over to the enemies of the people. 
 
 The working men fought, the capitalists sold out, and the 
 lawyers bluffed. 
 
 Then, as ever in Ireland, the fate of the country depended 
 upon the issue of the struggle between the forces of aristocracy 
 and the forces of democracy. The working class in town and the 
 peasantry in the country were enthusiastic over the success of the 
 revolutionary forces in America and France, and were burning 
 with a desire to emulate their deeds in Ireland. But the Irish 
 capitalist class dreaded the people more than they feared the 
 British Government, and in the crisis of their country's fate their 
 influence and counsels were withdrawn from the popular side. 
 Whilst this battle was being fought out with such fatal results 
 to the cause of freedom there was going on elsewhere in Ireland 
 a more spectacular battle over a mock issue. And as is the wont of 
 things in Ireland this sham battle engrosses the greatest amount 
 of attention in Irish history. We have already alluded to the 
 Henry Flood who made himself conspicuous in the Irish Parlia-
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 47 
 
 ment by out-Heroding Herod in his denunciation of the Govern- 
 ment for failing to hang enough peasants to satisfy him. Mr. 
 Henry Grattan we have also introduced to our readers. These 
 two men were the Parliamentary leaders of the "patriot party" in 
 the House of Commons the "rival Harries," as the Dublin 
 crowd sarcastically described them. When the threat of the Vol- 
 unteers compelled the English authorities to formally renounce all 
 its rights to make laws binding the Irish Parliament these two 
 patriots quarrelled, and, we are seriously informed by the grave 
 and learned historians, the subject of their quarrel divided all 
 Ireland. In telling of what that subject was we hope our readers 
 will not accuse us of fooling ; we are not, although the temptation 
 is almost irresistible. We are soberly stating the historical facts. 
 The grave and learned historians tell us that Grattan and Flood 
 quarrelled because Flood insisted that England should be required 
 to promise that it would never again interfere to make laws gov- 
 erning the Irish Parliament, and Grattan insisted that it would be 
 an insult to the honour of England to require any such promise. 
 
 As we have said, the grave and learned historians declare 
 that all Ireland took sides in this quarrel, even such a hater of 
 England as John Mitchel in his History of Ireland seemingly 
 believes this to be the case. Yet we absolutely refuse to give any 
 credence to the story. We are firmly convinced that while Grat- 
 tan and Flood were splitting the air with their declamations upon 
 this subject, if an enquirer had gone down into any Irish harvest 
 field and asked the first reaper he met his opinion of the matter, 
 the said reaper would have touched the heart of the question 
 without losing a single swing of his hook. He would have said 
 truly : 
 
 "An' sure, what does it matter what England promises? 
 Won't she break her promise, anyway, as soon as it suits her, 
 and she is able to ?" 
 
 It is difficult to believe that either Grattan or Flood could 
 have seriously thought that any promise would bind England, a 
 country which even then was notorious all over the world for 
 broken faith and dishonoured treaties. To-day the recital of 
 the facts of this famous controversy looks like a poor attempt at 
 humour, but in view of the tragic setting of the controversy we 
 must say that it bears the same relation to humour that a joke 
 would in a torture chamber. Grattan and Flood in this case 
 were but two skilful actors indulging in oratorical horseplay at 
 the deathbed of the murdered hopes of a people. Were any other 
 argument, outside of the absurdity of the legal hair-splitting on
 
 48 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 both sides, needed to prove how little such a sham battle really 
 interested the great mass of the people the record of the two 
 leaders would suffice. Mr. Flood was not only known to be an 
 enemy of the oppressed peasantry and a hater of the Catholics 
 that is to say, of the great mass of the inhabitants of Ireland 
 but he had also spoken and voted in the Irish Parliament in 
 favour of a motion to pay the expenses of an army of 10,000 
 British soldiers to be sent to put down the Revolution in America, 
 and Mr. Grattan on his part jiad accepted a donation of 50,000 
 from the Government for his "patriotic" services, and afterwards 
 in excess of gratitude for this timely aid repaid the Government 
 by betraying and denouncing the Volunteers. 
 
 On the other great questions of the day they were each occu- 
 pying an equivocal position, playing fast and loose. For in- 
 stance : 
 
 Mr. Flood believed in Democracy amongst Protestants, but 
 opposed religious freedom. 
 
 Mr. Grattan believed in religious freedom amongst property 
 owners, but opposed all extension of the suffrage to the working 
 class. 
 
 Mr. Flood would have given the suffrage to all Protestants, 
 rich or poor, and denied it to all Catholics, rich or poor. 
 
 Mr. Grattan would have given the vote to every man who 
 owned property, irrespective of religion, and he opposed its exten- 
 sion to any propertyless man. In the Irish House of Commons 
 he bitterly denounced the United Irishmen, of whom we will 
 treat later, for proposing universal suffrage, which he declared 
 would ruin the country and destroy all order. 
 
 It will be seen that Mr. Grattan was the ideal capitalist 
 statesman; his spirit was the spirit of the bourgeoisie incarnate. 
 He cared more for the interests of property than for human 
 rights or for the supremacy of any religion. 
 
 His early bent in that direction is seen in a letter he sent to 
 his friend, a Mr. Broome, dated November 3, 1767, and repro- 
 duced by his son in the latter's edition of the life and speeches 
 of his father. The letter shows the eminently respectable, anti- 
 revolutionary, religious Mr. Henry Grattan to have been, at 
 heart, a free thinker, free lover, and epicurean philosopher, who 
 had early understood the wisdom of not allowing these opinions 
 to be known to the common multitude whom he aspired to 
 govern. We extract : 
 
 "You and I, in this as in most other things, perfectly agree; 
 we think marriage is an artificial, not a natural, institution, and
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 49 
 
 imagine women too frail a bark for so long and tempestuous 
 a voyage as that of life. ... I have become an epicurean phi- 
 losopher; consider this world as our 'ne plus ultra,' and happi- 
 ness as our great object in it. ... Such a subject is too ex- 
 tensive and too dangerous for a letter; in our privacy we shall 
 dwell upon it more copiously." 
 
 This, be it noted, is perhaps not the Grattan of the poet 
 Moore's rhapsody, but it is the real Grattan. 
 
 Small wonder that the Dublin mob stoned this Grattan on 
 his return from England, on one occasion, after attending Parlia- 
 ment in London. His rhetoric and heroics did not deceive them, 
 even if they did bewitch the historians. His dramatic rising 
 from a sick bed to appear before the purchased traitors who sold 
 their votes to carry the Union, in order to appeal to them not to 
 fulfill their bargain, makes indeed a fine tableau for romantic 
 historians to dwell upon, but it was a poor compensation to the 
 common people for the Volunteer's insulted and betrayed, and 
 the cause of popular suffrage opposed and misrepresented. 
 
 A further and, to our mind, conclusive proof of the manner 
 in which the "Parliament of '82" was regarded by the real 
 Nationalists and progressive thinkers of Ireland is to be found 
 in the extract below from the famous pamphlet written by 
 Theobald Wolfe Tone and published September, 1791, entitled 
 "An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland." It is 
 interesting to recall that this biting characterisation of the "glo- 
 rious revolution of 1782" from the pen of the most far-seeing 
 Irishman of his day, has been so little to the liking of our his- 
 torians and journalists that it was rigidly boycotted by them all 
 until the present writer reprinted it in 1897, in Dublin, in a 
 series of " '98 Readings," containing also many other forgotten 
 and inconvenient documents of the same period. Since then it 
 has several times been republished exactly as we reprinted the 
 extract, but to judge by the manner in which some of our friends 
 still declare they "stand upon the constitution of '82" it has been 
 published in vain for some people. 
 
 WOLFE TONE ON GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT. 
 
 (Extract from the famous pamphlet, "An Argument on 
 BeJaalf of the Catholics of Ireland," published September, 1791.) 
 
 "I have said that we have no National Government. Before 
 the year 1782 it was not pretended that we had, and it is at 
 feast a curious, if not a useful speculation to examine how we
 
 50 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 stand in that regard now. And I have little dread of being 
 confuted, when I assert that all we got by what we are pleased 
 to dignify with the name of Revolution was simply the means of 
 doing good according to law, without recurring to the great rule 
 of nature, which is above all positive Statutes ; whether we have 
 done good or not, why we have omitted to do good is a serious 
 question. The pride of the nation, the vanity of individuals 
 concerned, the moderation of some honest men, the corruption 
 of knaves, I know may be alarmed when I assert that the revolu- 
 tion of 1782 was the most bungling, imperfect business that ever 
 threw ridicule on a lofty epithet, by assuming it unworthily. It 
 is not pleasant to any Irishman to make such a concession, but 
 it cannot be helped if truth will have it so. It is much better 
 that we should know and feel our real state, then delude our- 
 selves or be gulled by our enemies with praises which we do not 
 deserve, or imaginary blessings which we do not enjoy. 
 
 "I leave to the admirers of that era to vent flowing decla- 
 mations on its theoretical advantages, and its visionary glories; 
 it is a fine subject, and peculiarly flattering to my countrymen, 
 many of whom were actors, and almost all spectators of it. 
 Be mine the unpleasing task to strip it of its plumage and its 
 tinsel, and show the naked figure. The operation will be severe, 
 but if properly attended to may give us a strong and striking 
 lesson of caution and of wisdom. 
 
 "The Revolution of 1782 was a Revolution which enabled 
 Irishmen to sell at a much higher price their honour, their integ- 
 rity, and the interests of their country ; it was a Revolution which, 
 while at one stroke it doubled the value of every borough-monger 
 in the kingdom left three-fourths of our countrymen slaves as it 
 found them, and the government of Ireland in the base and 
 wicked, and contemptible hands who had spent their lives in 
 degrading and plundering her; nay, some of whom had given 
 their last vote decidedly, though hopelessly, against this, our 
 famous Revolution. Who of the veteran enemies of the country 
 lost his place or his pension? Who was called forth to station 
 or office from the ranks of opposition? Not one. The power 
 remained in the hands of our enemies, again to be exerted for 
 our ruin, with this difference, that formerly we had our dis- 
 tresses, our injuries, and our insults gratis at the hands of Eng- 
 land ; but now we pay very dearly to receive the same with aggra- 
 vation, through the hands of Irishmen yet this we boast of and 
 call a Revolution!"
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY SI 
 
 And so we close this chapter on the Volunteers a chapter 
 of great opportunities lost, of popular confidence betrayed. A 
 few extracts from some verses written at the time in Dublin 
 serve as an epitome of the times, even if they do seem a little 
 bitter. 
 
 Who aroused the people? 
 The rival Harries rose 
 And pulled each other's nose. 
 And said they aroused the people. 
 
 What did the Volunteers? 
 
 They mustered and paraded 
 
 Until their laurels faded. 
 This did the Volunteers. 
 
 How died the Volunteers? 
 
 The death that's fit for slaves. 
 
 They slunk into their graves. 
 Thus died the Volunteers.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE UNITED IRISHMEN. 
 
 "Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property 
 wH\ not help us they must fall ; we will free ourselves by the aid of that 
 large and respectable class of the community the men of no property." 
 
 Theobald Wolfe Tone. 
 
 CONTEMPORANEOUSLY with the betrayal and fall of the Volun- 
 teers, Ireland witnessed the rise and progress of the Society of 
 United Irishmen. This organisation was at first an open, peaceful 
 association, seeking to utilise the ordinary means of political 
 agitation in order to spread its propaganda amongst the masses 
 and so prepare them for the accomplishment of its greater end 
 viz., the realisation in Ireland of a republic on the lines of that 
 established in France at the Revolution. Afterwards, unable to 
 maintain its public character in face of the severe persecution 
 by the British Government of anything savouring in the least of 
 a democratic nature, the organisation assumed the veil and meth- 
 ods of secrecy, and in that form attained to such proportions as 
 enabled it to enter into negotiations with the Revolutionary 
 Directory of France on the basis of an equal treaty making 
 national power. As the result of this secret treaty between 
 Revolutionary France and Revolutionary Ireland against the 
 common enemy, aristocratic England, various fleets and armies 
 were dispatched from the Continent to assist the Irish Republic- 
 ans, but all of those expeditions were disastrous in their outcome. 
 The first, under the command of Grouchy and Hoche, was dis- 
 persed by a storm, some of the ships being compelled to return 
 to France for repairs, and when the remainder, including the 
 greater part of the army, reached Bantry Bay, on the Irish coast, 
 the French commander exhibited to the full all that hesitation, 
 indecision and lack of initiative which he afterwards was to show 
 with equally fatal results to Napoleon on the eve of the battle 
 of Waterloo. Finally, despite the desperate protests of the Irisk 
 
 52
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 5* 
 
 Revolutionists on board, he weighed anchor and returned t* 
 France without striking a blow or landing a corporal's guard- 
 Had he been a man equal to the occasion and landed his expedi- 
 tion, Ireland would almost undoubtedly have been separated 
 from England and become mistress of her own national destinies. 
 
 Another expedition, fitted out by the Dutch Republic in al- 
 liance with France, was detained by contrary winds in tke 
 harbour until the British fleet had time to come upon the scene, 
 and then the Dutch commander chivalrously but foolishly a- 
 epted the British challenge to fight, and, contending under ua- 
 equal and adverse conditions, was defeated. 
 
 An unauthorised but gallant attempt was made nder a- 
 other French officer, General Humbert, and this actually land 
 in Ireland, proclaimed the Irish Republic at Killala, in Coa- 
 naught, armed large numbers of the United Irishmen amongst 
 the inhabitants, and in conjunction with these latter fought and 
 utterly routed a much superior British force at Castlebar, and 
 penetrated far into the country before it was surrounded and 
 compelled to surrender to a force more than ten times its OWR 
 In number. The numbers of the French expedition in this aae 
 were insufficient for the purposes of making a stand long enougk 
 to permit of the people reaching it and being armed and organ- 
 ised efficiently, and hence its failure. But had Humbert pos- 
 sessed the numbers commanded by Grouchy, or Grouchy pos- 
 sessed the dash and daring of Humbert, the Irish Republic would 
 have been born, for weal or woe, in 1798. It is a somewhat 
 hackneyed observation, but so true that it compels repetition, 
 that the elements did more for England than her armies. In- 
 deed whether in conflict with the French expeditionary force of 
 Humbert, with the Presbyterians and Catholics of the United. 
 Irish Army under General Munro in the North, or with the in- 
 surgent forces of Wicklow, Wexford, Kildare, and Dublin, the 
 British army can scarcely be said to have at any time justified 
 its reputation let alone covered itself with glory. All the glory 
 was, indeed, on the other side, as was also most of the humanity s 
 and all of the zeal for human freedom. The people were wretch- 
 edly armed, totally undrilled, and compelled to act without any 
 systematic plan of campaign, because of the sudden arrest anej 
 imprisonment of their leaders. Yet they fought and defeated 
 the British troops on a score of battlefields, despite the fact that 
 the latter were thoroughly disciplined, splendidly armed, and 
 directed like a huge machine from one common centre. To sup- 
 prs th insurrection in the counties of Wicklow and Wexford.
 
 54 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 alone required all the efforts of 30,000 soldiers; had the plans 
 of the United Irishmen for a concerted uprising all over the 
 island on a given date not failed, the task of coping with the 
 Republican forces would have been too great for the Govern- 
 ment to achieve. As it was, the lack of means of communication 
 prevalent in those days made it possible for the insurrection in 
 any one district to be almost fought and lost before news of its 
 course had penetrated into some other parts of the country. 
 
 While the forces of republicanism and of despotism were 
 thus contending for supremacy upon the land, the victory was 
 being in reality decided for the latter by its superiority upon 
 the sea. The success of the British fleet alone made it possible 
 to keep the shores of England free of invading enemies, and to 
 enable Pitt, the English Prime Minister, to subsidise and main- 
 tain the armies of the allied despots of Europe in their conflict 
 with the forces of freedom and progress throughout the Conti- 
 nent. In face of this undoubted fact, it is somewhat humiliating 
 to be compelled to record that the overwhelming majority of 
 those serving upon that fleet were Irishmen. But, unlike those 
 serving in the British army, the sailors and marines of the navy 
 were there against their own will. During the coercive proceed- 
 ings of the British Government in Ireland, in their attempt to 
 compel the revolutionary movement to explode prematurely, 
 the authorities suspended the Habeas Corpus Act (the guarantee 
 of ordinary legal procedure) and instituted Martial Law and 
 Free Quarters for the Military. Under the latter system the 
 soldiery were forced as boarders upon the civilian population, 
 each family being compelled to provide food and lodging for a 
 certain number. For all attempts at resistance, or all protests 
 arising out of the licentious conduct of the brutal soldiery, or all 
 incautious expressions overheard by them during their unwelcome 
 residence in the houses of the people, the authorities had one 
 great sovereign remedy viz., transportation on board the Brit- 
 ish fleet. 
 
 Thousands of young men were seized all over the island and 
 marched in chains to the various harbours, from thence taken on 
 board the English men-of-war ships, and there compelled to fight 
 for the Government that had broken up their homes, ruined their 
 lives and desolated their country. Whenever any district was 
 suspected of treasonable sympathies it was first put under Mar- 
 tial Law, then every promising young man was seized and thrown 
 into prison on suspicion and without trial, and then those who 
 were not executed or flogged to the point of death were marched
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 55 
 
 on board the fleet. All over Ireland, but especially in Ulster 
 and Leinster during the closing years of the 18th and the opening 
 of the 19th century, the newspapers and private letters of the 
 times are full of records of such proceedings, telling of the vast 
 numbers everywhere sent on board the fleet as a result of the 
 wholesale dragooning of the people. Great numbers of these 
 were United Irishmen, sworn to an effort to overthrow the 
 despotism under which the people of Ireland suffered, and as a 
 result of their presence on board every British ship soon became 
 a nest of conspirators. The "Jack Tars of Old England" were 
 conspiring to destroy the British Empire, and any one at att 
 acquainted with the facts relative to their treatment by their 
 superiors and the authorities cannot wonder at their acts. The 
 subject is not loved by the jingo historians of the English gov- 
 erning classes, and is consequently usually complacently lied 
 about, but, as a cold matter of fact, the "wooden walls of Eng- 
 land," so beloved of the poets of that country, were in reality 
 veritable floating hells to the poor sailors and marines. 
 
 Flogging for the most trivial offences was inflicted upon the 
 unsupported word of the most petty officer, the quarters in which 
 the men were compelled to sleep and eat below decks were of the 
 vilest and most insanitary conditions; the food was of the filth- 
 iest, and every seaman had to pay tribute to a greedy quarter- 
 master in order to escape actual starvation, and the whole official 
 life of the ship from the captain down to the youngest midship- 
 man was based upon wealth and rank and breathed hatred and 
 contempt for anything belonging to the lower classes. Mutinies 
 and attempts at mutiny were consequently of constant occur- 
 rence, and, therfeore, the forcibly impressed United Irishmen 
 found a fertile field for their operations. In the Government 
 records of naval court martials at that time, the charge of "ad- 
 ministering the secret oath of the United Irishmen" is one of the 
 commonest against the accused, and the number of men shot and; 
 transported beyond seas for this offence is simply enormous;. 
 English and Scottish sailors were freely sworn into the ranks 
 of the conspirators, and the numbers of those disaffected grew 
 to such an extent that on one occasion the mutiny of the Nore 
 the sailors were able to revolt, depose their officers, and take com- 
 mand of the fleet. The wisest heads amongst them, the original 
 United Irishmen, proposed to sail the ships into a French port 
 and turn them over to the French Government, and for a time 
 they had great hopes of accomplishing this purpose, but finally 
 they were compelled to accede to a proposal to attempt to win
 
 * LABOU* IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 ver the sailors on some other ships in the port of London be- 
 fore sailing to France. This they did, and even threatened to 
 bombard the city; but the delay had enabled the Government 
 to rally its loyal ships, and also enabled the "loyal" slaves still 
 on board the revolting ships to play upon the "patriotic"' feelings 
 of the waverers among the British mutineers by representing 
 to them the probability of their being confined in French prisons 
 instead of welcomed as allies. In the end the admiral and offi- 
 cers, by promising a "redress of their just grievances," succeeded 
 in winning over a sufficient number on each ship to paralyse 
 any chance of resistance, and the mutiny was quenched. The 
 usual tale of shootings, floggings, and transportations followed, 
 but the conditions of life on board ship were long in being 
 altered for the better. It may be wondered that men forcibly 
 impressed, and conspirators against a tyrannical Government 
 could fight for that Government as did those unfortunates under 
 Nelson, but it must be borne in mind that once on board a war 
 vessel and that vessel brought into action with an enemy in the 
 open sea, there was no possibility of escape or even of co-opera- 
 tion with the enemy ; the necessity of self-preservation compelled 
 the rebellious United Irishmen or the discontented mutineers to 
 fight as loyally for the ship as did the soulless slaves amongst 
 whom they found themselves. And being better men, with more 
 manhood, they undoubtedly fought better. 
 
 In concluding this brief summary of this aspect of that great 
 democratic upheaval we desire to quote from the "Press," the 
 organ of the United Irishmen, published in Dublin, the following 
 short news item of the period, which we trust will be found highly 
 illustrative of the times in question, as well as a confirmatio 
 of the points we have set forth above: 
 
 "ROASTING. 
 
 "Near Castle Ward, a northern hamlet, a father and son had 
 their heads roasted on their own fire to extort a confession of 
 concealed arms. The cause was that the lock of a gun was found 
 in an old box belonging to the wife of the elder man. It is a 
 fact that the above old couple had two sons serving on board the 
 British fleet, one under Lord Bridgport, the other under Lord 
 St. Vincent."
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 UNITED IRISHMEN AS DEMOCRATS AND INTERNATIONALISTS. 
 
 "Och, Paddies, my hearties, have done wicl your parties, 
 
 Let rain of all creeds and professions agree, 
 If Orange and Green, min, no longer were sees, min, 
 Och, naboclis, how aisy ould Ireland we'd free. 
 
 Jamie Hope, 1798. 
 
 As we have pointed out elsewhere ("Erin's Hope, the End 
 and the Means") native Irish civilisation disappeared for all 
 practical purposes with the defeat of the Insurrection of 1641 
 and the break up of the Kilkenny Confederation. This great 
 Insurrection marked the last appearance of the Irish clan system, 
 founded upon common property and a democratic social organisa- 
 tion, as a rival to the poliltico-social order of capitalist feudalism 
 founded upon the poiltical despotism of the proprietors, and the 
 political and social slavery of the actual producers. 
 
 In the course of this Insurrection the Anglo-Irish noblemen 
 who held Irish tribelands as their private property under the 
 English feudal system did indeed throw in their lot with the native 
 Irish tribesmen, but the union was never a cordial one, and their 
 presence in the councils of the insurgents was at all times a fruitful 
 source of dissension, treachery and incapacity. Professing to fight 
 for Catholicity, they in reality sought only to conserve their right 
 to the lands they held as the result of previous confiscations from 
 the very men, or the immediate ancestors of the men, by whose 
 side they were fighting. They feared confiscation from the new 
 generation of Englishmen if the insurrection was defeated, and 
 they feared confiscation at the hands of the insurgent clansmen if 
 the insurrection was successful. 
 
 In the vaccillation and treachery arising out of this state of 
 mind can be found the only explanation for the defeat of this 
 magnificent movement of the Irish clans, a movement which had 
 attained to such proportions that it held sway over and made law 
 
 57
 
 58 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 for the greater part of Ireland, issued its own coinage, had its own 
 fleet and issued letters of marque to foreign privateers, made treat- 
 ies with foreign nations, and levied taxes for the support of its 
 several armies fighting under its flag. The fact that it had enrolled 
 under its banner the representatives of two different social sys- 
 tems contained the germs of its undoing. Had it been all feudal 
 it would have succeeded in creating an independent Ireland, albeit 
 with a serf population like that of England at the time; had it 
 been all composed of the ancient septs it would have crushed the 
 English power and erected a really free Ireland, but as it was but a 
 hybrid composed of both, it had all the faults of both and the 
 strength of neither, and hence went down in disaster. With its 
 destruction, and the following massacres, expropriations and dis- 
 persion of the native Irish, the Irish clans disappear finally from 
 history. 
 
 Out of these circumstances certain conditions arose well 
 worthy of the study of every student who would understand 
 modern Irish history. 
 
 One condition which thus arose was that the disappearance 
 of the clan as a rallying point for rebellions and possible base 
 of freedom made it impossible thereafter to localise an insurrec- 
 tionary effort, or to give it a smaller or more circumscribed aim 
 than that of the Irish Nation. When before the iron hand of 
 Cromwell the Irish clans went down into the tomb of a common 
 subjection the only possible reappearance of the Irish idea hence- 
 forth lay through the gateway of a National resurrection. And 
 from that day forward the idea of common property was des- 
 tined to recede into the background as an avowed principle of 
 action, whilst the energies of the nation were engaged in a slow 
 and painful process of assimilating the social system of the 
 conqueror; of absorbing the principles of that political society 
 based upon ownership which had replaced the Irish clan society 
 based upon a common kinship. 
 
 Another condition ensuing upon the total disappearance of 
 the Irish Social Order was the growth and accentuation of class 
 distinctions amongst the conquerors. The indubitable fact that 
 from that day forward the ownership of what industries remained 
 in Ireland was left in the hands of the Protestant element, is not 
 to be explained as sophistical anti-Irish historians have striven 
 to explain it, by asserting that it arose from the greater enter- 
 prise of Protestants as against Catholics; in reality it was due 
 to the state of social and political outlawry in which the Catho- 
 lics were henceforth placed by the law of the land. According
 
 S9 
 
 to the English Constitution as interpreted for the benefit of 
 Ireland, the Irish Catholics were not presumed to exist, and 
 hence the practical impossibility of industrial enterprise being in 
 their hands, or initiated by them. Thus as the landed property 
 of the Catholic passed into the ownership of the Protestant ad- 
 venturers, so also the manufacturing business of the nation fell 
 out of the stricken grasp of the hunted and proscribed "Papists'* 
 into the clutches of their successful and remorseless enemies. 
 Amongst these latter there were two elements the fanatical 
 Protestant, and the mere adventurer trading on the religious 
 enthusiasm of the former. The latter used the fanaticism of the 
 former in order to disarm, subjugate and rob the common Catho- 
 lic enemy, and having done so, established themselves as a ruling 
 landed and commercial class, leaving the Protestant soldier to 
 his fate as a tenant or artisan. Already by the outbreak of the 
 Williamite war in the generation succeeding Cromwell, the in- 
 dustries of the North of Ireland had so far developed that the 
 "Prentice Boys" of Derry were the dominating factor in deter- 
 mining the attitude of that city towards the contending English 
 kings, and with the close of that war industries developed so 
 quickly in the country as to become a menace to the capitalists of 
 England, who accordingly petitioned the King of England to 
 restrict and fetter their growth, which he accordingly did. With 
 the passing of this restrictive legislation against Irish industries, 
 Irish capitalism became discontented and disloyal without, as a 
 whole, the power or courage to be revolutionary. It was a re- 
 staging of the ever-recurring drama of English invasion and 
 Anglo-Irish disaffection, with the usual economic background. 
 We have pointed out in a previous chapter how each generation 
 of English adventurers settling upon the soil as owners resented 
 the coming of the next generation, and that their so-called 
 Irish patriotism was simply inspired by the fear that they should 
 be dispossessed in their turn as they had dispossessed others. 
 What applies to the landowning "patriots" applies also to the 
 manufacturers. The Protestant capitalists, with the help of the 
 English, Dutch, and other adventurers dispossessed the native 
 Catholics and became prosperous; as their commerce grew it 
 became a serious rival to that of England, and accordingly the 
 English capitalists compelled legislation against it, and imme- 
 diately the erstwhile "English Garrison in Ireland" became an 
 Irish "patriot" party. 
 
 From time to time many weird and fanciful theories have 
 been evolved to account for the transformation of English set-
 
 40 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 tiers of one generation into Irish patriots in the next. We hare 
 been told it was the air, or the language, or the religion, or the 
 hospitality, or the lovableness of Ireland, and all the time th 
 naked economic fact, the material reason, was as plain as the 
 alleged reason was mythical or spurious. But there are none so 
 blind as those who will not see, yet the fact remains that since 
 English confiscations of Irish land ceased no Irish landlord 
 body has become patriotic or rebellious, and since English re- 
 pressive legislation against Irish manufacturers ceased, Irish 
 capitalists have remained valuable assets in the scheme of Eng- 
 lish rule in Ireland. So it would appear that since the economic 
 reason ceased to operate, the air, and the language, and the 
 religion, and the hospitality, and the lovableness of Ireland 
 have lost all their seductive capacity ; all their power to make an 
 Irish patriot out of an English settler of the propertied classes. 
 
 With the development of ' this "patriotic" policy amongst 
 the Irish manufacturing class there had also developed a more 
 intense and aggressive policy amongst the humbler class of 
 Protestants in town and country. In fact in Ireland at that 
 time there were not only two nations divided into Catholics and 
 non-Catholics, but each of those two nations in turn was divided 
 into other two, the rich and the poor. The development of 
 industry had drawn large numbers of the Protestant poor from 
 agricultural pursuits into industrial occupations, and the sup- 
 pression of those latter in the interest of English manufacturers 
 left them both landless and workless. This condition reduced 
 the labourers in town and country to the position of serfs. Fierce 
 competition for farms and for jobs enabled the master class to 
 bend both Protestant and Catholic to its will, and the result 
 was seen in the revolts we have noticed earlier in our history. 
 The Protestant workman and tenant was learning that the Pope 
 of Rome was a very unreal and shadowy danger compared with 
 the social power of his employer or landlord, and the Catholic 
 tenant was awakening to a perception of the fact that under the 
 new social order the Catholic landlord represented the Mass less 
 than the rent roll. The times were propitious for a union of 
 the two democracies of Ireland. They had travelled from widely 
 different points through the valleys of disillusion and disappoint- 
 ment to meet at last by the unifying waters of a common suf- 
 fering. 
 
 To accomplish this union and make it a living force in the 
 life of the nation, there was required the activity of a revolu- 
 tionist with statesmanship enough to find a common point upon
 
 which the two elements could unite, and some great event dra- 
 matic enough in its character to arrest the attention of all and 
 fire them with a common feeling. The first, the Man, revolu- 
 tionist and statesman, was found in the person of Theobald 
 Wolfe Tone, and the second, the Event, in the French Revolu- 
 tion. Wolfe Tone had, although a Protestant, been secretary 
 for the Catholic Committee for some time, and in that capacity 
 had written the pamphlet quoted in a previous chapter, but 
 eventually had become convinced that the time had come for 
 more comprehensive and drastic measures than that Committee 
 could possibly initiate even were it willing to do so. The French 
 Revolution operated alike upon the minds of the Catholic and 
 Protestant democracies to demonstrate this fact and prepare 
 them for the reception of it. The Protestant workers saw in it 
 a revolution of a great Catholic nation, and hence wavered in 
 the belief so insidiously instilled into them that Catholics were 
 willing slaves of despotism; and the Catholics saw in it a great 
 manifestation of popular power a revolution of the people 
 against the aristocracy, and, therefore, ceased to believe that 
 aristocratic leadership was necessary for their salvation. 
 
 Seizing this propitious moment, Tone and his associates 
 proposed the formation of a society of men of every creed for 
 the purpose of securing an equal representation of all the people 
 in Parliament. 
 
 This was, as Tone's later words and works amply prove, 
 intended solely as a means of unity knowing well the nature of 
 the times and the political oligarchy in power he realised that 
 such a demand would be resisted with all the power of govern- 
 ment, but he wisely calculated that such resistance to a popular 
 demand, would tend to make closer and more enduring trie 
 union of the democracy irrespective of religion. And that Tone 
 had no illusions about the value of the aristocracy is proven in 
 scores of passages in his autobiography. We quote one, proving 
 alike this point, and also the determining effect of the French 
 Revolution upon the popular mind in Ireland : 
 
 "As the Revolution advanced, and as events expanded them- 
 selves, the public spirit of Ireland rose with a rapid acceleration. 
 The fears and animosities of the aristocracy rose in the same or 
 a still higher proportion. In a little time the French Revolution 
 became the test of every man's political creed, and the nation was 
 fairly divided into two great parties the aristocrats and demo- 
 crats (borrowed from France) who have ever since been meas- 
 uring each other's strength and carrying on a kind of smothered
 
 $2 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 war, which the course of events, it is highly probable, may soon 
 call into energy and action." 
 
 It will be thus seen that Tone built up his hopes upon a 
 successful prosecution of a Class War, although those who pre- 
 tend to imitate him today raise up their hands in holy horror 
 at the mere mention of the phrase. 
 
 The political wisdom of using a demand for equal represen- 
 tation as a rallying cry for the democracy of Ireland is evidenced 
 by a study of the state of the suffrage at that time. In an Address 
 from the United Irishmen of Dublin to the English Society of 
 the Friends of the People, dated Dublin, October 26, 1792, we 
 find the following description of the state of representation: 
 
 "The state of Protestant representation is as follows: 
 Seventeen boroughs have no resident elector; sixteen have but 
 one ; ninety have thirteen electors each ; ninety persons return 
 for 106 rural boroughs that is 212 members out of 300 the 
 whole number ; fifty- four members are returned by five noblemen 
 and four bishops; and borough influence has given landlords 
 such power in the counties as make them boroughs also . . . yet 
 the Majesty of the People is still quoted with affected veneration ; 
 and if the crown be ostensibly placed in a part of the Protestant 
 portion it is placed in mockery, for it is encircled with thorns." 
 
 "With regard to the Catholics, the following is the simple 
 and sorrowful fact: Three millions, every one of whom has an 
 interest in the State, and collectively give it its value, are taxed 
 without being represented, and bound by laws to which they have 
 not given consent." 
 
 The above Address, which is signed by Thomas Wright as 
 secretary, contains one sentence which certain Socialists and 
 others in Ireland and England might well study to advantage, 
 and is also useful in illustrating the thought of the time. It is 
 as follows : 
 
 "As to any union between the two islands, believe us when 
 we assert that our union rests upon our mutual independence. 
 We shall love each other if we be left to ourselves. It is the 
 union of mind which ought to bind these nations together." 
 
 This, then, was the situation in which the Society of United 
 Irishmen was born. That society was initiated and conducted 
 by men who realised the importance of all those principles of 
 action upon which latter day Irish revolutionists have turned 
 their backs. Consequently it was as effective in uniting the 
 democracy of Ireland as the "patriots" of our day have been in 
 keeping it separated into warring religious factions. Jt under-
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 63 
 
 stood that the aristocracy was necessarily hostile to the princi- 
 ple and practice of Freedom ; it understood that the Irish fight for 
 liberty was but a part of the world-wide upward march of the 
 human race, and hence allied itself with the revolutionists of 
 Great Britain as well as with those of France, and it said little 
 about ancient glories, and much about modern misery. The 
 Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords reprinted 
 in full the Secret Manifesto to the Friends of Freedom in Ireland, 
 circulated throughout the country by Wolfe Tone and his asso- 
 ciates, in the month of June, 1791, and as this contains the draft 
 of the designs of the revolutionary association known to history 
 as the Society of United Irishmen, we quote a few passages in 
 support of our contentions, and to show the democratic views 
 of its founders. The manifesto is supposed to have been written 
 by Wolfe Tone in collaboration with Samuel Neilson and others : 
 
 "It is by wandering from the few plain and simple principles 
 of Political Faith that our politics, like our religion, has become 
 preaching, not practice ; words not works. A society such as 
 this will disclaim those party appellations which seems to pale 
 the human hearts with petty compartments, and parcel out into 
 sects and sections common sense, common honesty, and com- 
 mon weal. 
 
 "It will not be an aristocracy, affecting the language of 
 patriotism, the rival of despotism for its own sake, not its 
 irreconcilable enemy for the sake of us all. It will not, by views 
 merely retrospective, stop the march of mankind or force them 
 back into the lanes and alleys of their ancestors. 
 
 "This society is likely to be a means the most powerful for 
 the promotion of a great end. What end? The Rights of Man 
 in Ireland. The greatest happiness of the greatest numbers in 
 this island, the inherent and indefeasible claims of every free 
 nation to rest in this nation the will and the power to be happy 
 to pursue the common weal as an individual pursues his private 
 welfare, and to stand in insulated independence, an imperatorial 
 people. 
 
 '"The greatest happiness of the Greatest Number. On the 
 rock of this principle let this society rest; by this let it judge 
 and determine every political question, and whatever is necessary 
 for this end let it not be accounted hazardous, but rather our 
 interest, our duty, our glory and our common religion. The 
 Rights of Man are the Rights of God, and to vindicate the one 
 is to maintain the other. We must be free in order to serve 
 Him whose service is perfect freedom.
 
 *4 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 "The external business of this society will be first, publica- 
 tion, in order to propagate their principles and effectuate their 
 ends. Second, communications with the different towns to be 
 assiduously kept up and every exertion used to accomplish a 
 National Convention of the People of Ireland, who may profit 
 by past errors and by many unexpected circumstances which have 
 happened since this last meeting. Third, communications with 
 similar societies abroad as the Jacobin Club of Paris, the Revo- 
 lutionary Society in England, the Committee for Reform in Scot- 
 land. Let the nations go abreast. Let the interchange of senti- 
 ments among mankind concerning the Rights of Man be as 
 immediate as possible. 
 
 "When the aristocracy come fonvard, the people fall back- 
 ward; when the people come forward, the aristocrasy, fearful 
 of being left behind, insinuate themselves into our ranks and rise 
 into timid leaders or treacherous auxiliaries. They mean to 
 make us their instruments; let us rather make them our instru- 
 ments. One of the two must happen. The people must serve 
 the party, or the party must emerge in the mightiness of the 
 people, and Hercules will then lean upon his club. On the 14th 
 of July, the day which shall ever commemorate the French Revo- 
 lution, let this society pour out their first libation to European 
 liberty, eventually the liberty of the world, and with their hands 
 joined in each other, and their eyes raised to Heaven, in His 
 presence, who breathed into them an ever-living soul, let them 
 swear to maintain the rights and prerogatives of their nature 
 as men, and the right and prerogative of Ireland as an indepen- 
 dent people. 
 
 " 'Dieu et mon Droit' (God and my right) is the motto of 
 kings. 'Dieu et la liberte' (God and liberty), exclaimed Voltaire 
 when he beheld Franklin, his fellow citizen of the world. 'Dieu 
 et nos Droits' (God and our rights), let every Irishman cry 
 aloud to each other the cry of mercy, of justice, and of victory." 
 
 It would be hard to find in modern Socialist literature any- 
 thing more broadly International in its scope and aims, more 
 definitely of a class character in its methods, or more avowedly 
 democratic in its nature than this manifesto, yet, although it 
 reveals the inspiration and methods of a revolutionist acknowl- 
 edged to be the most successful organiser of revolt in Ireland 
 since the days of Rory O'More, all his present-day professed fol- 
 lowers constantly trample upon and repudiate every one of these 
 principles and reject them as a possible guide to their political 
 activity. The Irish Socialist alone is in line with the thought of
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 65 
 
 this revolutionary apostle of the United Irishmen. 
 
 The above quoted manifesto was circulated in June, 1791, 
 and in July of the same year the townspeople and volunteer so- 
 cieties of Belfast met to celebrate the anniversary of the Fall of 
 the Bastile, a celebration recommended by the framer of the 
 manifesto as a means of educating and uniting the real people 
 of Ireland the producers. From the Dublin Chronicle af the 
 time we quote the following passages from the "Declaration of 
 the Volunteers and Inhabitants at Large of the town and neigh- 
 bourhood of Belfast on the subject of the French Revolution." 
 As Belfast was then the hot-bed of revolutionary ideas in Ire- 
 land, and became the seat of the first society of United Irishmen, 
 and as all the other branches of the society were founded upon 
 this original, it will repay to study the sentiments here expressed, 
 
 "Unanimously agreed to at an Assembly held by public 
 notice on the 14th of July, 1791. 
 
 "COLONEL SHARMAN, President. 
 
 "Neither on marble, nor brass, can the rights and duties of 
 men be so durably registered as on their memories and on their 
 hearts. We therefore meet this day to commemorate the French 
 Revolution, that the remembrance of this great event may sink 
 deeply into our hearts, warmed not merely with the fellow feel- 
 ing of townsmen, but with a sympathy which binds us to the 
 human race in a brotherhood of interest, of duty and affection. 
 
 "Here we take our stand, and if we be asked what the French 
 Revolution is to us, we answer much. Much as men. It is good 
 for human nature that the grass grows where the Bastile stood. 
 We do rejoice at an event that means the breaking up of civil and 
 religious bondage, when we behold this misshapen pile of abuses, 
 cemented merely by custom, and raised upon the ignorance of 
 a prostrate people, tottering to its base, to the very level of 
 equal liberty and common wealth. We do really rejoice in this 
 resurrection of human nature, and we congratulate our brother 
 man coming forth from the vaults of ingenious torture and from 
 the cave of death. We do congratulate the Christian world that 
 there is in it one great nation which has renounced all ideas 
 of conquest, and has published the first glorious manifesto of 
 humanity, of union, and of peace. In return we pray to. God 
 that peace may rest in their land, and that it may never be in 
 power of royalty, nobility, or a priesthood to disturb the har- 
 mony of a good people, consulting about those laws which must 
 ensure their own happiness and that of unborn millions. 
 
 "Go on, then great and gallant people; to practise the sub-
 
 66 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 lime philosophy of your legislation, to force applause from na- 
 tions least disposed to do you justice, and not by conquest but 
 by the omnipotence of reason to convert and liberate the world 
 a world whose eyes are fixed on you, whose heart is with you, 
 who talks of you with all her tongues ; you are in very truth the 
 hope of this world, of all except a few men in a few cabinets 
 who thought the human race belonged to them, not them to the 
 human race ; but now are taught by awful example, and tremble, 
 and dare not confide in armies arrayed against you and your 
 cause," 
 
 Thus spoke Belfast. It will be seen that the ideas of the 
 publishers of the secret manifesto were striking a responsive 
 chord in the hearts of the people. A series of meetings of the 
 Dublin Volunteer Corps were held in October of the same year, 
 ostensibly to denounce a government proclamation offering a 
 reward for the apprehension of Catholics under arms, but in 
 reality to discuss the political situation. The nature of the con- 
 clusions arrived at may be judged by a final paragraph in the 
 resolution, passed 23rd October, 1791, and signed amongst 
 others by James Napper Tandy, on behalf of the Liberty Corps 
 of Artillery. It reads : 
 
 "While we admire the philanthropy of that great and en- 
 lightened nation, who have set an example to mankind, both of 
 polictial and religious wisdom, we cannot but lament that distinc- 
 tions, injurious to both, have too long disgraced the name of 
 Irishmen ; and we most fervently wish that our animosities were 
 entombed with the bones of our ancestors ; and that we and our 
 Roman Catholic brethren would unite like citizens, and claim the 
 Rights of Man." 
 
 This was in October. In the same month Wolfe Tone went 
 to Belfast on the invitation of one of the advanced Volunteer 
 Clubs, and formed the first club of United Irishmen. Returning 
 to Dublin he organised another. From the minutes of the Inaug- 
 uration Meeting of this First Dublin Society of United Irishmen, 
 held at the Eagle Inn, Eustace Street, 9th November, 1791, we 
 make the following extracts, which speak for the principles of 
 the original members of those two parent clubs of a society 
 destined in a short time to cover all Ireland, and to set in motion 
 the fleets of two foreign auxiliaries. 
 
 ''For the attainment then of this great and important ob- 
 ject the removal of absurd and ruinous distinctions and for 
 jjromoting a complete coalition of the people, a club has been 
 formed composed of all religious persuasions who have adopted
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 67 
 
 for their name The Society of United Irishmen of Dublin, and 
 have taken as their declaration that of a similar society in Belfast, 
 which is as follows : 
 
 "In the present great era of reform when unjust govern- 
 ments are falling in every quarter of Europe, when religious pros- 
 ecution is compelled to abjure her tyranny over conscience; 
 when the Rights of Man are ascertained in Theory and that 
 Theory substantiated by Practice; when antiquity can no longer 
 defend absurd and oppressive forms against the common sense 
 and common interests of mankind; when all government is ac- 
 knowledged to originate from the people, and to be so far only 
 obligatory as it protects their rights and promotes their welfare; 
 we think it our duty as Irishmen to come forward and state what 
 we feel to be our heavy grievance, and what we know to be its 
 effectual remedy. 
 
 "We have no National Government; we are ruled by Eng- 
 lishmen and the servants of Englishmen, whose object is the 
 interest of another country; whose instrument is corruption; 
 whose strength is the weakness of Ireland; and these men have 
 the whole of the power and patronage of the country as means 
 to seduce and subdue the honesty and the spirit of her representa- 
 tives in the legislature. Such an extrinsic power, acting with 
 uniform force in a direction too frequently opposite to the true 
 line of our obvious interests, can be resisted with effect solely 
 by unanimity, decision, and spirit in the people, qualities which 
 may be exerted most legally, constitutionally, and efficaciously 
 by that great measure essential to the prosperity and freedom 
 of Ireland an equal Representation of all the People in Par- 
 liament. . . . 
 
 "We have gone to what we conceive to be the root of the 
 evil; we have stated what we conceive to be the remedy with 
 a Parliament thus reformed everything is easy ; without it nothing 
 can be done." 
 
 Here we have a plan of campaign indicated on the lines 
 of those afterwards followed so successfully by the Socialists of 
 Europe a revolutionary party openly declaring their revolution- 
 ary sympathies but limiting their first demand to a popular meas- 
 ure such as would enfranchise the masses upon whose support 
 their ultimate success must rest. No one can read the manifesto 
 we have just quoted without realising that these men aimed at 
 nothing less than a social and political revolution, such as had 
 been accomplished in France, or even greater, because the French 
 Revolution did not enfranchise all the people, but made a dis-
 
 38 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 tmction between active and passive citizens, taxpayers and non- 
 taxpayers. Nor yet can an impartial student fail to realise that 
 it was just this daring aim that was the secret of their success as 
 organisers, as it is the secret of the political effectiveness of the 
 Socialists of our day. Nothing less would have succeeded in 
 causing Protestant and Catholic masses to shake hands over the 
 bloody chasm of religious hatreds, nothing less will accomplish 
 the same result in our day among the Irish workers. It must be 
 related to the credit of the leaders of the United Irishmen that 
 they remained true to their principles even when moderation 
 might have secured a mitigation of their lot. When exmained 
 before the Secret Committee of the House of Lords at the 
 prison of Fort George, Scotland, Thomas Addis Emmet did not 
 hesitate to tell his inquisitors that if successful they would have 
 inaugurated a very different social system than that which then 
 prevailed. 
 
 Few movements in history have been more consistently mis- 
 represented by open enemies and professed admirers than that 
 of the United Irishmen. The suggestio falso, and the suppressio 
 veri have been remorselessly used. The middle class "patriotic" 
 historians, orators, and journalists of Ireland have ever vied with 
 one another in enthusiastic descriptions of their military exploits 
 on land and sea, their hair-breadth escapes and heroic martyr- 
 dom, but have resolutely suppressed or distorted their writings, 
 songs and manifestos. We have striven to reverse the process, 
 to give publicity to their literature, believing ^hat this literature 
 reveals the men better than any partisan biographer can do. Dr. 
 Madden, a most painstaking and conscientious biographer, de- 
 clares in his volume of "The Literary Remains of the United 
 Irishmen," that he has suppressed many of their productions 
 because of their "trashy" republican and irreligious tendencies. 
 This is to be regretted, as it places upon other biographers 
 and historians the trouble (a thousand times more difficult now) 
 of searching for anew and re-collecting the literary material from 
 which to build a proper appreciation of the work of those pio- 
 neers of democracy in Ireland. And as Irish men and women 
 progress to a truer appreciation of correct social and political 
 principles, perhaps it will be found possible to say, without 
 being in the least degree blasphemous or irreverent, that the 
 atones rejected by the builders of the past have become the 
 corner-stones of the edifice.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE EMMET CONSPIRACY. 
 
 "The Rich always betray the Poor." Henry Joy M'Cracken's Letter 
 to his sister, 1798. 
 
 THE Emmet Conspiracy the aftermath of the United Irisfe 
 movement of 1798, was even more distinctly democratic, inter- 
 national and popular in its sympathies and affiliations than the 
 latter. The treacherous betrayal of the United Irish chiefs into 
 the hands of the Government had removed from the scene of 
 action practically all the middle class supporters of the revolu- 
 tionary movement and left the rank and file to their own re- 
 sources and to consult their own inclinations. It was accordingly 
 with these humble workers in town and country Emmet had to 
 deal when he essayed to reorganise the scattered forces of free- 
 dom for a fresh grapple with the despotic power of the class 
 government then ruling Ireland and England. All students who 
 have investigated the matter are as one in conceding that Em- 
 met's conspiracy was more of a working class character than its 
 predecessors. Indeed it is a remarkable fact that this conspiracy^ 
 widespread throughout Ireland, England, and France, should- 
 have progressed so rapidly, and with such elaborate preparations 
 for armed revolt, amongst the poorer section of the populace 
 right up to within a short time of the date for the projected 
 rising, without the alert English Government or its Irish Execu- 
 tive being able to inform themselves of the matter. 
 
 Probably the proletarian character of the movement the 
 fact that it was recruited principally amongst the working class 
 of Dublin and other large centres, as well as amongst the labour- 
 ing element of the country districts, was the real reason why it 
 was not so prolific of traitors as its forerunner. After the con- 
 spiracy had fallen through, the Government, of course, pretended 
 that it had known of it all along indeed the British Government 
 
 69
 
 70 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 in Ireland always pretends to be omniscient but nothing devel- 
 oped during the trial of Emmet to justify such a claim. Nor 
 has anything developed since, although searchers of the Gov- 
 ernment documents of the time, the Castlereagh papers, the 
 records of the secret service and other sources of information 
 have been able to reveal in their true colours of infamy many who 
 had posed in the limelight for more than a generation as whole- 
 souled patriots and reformers. Thus Leonard McNaliy, barrister- 
 at-law, and legal defender of the United Irishmen, who acted 
 for all the chiefs of that body at their trials, 'was one of the 
 Catholic Committee and elected as Catholic delegate to England 
 in 1811, looked up to and revered as a fearless advocate of 
 Catholic rights, and champion of persecuted Nationalists, was 
 discovered to have been all the time in the pay of the Govern- 
 ment, acting the loathsome part of an informer, and systemat- 
 ically betraying to the Government the inmost secrets of the 
 men whose cause he was pretending to champion in the court- 
 room. But this secret was kept for half a century. Francis 
 Magan, another worthy, received a secret pension of 20 per 
 year from the Government for the betrayal of the hiding-place 
 of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and lived and died revered as an 
 honest, unoffending citizen. A body of the Royal Meath Militia 
 stationed at Mallow, County Cork, had conspired to seize the 
 artillery stationed there, and with that valuable arm join the 
 insurgents in a body. One of their number mentioned the plot 
 in his confessions to the Rev. Thomas Barry, parish priest of 
 Mallow, and was by him ordered to reveal it to the military 
 authorities. The leader of the plotters, Sergeant Beatty, seeing 
 by the precautions suddenly taken that the plot was discovered, 
 fought his way out of the barracks with nineteen men, but was 
 subsequently captured and hanged in Dublin. Father Barry (how 
 ironical the title sounds) received 100 per year pension from the 
 Government, and drew this blood-money in secret for a lifetime 
 before his crime was discovered. It is recorded that the great 
 Daniel O'Connell at one time turned pale when shown a receipt 
 for this blood-money signed by Father Barry, and yet it is known 
 now that O'Connell "himself, as a member of the lawyers' Yeom- 
 anry Corps of Dublin, was turned out on duty to serve against 
 the rebels on the night of Emmet's insurrection, and in Daunt's 
 "Recollections" he relates that O'Connell pointed out to him a 
 house in James's Street which he (O'Connell) had searched for 
 "Croppies" (patriots). 
 
 The present writer has seen in Derrynane, O'Connell's an-
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 71 
 
 cestral home in County Kerry, a brass-mounted blunderbuss, 
 which we were assured by a member of the family was procured 
 at a house in James's Street, Dublin, by O'Connell from the 
 owner, a follower of Emmet, a remark that recalled to our mind 
 that "search for Croppies" of which Daunt speaks, and gave rise 
 to a conjecture that possibly the blunderbuss in question owed 
 its presence in Derrynane to that memorable raid. 
 
 But although latter-day investigators have brought to the 
 light of day many such treasons against liberty as those recorded, 
 and have revealed depths of corruption in quarters long unsus- 
 pected, nothing has yet been demonstrated to dim the glory or 
 sully the name of the men and women of the working class who 
 carried the dangerous secret of Emmet's conspiracy and guarded 
 it so well and faithfully to the end. It must be remembered in 
 this connection that at that period the open organisation of la- 
 bourers for any purpose was against the law, that consequently' 
 the trade unions which then flourished amongst the working class 
 were all illegal organisations whose members were in constant , 
 danger of arrest and transportation for the crime of organising, 
 and that, therefore, a proposal to subvert the oppressive govern- 
 ing class and establish a republic founded upon the votes of all 
 citizens, as Emmet planned, was one likely to appeal alike to the 
 material requirements and imagination of the Irish toilers. And 
 as they were already trained to secrecy in organisation they 
 naturally made splendid material for the revolutionary movement. 
 It is significant that the only serious fight on the night of the 
 ill-fated insurrection took place in the Coombe district of the 
 Liberties of Dublin, a quarter inhabited exclusively by weavers, 
 tanners, and shoemakers, the best organised trades in the city, 
 and that a force of Wicklow men brought into Dublin by Michael 
 Dwyer, the insurgent chieftain, were sheltered on the quays 
 amongst the dock labourers and eventually enabled to return home 
 without any traitor betraying their whereabouts to the numerous 
 Government spies overrunning the city. 
 
 The ripeness of the labouring element in the country at 
 large for any movement that held out hopes of social emancipa- 
 tion may be gauged by the fact that a partial rebellion had 
 already taken place in 1802 in Limerick, Water ford, and Tip- 
 perary, where, according to Haverty's "History of Ireland/' 
 "the alleged grounds for rebellion were the dearness of the 
 potatoes," and "the right of the old tenants to retain possession 
 of their farms." 
 
 Such were the domestic materials upon which the conspiracy
 
 72 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 of Emmet rested working class elements fired with the hope 
 of political and social emancipation. Abroad he sought alliance 
 with the French Republic the incarnation of the political, social, 
 and religious unrest and revolution of the age, and in Great 
 Britain he formed alliance with the "Sassenach" reformers who 
 were conspiring to overthrow the English monarchy. On Nov- 
 ember 13, 1802, one Colonel Despard, with nineteen others, was 
 arrested in London charged with the crime of high treason ; they 
 were tried on the charge of conspiracy to murder the King; 
 although no evidence in support of such a charge was forthcom- 
 ing, Despard and seven others were hanged. According to the 
 Castlereagh papers Emmet and Despard were preparing for a 
 simultaneous, uprising, a certain William Dowdall, of Dublin, 
 described as one of the most determined of the society of United 
 Irishmen, being the confidential agent who acted for both. Mr. 
 W. J. Fitzpatrick, in his books "Secret Service Under Pitt," and 
 "The Sham Squire," brings out many of these facts as a result 
 of an extensive and scholarly investigation of Government rec- 
 ords and the papers of private families, yet, although these books 
 were published half a century ago, every recurring Emmet an- 
 niversary continues to bring us its crop of orators who know all 
 about Emmet's martyrdom, and nothing about his principles. 
 Even some of the more sympathetic of his panegyrists do not 
 seem to realise that they dim his glory when they represent him 
 as the victim of a protest against an injustice local to Ireland 
 instead of as an Irish apostle of a world-wide movement for 
 liberty, equality and fraternity. Yet this latter was indeed the 
 character and position of Emmet, and as such the democracy of 
 the future will revere him. He fully shared in the international 
 sympathies of that Dublin Society of United Irishmen who had 
 elected a Scottish reformer to be a United Irishman upon hear- 
 ing that the Government had sentenced him to transportation for 
 attending a reform convention in Edinburgh. He believed in the 
 brotherhood of the oppressed and in the community of free na- 
 tions, and died for his ideal. 
 
 Emmet is the most idolised, the most universally praised of 
 all Irish martyrs; it is, therefore, worthy of note that in the 
 proclamation he drew up to be issued in the name of the "Pro- 
 visional Government of Ireland" the first article decrees the 
 wholesale confiscation of church property and the nationalising 
 of the same, and the second and third decrees forbid and declare 
 void the transfer of all landed property, bonds, debentures, and 
 public securities until the national government is established and
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 73 
 
 the national will upon them is declared. 
 
 Two things are thus established viz., that Emmet believed 
 the "national will" was superior to property rights and could 
 abolish them at will ; and also that he realised that the producing 
 classes could not be expected to rally to the revolution unless 
 given to understand that it meant their freedom from social as 
 well as from political bondage.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 THE FIRST IRISH SOCIALIST; A FORERUNNER OF MARX 
 
 "It is a system which in its least repulsive aspects compels thousands 
 and tens of thousands to fret and toil, to live and die in hunger and rags 
 and wretchedness in order that a few idle drones may revel in ease and 
 luxury." Irish People, July 9, 1864. 
 
 FOR Ireland, as for every other part of Europe, the first quarter 
 of the nineteenth century was a period of political darkness, or 
 unbridled despotism and reaction. The fear engendered in the 
 heart of the ruling classes by the French Revolution had given 
 birth to an almost insane hatred of reform, coupled with a wolfish 
 ferocity in hunting down even the mildest reformers. The 
 triumph of the allied sovereigns over Napoleon was followed by 
 a perfect saturnalia of despotism all over Europe, and every 
 form of popular organisation v, as ruthlessly suppressed or driven 
 under the surface. But driving organisations under the surface 
 does not remove the cause? of discontent, and, consequently, we 
 find that as rapidly as reaction triumphed above ground its 
 antagonists spread their secret conspiracies underneath. The pop- 
 ular discontent was further increased by the fact that the return 
 home of the soldiers disbanded from the Napoleonic wars had a 
 serious economic effect. It deprived the agriculturists of a market 
 for their produce, and produced a great agricultural and indus-* 
 trial crisis. It threw out of employment all the ships employed 
 in provisioning the troops, all the trades required to build, equip 
 and repair them, all the industries engaged in making war ma- 
 terial, and in addition to suspending the work and flooding the 
 labour market with the men and women thus disemployed, it 
 cast adrift scores of thousands of able-bodied soldiers and sailors 
 to compete with the civilian workers who had fed, clothed and 
 maintained them during the war. In Ireland, especially, the 
 results were disastrous owing to the inordinately large propor- 
 tion of Irish amongst the disbanded soldiers and sailors. Those 
 returning home found the labour market glutted with unemployed 
 
 74
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 75 
 
 in the cities, and in the rural districts the landlords engaged in 
 a fierce war of extermination with their tenantry, who, having 
 lost their war market and war prices, were unable to meet the 
 increasing exactions of the owners of the soil. It was at this 
 period the great Ribbon conspiracy took hold upon the Irish 
 labourer in the rural districts, and although the full truth relative 
 to that movement has never yet been unearthed sufficient is known 
 to indicate that it was in effect a secret agricultural trades union 
 of labourers and cottier farmers a trades union which under- 
 took in its own wild way to execute justice upon the e victor, and 
 vengeance upon the traitor to his fellows. Also at this time Irish 
 trade unionism, although secret and illegal, attained to its maxi- 
 mum of strength and compact organisation. In 1824 the chief 
 constable of Dublin, testifying before a committee of the House 
 of Commons, declared that the trades of Dublin were perfectly 
 organised, and many of the employers were already beginning 
 to complain of the "tyranny of the Irish trades unions." Under 
 such circumstances it is not to be wondered at that the attention 
 which in the eighteenth century had been given to political re- 
 forms and the philosophy thereof gave way in the nineteenth to 
 solicitude for social amelioration. 
 
 In England, France, and Germany a crop of social philos- 
 ophers sprang up, each with his scheme of a perfect social order, 
 each with a plan by which the regeneration of society could be 
 accomplished and poverty and all its attendant evils abolished. 
 For the most part these theorists had no complaint to make 
 against the beneficiaries of the social system of the day; their 
 complaint was against the results of the social system. Indeed 
 they in most cases believed that the governing and possessing 
 classes would themselves voluntarily renounce their privileges and 
 property and initiate the new order once they were convinced of 
 its advantages. With this belief it was natural that the chief 
 direction taken by their criticism of society should be towards an 
 analysis of the effects of competition upon buyer and seller, and 
 that the relation of the labourer as producer to the proprietor as 
 appropriator of the thing produced should occupy no part of their 
 examination. One result of this one-sided view of social rela- 
 tions necessarily was a complete ignoring of historical develop- 
 ment as a factor in hastening the attainment of their ideal ; since 
 the new order was to be introduced by the governing class it fol- 
 lowed that the stronger that class became the easier would be the 
 transition, and, consequently, everything which would tend to 
 weaken the social bond by accentuating class distinction, or im-
 
 76 
 
 pairing the feelings of reverence held by the labourer for his 
 masters would be a hindrance to progress. 
 
 Those philosophers formed socialist sects, and it is known 
 that their followers, when they lost the inspiring genius of their 
 leaders, degenerated into reactionaries of the most pronounced 
 type, opposed to every forward move of labour. 
 
 The Irish are not philosophers as a rule, they proceed too 
 rapidly from thought to action. 
 
 Hence it is not to be wondered at that the same period which 
 produced the Utopian Socialists before alluded to in France, 
 England, and Germany produced in Ireland an economist more 
 thoroughly Socialist in the modern sense than any of his con- 
 temporaries William Thompson, of Clonkeen, Roscarberry, 
 County Cork a Socialist who did not hesitate to direct attention 
 to the political and social subjection of labour as the worst evil 
 of society, nor to depict with a merciless fidelity to truth the 
 disastrous consequences to political freedom of the presence in 
 society of a wealthy class. Thompson was a believer in the 
 possibility of realising Socialism by forming co-operative colonies 
 on the lines of those advocated by Robert Owen, and to that 
 extent may be classed as a Utopian. On the other hand he be- 
 lieved that such colonies must be built by the labourers them- 
 selves, and not by the governing class. He taught that the wealth 
 of the ruling class was derived from the plunder of labour, and 
 he advocated as a necessary preliminary to Socialism the con- 
 quest of political representation on the basis of the adult suffrage 
 of both sexes. He did not believe in the State as a basis of 
 Socialist society, but he insisted upon the necessity of using po- 
 litical weapons to destroy all class privileges founded in law, and 
 to clear the ground of all obstacles which the governing class 
 might desire to put in the way of the growth of Socialist com- 
 munities. 
 
 Lest it may be thought that we are exaggerating the merits 
 of Thompson's work as an original thinker, a pioneer of Socialist 
 thought superior to any of the Utopian Socialists of the Con- 
 tinent, and long ante-dating Karl Marx in his insistence upon 
 the subjection of labour as the cause of all social misery, modern 
 crime and political dependence, as well as in his searching analysis 
 of the true definition of capital, we will quote a passage from his 
 most important work, published in 1824: "An Inquiry into the 
 principles of the distribution of Wealth most conducive to Human 
 Happiness as applied to the newly proposed System of the Vol- 
 untary Equality of Wealth." Third edition.
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 77 
 
 "What, then, is the most accurate idea of capital ? It is that 
 portion of the product of labour which, whether of a permanent 
 nature or not, is capable of being made the instrument of profit. 
 Such seem to be the real circumstances which mark out one por- 
 tion of the products of labour as capital. On such distinctions, 
 however, have been founded the insecurity and oppression of the 
 productive labourer the real parent, under the guidance of 
 knowledge, of all wealth and the enormous usurpation over the 
 productive forces and their fellow-creatures of those who, under 
 the name of capitalists, or landlords, acquired the possession of 
 those accumulated products the yearly or permanent supply of 
 the community. Hence the opposing claims of the capitalist and 
 the labourer. The capitalist, getting into his hands, under the 
 reign of insecurity and force, the consumption of many labourers 
 for the coming year, the tools or machinery necessary to make 
 their labour productive, and the dwellings in which they must 
 live, turned them to the best account, and bought labour and 
 its future products with them as cheaply as possible. The greater 
 the profit of capital, or trfe more the' capitalist made the labourer 
 pay for the advance of his food, the use of the implements or 
 machinery and the occupation of the dwelling, the less of course 
 remained to the labourer for the acquisition of any object of 
 desire." 
 
 Or again, see how, whilst advocating political reform as a 
 means to an end, he depicts its inefficiency when considered as 
 an end in itself: 
 
 "As long as the accumulated capital of society remains in 
 one set of hands, and the productive power of creating wealth 
 remains in another, the accumulated capital will, while the nature 
 of man continues as at present, be made use of to counteract the 
 natural laws of distribution, and to deprive the producers of the 
 use of what their labour has produced. Were it possible to con- 
 ceive that, under simple representative institutions, any such of 
 the expedients of insecurity should be permitted to remain in 
 existence as would uphold the division of capital and labour, 
 such representative institutions (though all the plunder of political 
 power should cease) would be of little further benefit to the real 
 happiness of mankind, than as affording an easy means for the 
 development of knowledge, and the ultimate abolition of all such 
 expedients. As long as a class of mere capitalists exists society 
 must remain in a diseased state. Whatever plunder is saved 
 from the hand of political power will be levied in another way 
 under the name of profit by capitalists who, while capitalists,
 
 78 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 must be always law makers." 
 
 Thompson advocated free education for all, and went into 
 great detail to prove its feasibility, giving statistics to show that 
 the total cost of such education could be easily borne by Ireland, 
 without unduly increasing the burden of the producers. In this 
 he was three generations ahead of his time the reform he then 
 advocated being only partially realised in our day. Living in a 
 country in which a small minority imposed a detested religion by 
 force upon a conquered people with the result that a ferocious 
 fanaticism disgraced both sides, he yet had courage and fore- 
 sight enough to plead for secular education, and to the cry of 
 the bigots who then as now declare that religion would die unless 
 supported by the State, he answered : 
 
 "Not only has experience proved that religion can exist 
 without interfering with the natural laws of distribution by 
 violation of security, but it has increased and flourished as during 
 centuries in Ireland and in Greece under and in spite of the forced 
 abstraction of its own resources from its own communicants, to 
 enrich a rival and hated priesthood, or to feed the force that 
 enchained it." 
 
 How different was the spirit of the Socialism preached by 
 Thompson from the visionary sentimentalism of the Utopians of 
 Continental Europe, or of Owen in his earlier days in England, 
 with their constant appeals to the "humanity" of the possessing 
 classes, is further illustrated by the following passage which, 
 although lengthy, we make no apology for reproducing. Because 
 of its biting analysis of the attitude of the rich in the various 
 stages of political society, and the lust for power which accom- 
 panies extreme wealth, the passage might have been written by a 
 Socialist of the twentieth century : 
 
 "The unoccupied rich are without any active pursuit; an 
 object in life is wanting to them. The means of gratifying the 
 senses, the imagination even, of sating all wants and caprices they 
 possess. The pleasures of power are still to be attained. It is 
 one of the strongest and most unavoidable propensities of those 
 who have been brought up in indulgence to abhor restraint, to 
 be uneasy under opposition, and therefore to desire power to 
 remove these evils of restraint and opposition. How shall they 
 acquire the power? First by the direct influence of their wealth, 
 and the hopes and fears it engenders ; then when these means are 
 exhausted or to make these means more effectual they endeavour 
 everywhere to seize on, to monopolise the powers of Government. 
 
 "Where despotism does not exist they endeavour to get en-
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 79 
 
 tircly into their own hands, or in conjunction with the head of 
 the State, or other bodies, they seize as large a portion as they 
 can of the functions of legislation. Where despotism does not 
 exist, or is modified, they share amongst themselves all the subor- 
 dinate departments of Government; they monopolise, either di- 
 rectly or indirectly, the command of the armed force, the offices 
 of judges, priests and all those executive departments which give 
 the most power, require the least trouble, and render the largest 
 pecuniary returns. When despotism exists the class of the excess- 
 ively rich make the best terms they can with the despot, to 
 share his power whether as partners, equals or mere slaves. 
 
 "If his situation is such as to give them a confidence in their 
 strength, they make terms with the despot, and insist on what they 
 call their rights ; if they are weak they gladly crawl to the despot, 
 and appear to glory in their slavishness to him for the sake of 
 the delegated power of making slaves to themselves of the rest 
 of the community. Such do the historians of all nations prove 
 the tendencies of excessive wealth to be." 
 
 In the English-speaking world the work of this Irish thinker 
 is practically unknown, but on the Continent of Europe his posi- 
 tion has long been established. Besides the work already quoted 
 he wrote an "Apeal of one-half of the Human Race Women 
 against the Pretensions of the other half Men to retain them 
 in Political and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery," published 
 in London in 1825. "Labour Rewarded, the Claims of Labour 
 and Capital Conciliated ; or, How to Secure to Labour the Whole 
 Product of its Exertions," published in 1827, and "Practical Di- 
 rections for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Com- 
 munities," published in London in 1830, are two other known 
 works. He also left behind the manuscript of other books on the 
 same 'subject, but they have never been published, and their 
 whereabouts is now unknown. It is told of him that he was for 
 twenty years a vegetarian and total abstainer, and in his will left 
 the bulk of his fortune to endow the first co-operative community 
 to be established in Ireland, and his body for the purpose of 
 dissection in the interests of science. His relations successfully 
 contested the will on the ground that "immoral objects were in- 
 cluded in its benefit." 
 
 His position in the development of Socialism as a science lies, 
 in our opinion, midway between the Utopianism of the early 
 idealists and the historical materialism of Marx. He anticipated 
 the latter in most of his analyses of the economic system, and 
 foresaw die part that a democratisation of politics must play
 
 80 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 in clearing the ground of the legal privileges of the professional 
 classes. In a preface to the English translation of the work of 
 one of his German biographers, Anton Menger, the writer, H. S. 
 Foxwell, M.A., says of his contribution to economic science: 
 
 "Thompson's fame will rest not upon his advocacy of Owen- 
 ite co-operation, devoted and public spirited as that was, but upon 
 the fact that he was the first writer to elevate the question of the 
 just distribution of zvealth to the supreme position it has since 
 held in English political economy. Up to his time political 
 economy had been rather commercial than industrial, indeed he 
 finds it necessary to explain the very meaning of the term "indus- 
 trial," which, he says, was from the French, no doubt adopted 
 from Saint Simon." 
 
 If we were to attempt to estimate the relative achievements 
 of Thompson and Marx we should not hope to do justice to either 
 by putting them in contrast, or by eulogising Thompson in order 
 to belittle Marx, as some Continental critics of the latter seek to 
 do. Rather we should say that the relative position of this Irish 
 genius and of Marx are best comparable to the historical relations 
 of the pre-Darwinian evolutionists to Darwin; as Darwin sys- 
 tematised all the theories of his predecessors and gave a liftime 
 to the accumulation of the facts required to establish his and 
 their position, so Marx found the true line of economic thought 
 already indicated and brought his genius and encyclopaedic knowl- 
 edge and research to place it upon an unshakable foundation. 
 Thompson brushed aside the economic fiction maintained by 
 the orthodox economists and accepted by the Utopian that profit 
 was made in exchange, and declared that it was due to the sub- 
 jection of labour and the resultant appropriation by the capitalists 
 and landlords of the fruits of the labour of others. He does not 
 hesitate to include himself as a beneficiary of monopoly. He 
 declared, in 1827, that for about twelve years he had been "living 
 on what is called rent, the produce of the labour of others." All 
 the theory of the class war is but a deduction from this principle. 
 But although Thompson recognised this class war as a fact, he did 
 not recognise it as a factor, as the factor in the evolution of so- 
 ciety towards freedom. This was reserved for Marx, and in 
 our opinion is his chief and crowning glory. While Owen and 
 the Continental Socialists were beseeching the favour of kings, 
 Parliaments and Congresses this Irishman was arraigning the 
 rich, pointing out that lust of power for ever followed riches, 
 that "capitalists, while capitalists, would always be law makers," 
 but that "as long as a class of mere capitalists exists society must
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 81 
 
 remain in a diseased state." The fact that the daring Celt who 
 preached this doctrine, arraigning alike the social and political 
 rulers of society and society itself, also vehemently demanded the 
 extension of the suffrage to the whole adult population is surely 
 explanation enough why his writings found no favour with the 
 respectable classes of society, with those same classes who so 
 frequently lionised the leaders of the Socialist sects of his day. 
 
 In our day another great Irishman, Standish O'Grady, per- 
 haps the greatest litterateur in Ireland, has been preaching in the 
 pages of "The Peasant," Dublin, 1908-9, against capitalist so- 
 ciety, and urging the formation of co-operative communities in 
 Ireland as an escape therefrom, and it is curiously significant of 
 how little Irishmen know of the intellectual achievements of their 
 race that O'Grady apparently is entirely unconscious of the work 
 of his great forerunner in that field of endeavour. It is also 
 curiously significant of the conquest of the Irish mind by English 
 traditions that Irish Nationalists should often be found fighting 
 fiercely against Socialism as "a German idea," although every 
 social conception which we find in the flower in Marx we can also 
 find in the bud in Thompson, twenty-three years before the pub- 
 lication of the "Communist Manifesto," forty-three years before 
 the issue of "Das Kapital." 
 
 We will conclude this chapter by another citation from this 
 Irish pioneer of revolutionary Socialism ; we say of revolutionary 
 Socialism advisedly, for all the deductions from his teachings 
 lead irresistibly to the revolutionary action of the working class. 
 As according to the Socialist philosophy the political demands of 
 the working class movement must at all times depend upon the 
 degree of development of the age and country in which it finds 
 itself, it is apparent that Thompson's theories of action were the 
 highest possible expression of the revolutionary thought of his 
 age. 
 
 "The productive labourers stript of all capital, of tools, 
 houses, and materials to make their labour productive, toil from 
 want, from the necessity of existence, their remuneration being 
 kept at the lowest compatible figure with the existence of indus-. 
 trious habits 
 
 "How shall the wretchedly poor be virtuous? Who cares 
 about them? What character have they to lose? What hold has 
 public opinion on their action? What care they for the delicate 
 pleasures of reputation who are tormented by the gnawings of 
 absolute want ? How should they respect the property or rights 
 of others who have none of their own to beget a sympathy for
 
 2 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 thoae who suffer for their privation? How can they feel for 
 Chers* woes, for others' passing light complaints, who are tor- 
 mented by their own substantial miseries? The mere mention of 
 Ifce trivial inconveniences of others insults and excites the indig- 
 nation instead of calling forth their complacent sympathies. Cut 
 off from the decencies, the comforts, the necessaries of life, want 
 begets ferocity. If they turn round they find many in the same 
 situation with themselves, partaking of their feelings of isolation 
 from kindly sympathies with the happy. They become a public to 
 each other, a public of suffering, of discontent and ignorance; 
 they form a public opinion of their own in contempt of the public 
 opinion of the rich, whom, and their laws, they look upon as 
 the result of force alone. From whom are the wretched to learn 
 die principle while they never see the practice of morality? Of 
 respect for the security of others ? From their superiors ? From 
 the laws? The conduct of their superiors, the operation of those 
 laws have been one practical lesson to them of force, of restraint, 
 of taking away without their consent, without any equivalent the 
 fruiti of their labour. Of what avail are morals or principles or 
 cotOmands, when opposed, when belied, by example? These can 
 never supply motives of virtuous conduct. Motives arise from 
 things, from surrounding circumstances, not from the idleness 
 of words and empty declamations. Words are only useful to con- 
 vey and impress a knowledge of these things and circumstances. 
 If tftese things do not exist words are mere mockery" 
 
 With this bit of economic determinist philosophy teaching 
 that morality is a thing of social growth, the outcome of things 
 and circumstances we leave this earliest Irish apostle of the 
 social revolution. Fervent Celtic enthusiasts are fond of claim- 
 ing, and the researches of our days seem to bear out the claim, 
 tfcat Irish missionaries were the first to rekindle the lamp of 
 learning in Europe, and dispel the intellectual darkness following 
 the downfall of the Roman Empire ; may we not also take pride 
 M the fact that an Irishman also was the first to pierce the worse 
 than Egyptian darkness of capitalist barbarism and point out to 
 the toilers the conditions of their enslavement, and the essential 
 pre-requisites of their emancipation?
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 AN IRISH UTOPIA 
 
 "Were the hand of Locke to hold from heaven a scheme of govern- 
 ment most perfectly adapted to the nature and capabilities of the Irish 
 nation, it would drop to the ground a mere sounding scroll were there no 
 other means of giving it effect than its intrinsic excellence. All true 
 Irishmen agree in what ought to be done, but how to get it done is the 
 question." Secret Manifesto (Ireland), 1793. 
 
 IN our last chapter we pointed out how the close of the Na- 
 poleonic wars precipitated a commercial crisis in Great Britain 
 and Ireland, and how in the latter country it also served to in- 
 tensify the bitterness of the relations existing between landlord 
 and tenant. During the continuance of the wars against Na- 
 poleon agricultural prices had steadily risen owing to the demand 
 by the British Government for provisions to supply its huge army 
 and navy. With the rise in prices rents had also risen, but when 
 the close of the war cut off the demand, and prices consequently 
 fell, rents did not fall along with them. A falling market and 
 a stationary or rising rent-roll could have but one result in Ire- 
 land viz., agrarian war. 
 
 The landlords insisted upon their "pound of flesh", and the 
 peasantry organised in secret to terrorise their oppressors and 
 protect themselves. In the year 1829 a fresh cause of popular 
 misery came as a result of the Act granting Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion. Until that year no Catholic had the right to sit in the 
 English House of Commons, to sit on the Bench as a Judge, or 
 to aspire to any of the higher posts in the Civil, Military, or 
 Naval services. As the culmination of a long fight against this 
 iniquitous "Protestant Ascendancy," after he had aroused the 
 entire Catholic population to a pitch of frenzy against the in- 
 justices inherent in it, the Catholic leader, Daniel O'Connell, pre- 
 sented himself as a candidate for the representation in Parliament 
 of the County Gare, declaring that if elected he would refuse 
 
 83
 
 84 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 to take the oath then required of a Member of Parliament, as 
 it libelled the Catholic Religion. In Ireland at that time open 
 voting prevailed, every elector having to openly declare before the 
 clerks of the election and all others who chose to attend, the 
 name of the candidate for whom he voted. In Ireland at that 
 time also most of the tenants were tenants-at-will, removable at 
 the mere pleasure of the agent or landlord. Hence elections were 
 a combination of farce and tragedy a farce as far as a means 
 of ascertaining the real wish of the electors were concerned, a 
 tragedy whenever any of the tenants dared to vote against the 
 nominee of the landlord. The suffrage had been extended to all 
 tenants paying an annual rental of forty shillings, irrespective of 
 religious belief, but the terrible power of life and death pos- 
 sessed by the landlord made this suffrage ordinarily useless for 
 popular purposes. Yet when O'Connell appealed to the Catholic 
 peasantry of Clare to brave the vengeance of their landed tyrants 
 and vote for him in the interests of religious liberty they nobly 
 responded. O'Connell was elected, and as a result Catholic 
 Emancipation was soon afterwards achieved. But the ruling 
 classes and the British Government took their revenge by coupling 
 with this reform a Bill depriving the smaller tenants of the 
 suffrage, and raising the amount of rent necessary to qualify for 
 a vote to ten pounds. 
 
 Up till that time landlords had rather encouraged the growth 
 of population on their estates, as it increased the number of 
 their political adherents, but with the passage of this Act of 
 Parliament this reason ceased to exist and they immediately began 
 the wholesale eviction of their tenantry and the conversion of 
 the arable lands into grazing farms. The Catholic middle, pro- 
 fessional and landed class by Catholic Emancipation had the way 
 pened to them for all the snug berths in the disposal of the 
 Government; the Catholics of the poorer class as a result of the 
 same Act were doomed to extermination to satisfy the vengeance 
 of a foreign Government, and an aristocracy whose power had 
 been defied where it knew itself most supreme. 
 
 The wholesale eviction of the smaller tenants and the ab- 
 sorption of their farms into huge grazing ranches, thus closing 
 up every avenue of employment to labour, meant death to the 
 agricultural population, and hence the peasantry struck back by 
 every means in their power. They formed lodges of the Secret 
 Ribbon Society, made midnight raids for arms upon the houses 
 of the gentry, assembled at night in large bodies and ploughed 
 up the grass lands, making them useless for grazing purposes,
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 85 
 
 filled up ditches, terrorised graziers into surrendering their 
 ranches, wounded and killed those who had entered the service 
 of graziers or obnoxious landlords, assassinated agents, and some- 
 times in sheer despair opposed their unarmed bodies to the arms 
 of military. Civil war of the most sanguinary character was con- 
 vulsing the country; in May, 1831, the Lord Lieutenant of Ire- 
 land and a huge military force accompanied by artillery marched 
 through Clare to overawe the people, but as he did not stop evic- 
 tions, nor provide employment for the labourers whom the estab- 
 lishment of grazing had deprived of their usual employment on 
 the farm, the "outrages" still continued. Nor were the profes- 
 sional patriots, or the newly emancipated Catholic rich, any more 
 sympathetic to the unfortunate people. They had opened the 
 way for themselves to place and preferment by using the labourer 
 and cotter-farmer as a lever to overthrow the fortress of religious 
 bigotry and ascendancy, and now when the fight was won they 
 abandoned these poor co-religionists of theirs to the tender mer- 
 cies of their economic masters. To the cry of despair welKng 
 up from the hearts of the evicted families, crouching in hunger 
 upon the road-side in sight of their ruined homes, to the heart- 
 broken appeal of the labourer permanently disemployed by the 
 destruction of his source of employment ; to the wail of famishing 
 women and children the politicians invariably had but one an- 
 swer "Be law abiding, and wait for the Repeal of the Union." 
 We are not exaggerating. One of the most ardent Repealers and 
 closest friends of Daniel O'Connell, Mr. Thomas Steele, had the 
 following manifesto posted up in the Market Place of Ennis and 
 other parts of Clare, addressed to the desperate labourers and 
 farmers : 
 
 "Unless you desist, I denounce you as traitors to the cause 
 of the liberty of Ireland. ... I leave you to the Government 
 and the fire and bayonets of the military. Your blood be upor 4 
 your own souls." 
 
 This language of denunciation was uttered to the heroic 
 men and women who had sacrificed their homes, their security, 
 and the hopes of food for their children to win the emancipation 
 from religious tyranny of the well-fed snobs who thus aban- 
 doned them. It is difficult to see how a promised Repeal of the 
 Union some time in the future could have been of any use to 
 the starving men of Clare, especially when they knew that their 
 fathers had been starved, evicted and tyrannised over before just 
 as they were after the Unic-n. At that time, however, it was 
 deemed a highly patriotic act to ascribe all the ills that Irish
 
 86 
 
 flesh is heir to to the Union. For example, a Mr. O'Gorman 
 Mahon, speaking in the House of Commons, London, on Feb- 
 ruary 8, 1831, hinted that the snow storm then covering Ireland 
 was a result of the Legislative Union. He said: 
 
 "Did the Hon. Members imagine that they could prevent 
 the unfortunate men who were under five feet of snow from 
 thinking they could better their condition by a Repeal of the 
 Union ? It might be said that England had not caused the snow, 
 but the people had the snow on them, and they thought that their 
 connection with England had reduced them to the state in which 
 they now were." 
 
 Another patriot destined in after years to don the mantle of 
 an Irish rebel, William Smith O'Brien, at this time, 1830, pub- 
 lished a pamphlet advocating emigration as the one remedy for 
 Irish misery. 
 
 On the other hand, a Commission appointed by the House 
 of Lords in 1839 to inquire into the causes of the unrest and 
 secret conspiracies amongst the poorer class examined many wit- 
 nesses in close touch with the life of the peasantry and elicted 
 much interesting testimony tending to prove that the evil was 
 much more deeply rooted than any political scheme of Govern- 
 ment, and that its real roots were in the social conditions. Thus 
 examined as to the attitude of the labourers towards the Ribbon 
 Association, one witness declared: 
 
 "Many look to the Association for protection. They think 
 they have no other protection." 
 
 Question: "What are the principal objects they have in 
 view ?" 
 
 Answer: "To keep themselves upon their lands. I have 
 often heard their conversation, when they say: 
 
 "What good did Emancipation do for us? Are we better 
 clothed or fed, or are our children better clothed or fed? Are 
 we not as naked as we were, and eating dry potatoes when we 
 can get them? Let us notice the farmers to give us better food 
 and better wages, and not give so much to the landlord, and more 
 to the workman; we must not be letting them be turning the 
 poor people off the ground." 
 
 And a Mr. Poulett Scroope, M.P., declared in one of his 
 writings upon the necessity for a Poor Law: "The tithe ques- 
 tion, the Church, the Grand Jury laws, the more or fewer Cath- 
 olics appointed to the Sheriffalty or Magistracy these are all 
 topics for political agitation among idle mobs; but the midnight 
 massacre, the daily plunder, the frequent insurrection, the inse-
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 87 
 
 curity of life and property throughout agricultural districts of 
 Ireland, these are neither caused by agitation, nor can be put 
 down with agitation." 
 
 It will be thus seen that the opinion of tht independent 
 Member of Parliament coincided with that of the revolting la- 
 bourers as to the relative unimportance to the toilers of Ireland 
 of the subjects which then as now bulked most largely in the 
 minds of politicians. 
 
 This was the state of things political and social in Ireland 
 in the year 1831 and as it was in Clare the final effective blow 
 had been struck for religious emancipation so it also was Clare 
 that was destined to see the first effort to discover a peaceful 
 way of achieving that social Emancipation, without which all 
 other freedom, religious or political, must ever remain as Dead 
 Sea fruit to the palate of Labour. 
 
 In 1823 the great English socialist, Robert Owen, visited 
 Ireland and held a number of meetings in the Rotunda, Dublin, 
 for the purpose of explaining the principles of Socialism to tine 
 people of that city. His audiences were mainly composed of the 
 well-to-do inhabitants, as was, indeed, the case universally at 
 that period when Socialism was the fad of the rich instead of 
 the faith of the poor. The Duke of Leinster, the Catholic Arch- 
 bishop Murray, Lord Meath, Lord Cloncurry, and others occu- 
 pied the platform, and as a result of the picture drawn by Owen 
 of the misery then existing, and the attendant insecurity of life 
 and property amongst all classes, and his outline of the possi- 
 bilities which a system of Socialist co-operation could produce, 
 an association styling itself the "Hibernian Philanthropic Society" 
 was informed to carry out his ideas. A sum of money was sub- 
 scribed to aid the prospects of the society, a General Brown, 
 giving 1,000, Lord Cloncurry 500, Mr. Owen himself subscrib- 
 ing 1,000, and 100 being raised from other sources The so- 
 ciety was short lived and ineffectual, but one of the members,, 
 Mr. Arthur Vandeleur, an Irish landlord, was so deeply infr-- 
 pressed with all he had seen and heard of the possibilities of 
 Owenite Socialism, that in 1831, when crime and outrage in the 
 country had reached its zenith, and the insecurity of life in his 
 own class had been brought home to him by the assassination 
 of the steward of his estate for unfeeling conduct towards the 
 labourers, he resolved to make an effort to establish a Socialist 
 colony upon his property at Ralahine, County Clare. For that 
 purpose he invited to Ireland a Mr. Craig, of Manchester, a fol- 
 lower of Owen, and entrusted him with the task of carrying the,
 
 88 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 project into execution. 
 
 Though Mr. Craig knew no Irish, and the people of Ralahine, 
 as a rule, knew no English a state of matters which greatly 
 complicated the work of explanation an understanding was 
 finally arrived at, and the estate was turned over to an association 
 of the people organised under the title of "The Ralahine Agri- 
 cultural and Manufacturing Co-Operative Association." 
 
 In the preamble of the Laws of the Association, its objects 
 were defined as follows: 
 
 "The acquisition of a common capital. 
 
 "The mutual assurance of its members against the evils of 
 poverty, sickness, infirmity, and old age. 
 
 "The attainment of a greater share of the comforts of life 
 than the working classes now possess. 
 
 "The mental and moral improvement of its adult members. 
 
 "The education of their children." 
 
 The following paragraphs selected from the Rules of the 
 Association will give a pretty clear idea of its most important 
 features : 
 
 "BASIS OF THE SOCIETY. 
 
 "That all the stock, implements of husbandry, and other 
 property belong to and are the property of Mr. Vandeleur, until 
 the Society accumulates sufficient to pay for them ; they then be- 
 come the joint property of the Society. 
 
 "PRODUCTION. 
 
 "We engage that whatever talents we may individually pos- 
 sess, whether mental or muscular, agricultural, manufacturing, 
 or scientific, shall be directed to the benefit of all, as well by 
 their immediate exercise in all necessary occupations as by com- 
 municating our knowledge to each other, and particularly to 
 the young. 
 
 "That, as far as we can be reduced to practice, each indi- 
 vidual shall assist in agricultural operations, particularly in har- 
 vest, it being fully understood that no individual is to act as 
 steward, but all are to work. 
 
 "That all the youth, male or female, do engage to leara 
 some useful trade, together with agriculture and gardening, be- 
 tween the ages of nine and seventeen years. 
 
 "That the committee meet every evening to arrange the busi- 
 ness for the following day. 
 
 "That the hours of labour be from six in the morning til
 
 89 
 
 six in the evening, in summer, and from daybreak till dusk in 
 winter, with the intermission of one hour for dinner. 
 
 "That each agricultural labouring man shall receive eight- 
 pence, and every woman fivepence per day for their labour 
 (these were the ordinary wages of the country, the secretary, 
 storekeeper, smiths, joiners, and a few others received some- 
 thing more; the excess being borne by the proprietor) which it 
 is expected will be paid out at the store in provisions, or any 
 other article the society may produce or keep there; any other 
 articles may be purchased elsewhere. 
 
 "That no member be expected to perform any service or 
 work but such as is agreeable to his or her feelings, or they 
 are able to perform; but if any member thinks that any other 
 member is not usefully employing his or her time, it is his or 
 her duty to report it to the committee, whose duty it will be to 
 bring that member's conduct before a general meeting, who shall 
 have power, if necessary, to expel that useless member. 
 
 "DISTRIBUTION AND DOMESTIC ECONOMY. 
 
 "That all the services usually performed by servants be 
 performed by the youth of both sexes under the age of seventeen 
 years, either by rotation or choice. 
 
 "That the expenses of the children's food, clothing, wash- 
 ing, lodging, and education be paid out of the common funds of 
 the society, from the time they are weaned till they arrive at the 
 age of seventeen, when they shall be eligible to become members. 
 
 "That a charge be made for the food and clothing, &c., of 
 those children trained by their parents, and residing in their 
 dwellinghouses. 
 
 "That each person occupying a house, or cooking and con- 
 suming their victuals therein, must pay for the fuel used. 
 
 "That no charge be made for fuel used in the public room. 
 
 "That it shall be a special object for the sub-committee of 
 domestic economy, or the superintendent of that department, to 
 ascertain and put in practice the best and most economical meth- 
 ods of preparing and cooking the food. 
 
 "That all the washing be done together in the public wash- 
 house ; the expenses of soap, labour, fuel, &c., to be equally borne 
 by all the adult members. 
 
 "That each member pay the sum of one half-penny out of 
 every shilling received as wages to form a fund to be placed 
 in the hands of the committee, who shall pay the wages out of 
 this fund of any member who may fall sick or meet with a
 
 90 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 accident. 
 
 "Any damage done by a member to the stock, implements, 
 or any other property belonging to the society to be made good 
 out of the wages of the individual, unless the damage is satis- 
 factorily accounted for to the committee. 
 
 "EDUCATION AND FORMATION OF CHARACTER. 
 
 "We guarantee each other that the young children of any 
 person dying, whilst a member of this society, shall be equally 
 protected, educated, and cherished with the children of the liv- 
 ing members, and entitled, when they arrive at the age of seven- 
 teen, to all the privileges of members. 
 
 "That each individual shall enjoy perfect liberty of consci- 
 ence, and freedom of expression of opinion, and in religious 
 worship. 
 
 "That no spirituous liquors of any kind, tobacco, or snuff 
 be kept in the store, or on the premises. 
 
 "That if any of us should unfortunately have a dispute 
 with any other person, we agree to abide by a decision of the 
 majority of the members, or any person to whom the matter in 
 question may be by them referred. 
 
 "That any person wishing to marry another do sign a de- 
 claration to that effect one week previous to the marriage taking 
 place, and that immediate preparations be made for the erection, 
 or fitting up of a suitable dwellinghouse for their reception. 
 
 "That any person wishing to marry another person, not a 
 member, shall sign a declaration according to the last rule; the 
 person not a member shall then be balloted for, and, if rejected, 
 both must leave the society. 
 
 "That if the conduct of any member be found injurious to 
 the well-being of the society, the committee shall explain to him 
 or her in what respect his or her conduct has been injurious, 
 and if the said member shall continue to transgress the rules, 
 such member shall be brought before a general meeting, called 
 for the purpose, and if the complaint be substantiated, three- 
 fourths of the members present shall have power to expel, by 
 ballot, such refractory member. 
 
 "GOVERNMENT. 
 
 "The society to be governed, and its business transacted, 
 by a committee of nine members, to be chosen half-yearly, by 
 ballot, by all the adult male and female members, the ballot list 
 to contain at least four of the last committee.
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 91 
 
 "The committee to meet every evening, and their transac- 
 tions to be regularly entered into a minute book, the recapitula- 
 tion of which is to be given at the society's general meeting by 
 the secretary. 
 
 "That there be a general weekly meeting of the society ; that 
 the treasurer's accounts be audited by the committee, and read 
 over to the society; that the 'Suggestion Book' be also read at 
 this meeting." 
 
 The colony did not use the ordinary currency of the country, 
 but instead adopted a "Labour Note" system of payment, all 
 workers being paid in notes according to the number of hours 
 worked, and being able to exchange the notes in the store for 
 all the necessities of life. The notes were printed on stiff card- 
 board about the size of a visiting card, and represented the equiva- 
 lent of a whole, a half, a quarter, an eighth, and a sixteenth of 
 a day's labour. There were also special notes printed in red ink 
 representing respectively the labours of a day and a half, and 
 two days. In his account of the colony published under the title 
 of "History of Ralahine," by Heywood & Sons, Manchester (a 
 book we earnestly recommend to all our readers), Mr. Craig 
 says: "The labour was recorded daily on a 'Labour Sheet/ 
 which was exposed to view during the following week. The 
 members could work or not at their own discretion. If no work, 
 no record, and, therefore, no pay. Practically the arrangement 
 was of great use. There were no idlers." Further on he com- 
 ments : 
 
 "The advantages of the labour notes were soon evident in 
 the saving of members. They had no anxiety as to employ- 
 ment, wages, or the price of provisions. Each could partake of 
 as much vegetable food as he or she could desire. The expenses 
 of the children from infancy, for food or education, were pro- 
 vided for out of the common fund. 
 
 "The object should be to obtain a rule of justice, if we 
 seek the law of righteousness. This can only be fully realised 
 in that equality arising out of a community of property where 
 the labour of one member is valued at the same rate as that of 
 another member, and labour is exchanged for labour. It was 
 not possible to attain to this condition of equality at Ralahine, 
 but we made such arrangements as would impart a feeling of 
 security, fairness and justice to all. The prices of provisions 
 were fixed and uniform. A labourer was charged one shilling 
 a week for as many vegetables and as much fruit as he chose 
 to consume ; milk was a penny per quart ; beef and mutton four-
 
 92 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 pence, and pork two and one-half pence per pound. The mar- 
 ried members occupying separate quarters were charged sixpence 
 per week for rent, and twopence for fuel." 
 
 In dealing with Ireland no one can afford to ignore the 
 question of the attitude of the clergy; it is therefore interesting 
 to quote the words of an English visitor to Ralahine, a Mr. 
 Finch, who afterwards wrote a series of fourteen letters de- 
 scribing the community, and offered to lay a special report be- 
 fore a Select Committee of the House of Commons upon th^ 
 subject. He says: 
 
 "The only religion taught by the society was the unceasing 
 practice of promoting the happiness of every man, woman, and 
 child to the utmost extent in their power. Hence the Bible was 
 not used as a school-book; no sectarian opinions were taught in 
 the schools ; no public dispute about religious dogmas or party 
 political questions took place; nor were members allowed to 
 ridicule each other's religion; nor were there any attempts at 
 proselytism. Perfect freedom in the performance of religions 
 duties and religious exercises was guaranteed to all. The teach- 
 ing of religion was left to ministers of religion and to the par- 
 ents ; but no priest or minister received anything from the funds 
 of the society. Nevertheless, both Protestant and Catholic priests 
 were friendly to the system as soon as they understood it, and 
 one reason was they found these sober, industrious persons had 
 now a little to give them out of their earnings, whereas for- 
 merly they had been beggars." 
 
 Mr. Craig also states that the members of the community 
 after it had been in operation for some time, were better Catho- 
 lics than before they began. He had at first considerable diffi- 
 culty in warding off the attacks of zealous Protestant proselytis- 
 ers, and his firmness in doing so was one of the chief factors in 
 winning the confidence of the people as well as their support in 
 insisting upon the absolutely non-sectarian character of the 
 teaching. 
 
 All disputes between the members were settled by appeals 
 to a general meeting in which all adults of both sexes partici- 
 pated, and from which all judges, lawyers, and other members 
 of the legal fraternity were rigorously excluded. 
 
 To those who fear that the institution of common property 
 will be inimical to progress and invention, it must be reassuring 
 to learn that this community of "ignorant" Irish peasants intro- 
 duced into Ralahine the first reaping machine used in Ireland, 
 and hailed it as a blessing at a time when the gentleman farmers
 
 93 
 
 of England were still gravely debating the practicability of the 
 invention. From an address to the agricultural labourers of the 
 County Clare, issued by the community on the occasion of the 
 introduction of this machine, we take the following passages, 
 illustrative of the difference of effect between invention under 
 common ownership and under capitalist ownership: 
 
 "This machine of ours is one of the first machines ever 
 given to the working classes to lighten their labour, and at the 
 same time increase their comforts. It does not benefit any one 
 person among us exclusively, nor throw any individual out of 
 employment. Any kind of machinery used for shortening labour 
 except used in a co-operative society like ours must tend to 
 lessen wages, and to deprive working men of employment, and 
 finally either to starve them, force them into some other employ- 
 ment (and then reduce wages in that also) or compel them to 
 emigrate. Now, if the working classes would cordially and 
 peacefully unite to adopt our system, no power or party could 
 prevent their success." 
 
 This was published by order of the committee, 21st August, 
 1833, and when we observe the date we cannot but wonder at the 
 number of things Clare and the rest of Ireland has forgotten 
 since. 
 
 It must not be supposed that the landlord of the estate on 
 which Ralahine was situated had allowed his enthusiasm for 
 Socialism to run away with his self-interest. On the contrary, 
 when turning over his farms to the community he stipulated for 
 the payment to himself of a very heavy rental in kind. We ex- 
 tract from "Brotherhood," a Christian Socialist Journal pub- 
 lished in the north of Ireland in 1891, a statement of the rental, 
 and a very luminous summing up of the lesson of Ralahine, by 
 the editor, Mr. Bruce Wallace, long a hard and unselfish worker 
 for the cause of Socialism in Ireland : 
 
 "The Association was bound to deliver annually, either at 
 Ralahine, Bunratty, Clare, or Limerick, as the landlord might 
 require, free of expense 
 
 Wheat 320 brls. 
 
 Barley 240 brls. 
 
 Oats 50 brls. 
 
 Butter 10 cwt. 
 
 Pork 30 cwt. 
 
 Beef 70 cwt. 
 
 "At the prices then prevailing, this amount of produce would 
 be equivalent to about 900, 700 of rent for the use of natural
 
 94 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 forces and opportunities, and 200 of interest upon capital. It 
 was thus a pretty stiff tribute that these poor Irish toilers had 
 to pay for the privilege of making a little bit of their native soil 
 fruitful. This tribute was, of course, so much to be deducted 
 from the means of improving their sunken condition. In any 
 future efforts that may be made to profit by the example of 
 Ralahine and to apply again the principles of co-operation in 
 farming, there ought to be the utmost care taken to reduce to 
 a minimum the tribute payable to non-workers, and if possible 
 to get rid of it altogether. If, despite this heavy burden of 
 having to produce a luxurious maintenance for loungers, the 
 condition of the toilers at Ralahine, as we shall see, was mar- 
 vellously raised by the introduction of the co-operative principle 
 amongst them, how much more satisfactorily would it have been 
 raised had they been free of that depressing dead weight?" 
 
 Such is the lesson of Ralahine. Had all the land and build- 
 ings belonged to the people, had all other estates in Ireland been 
 conducted on the same principles and the industries of the 
 country also so organised, had each of them appointed delegates 
 to confer on the business of the country at some common centre 
 as Dublin, the framework and basis of a free Ireland would 
 have been realised. And when Ireland does emerge into com- 
 plete control of her own destinies she must seek the happiness 
 of her people in the extension on a national basis of the social 
 arrangements of Ralahine, or else be but another social pur- 
 gatory for her poor a purgatory where the pangs of the suf- 
 ferers will be heightened by remembering the delusive promises 
 of political reformers. 
 
 In the most crime-ridden county in Ireland this partial ex- 
 periment in Socialism abolished crime; where the fiercest fight 
 for religious domination had been fought it brought the mildest 
 tolerance; where drunkenness had fed fuel to the darkest pas- 
 sions it established sobriety and gentleness ; where poverty and 
 destitution had engendered brutality, midnight marauding, and 
 a contempt for all social bonds, it enthroned security, peace and 
 rererence for justice, and it did this solely by virtue of the influ- 
 ence of the new social conception attendant upon the institution 
 of common property bringing a common interest to all. Where 
 such changes came in the bud, what might we not expect from 
 the flower? If a partial experiment in Socialism, with all the 
 drawbacks of an experiment, will achieve such magnificent re- 
 sults what could we not rightfully look for were all Ireland, all 
 the world, so organised on the basis of common property, and
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 95 
 
 exploitation and mastership forever abolished? 
 
 The downfall of the Association came as a result of the in- 
 iquitous land laws of Great Britain refusing to recognise the 
 right of such a community to hold a lease or to act as tenants. 
 The landlord, Mr. Vandeleur, lost his fortune in a gambling 
 transaction in Dublin, and fled in disgrace unable to pay His debts. 
 The persons who took over the estate under bankruptcy proceed- 
 ings refused to recognise the community, insisted upon treating its 
 members as common labourers on the estate, seized upon the 
 buildings and grounds and broke up the Association. 
 
 So Ralahine ended. But in the rejuvenated Ireland of the 
 future the achievement of those simple peasants will be dwelt 
 upon with admiration as a great and important landmark in the 
 march of the human race towards its complete social emancipa- 
 tion. Ralahine was an Irish point of interrogation erected 
 amidst the wildernesses of capitalist thought and feudal practice, 
 challenging both in vain for an answer. Other smaller com- 
 munities were also established in Ireland during the same pe- 
 riod. A Lord Wallscourt established a somewhat similar com- 
 munity on his estate in County Galway ; The Quarterly Review of 
 November, 1819, states that there was then a small community 
 existent nine miles outside Dublin, which held thirty acres, 
 supported a priest and a school of 300 children, had erected 
 buildings, made and sold jaunting cars, and comprised butchers, 
 carpenters and wheelwrights; the Quakers of Dublin established 
 a Co-Operative Woolen Factory, which flourished until it was 
 destroyed by litigation set on foot by dissatisfied members who 
 had been won over to the side of rival capitalists, and a com- 
 munal home was established and long maintained in Dublin by 
 members of the same religious sect, but without any other 
 motive than that of helping forward the march of social amelior- 
 ation. We understand that the extensive store of Messrs. Ganly 
 & Sons on Usher's Quay in Dublin was the home of this com- 
 munity, who lived, worked and enjoyed themselves in the spa- 
 cious halls, and slept in the smaller rooms of what is now the 
 property of a capitalist auctioneer.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 A CHAPTER OF HORRORS: DANIEL O'CONNELL AND THE WORK- 
 ING CLASS. 
 
 "Tis civilisation, so ye say, and cannot be changed for the weakness of 
 
 men, 
 Take heed, take heed, 'tis a dangerous way to drive the wild wolf to the 
 
 end of his den. 
 Take heed of your civilisation, ye, 'tis a pyramid built upon quivering 
 
 hearts, 
 There are times, as Paris in '93, when the commonest men play terrible 
 
 parts. 
 Take heed of /our progress, its feet are shod with the souls it slew with 
 
 its own i. Dilutions, 
 Submission is good, but the order of God may flame the torch of the 
 
 revolutions." 
 
 John Boyle O'Reilly. 
 
 FOR both Ireland and Great Britain the period between the 
 winning of Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the year 1850 was 
 marked by great misery and destitution amongst the producing 
 classes, accompanied by abortive attempts at revolution in both 
 countries, and the concession of some few unimportant political 
 and social reforms. In Ireland the first move against the forces 
 of privilege was the abolition of the Tithes, or, more correctly 
 speaking, the abolition of the harsh and brutal features attendant 
 upon the collection of the tithes. The clergy of the Episcopalian 
 Church, the Church by law established in Ireland, were legally 
 entitled to levy upon the people of each district irrespective 
 of religion, a certain tax for the upkeep of that Church and its 
 ministers. The fact that this was in conformity with the practice 
 of the Catholic Church in countries where it was dominant did 
 not, of course, make this any more palatable to the Catholic 
 peasantry of Ireland, who continually saw a part of their crops 
 seized upon and sold to maintain a clergy whose ministrations 
 they never attended and whose religion they detested. Eventu- 
 ally their discontent at the injustice grew so acute as to flare 
 
 96
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 97 
 
 forth in open rebellion, and accordingly all over Ireland the ten- 
 ants began to resist the collection of tithes by every means in 
 their power. 
 
 The Epicsopalian Clergymen called on the aid of the law, 
 and, escorted by police and military, seized the produce of the 
 poor tenants and carried them off to be sold at auction; the 
 peasantry, on the other hand, collected at dead of night, and 
 carried off crops and cattle from farms upon which the distraint 
 was to be made, and when that was impossible they strove by acts 
 of violence to terrorise auctioneers and buyers from consum- 
 mating the sale. Many a bright young life was extinguished on 
 the gallows or rotted away in prison cells as a result of this 
 attempt to sustain a hated religion by contributions exacted at 
 the point of a bayonet, until eventually the struggle assumed all 
 the aspect of a civil war. At several places when the military 
 were returning from raiding the farms of some poor peasant the 
 country people gathered, erected barricades, and opposed their 
 passage by force. Significantly enough of the temper and quali- 
 ties of the people in those engagements, they generally succeeded 
 in rescuing their crops and cattle from the police and military, 
 and in demonstrating that Ireland still possessed all the ma- 
 terial requisite for armed rebellion. 
 
 In one conflict at Newtownbarry twelve peasants were shot 
 and twenty fatally wounded; in another at Carrigshock eleven 
 policemen were killed and seventeen wounded; and at a great 
 fight at Rathcormack, twelve peasants were killed in a fight with 
 a large body of military and armed police. Eye-witnesses de- 
 clared that the poor farmers and labourers engaged stood the 
 charge and volleys of the soldiers as firmly as if they had been 
 seasoned troops, a fact that impressed the Government more than 
 a million speeches would have done. The gravity of the crisis 
 was enhanced by the contrast between the small sum often in- 
 volved and the bloodshed necessary to recover it. Thus at 
 Rathcormack the twelve peasants were massacred in an attempt 
 to save the effects of a poor widow from being sold to pay a 
 sum of forty shillings due as tithes. The ultimate effect of all 
 this resistance was the passage of a "Tithes Commutation Act" 
 by which the collection of tithes was abolished, and the substi- 
 tution in its place of a "Tithe Rent Charge" by means of which 
 the sums necessary for the support of the Episcopalian clergy 
 were included in the rent and paid as part of that tribute to the 
 landed aristocracy. In other words, the" economic drain remained, 
 but it was deprived of all the more odious and galling features
 
 98 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 of its collection. The secret Ribbon and Whiteboy Societies 
 were the most effective weapons of the peasantry in this fight, 
 and to their activities the victory is largely to be attributed. The 
 politicians gave neither help nor countenance to the fight, and 
 save for the advocacy of one small Dublin newspaper, con- 
 ducted by a small but brilliant band of young Protestant writers, 
 no journal in all Ireland championed their cause. For the Cath- 
 olic clergy it is enough to say that while this tithe war was 
 being waged they were almost universally silent about that 
 4 grevious sin of secret conspiracy" upon which they are usually 
 so eloquent. We would not dare to say that they recognised 
 that as the secret societies were doing their work against a 
 rival priesthood, it were better to be sparing in their denuncia- 
 tions for the time being; perhaps that is not the explanation, 
 but at all events it is noteworthy that as soon as the tithe war 
 was won all the old stock invectives against every kind of extra 
 constitutional action were immediately renewed. 
 
 Contemporaneously with this tithe war had grown up the 
 agitation for repeal of the Legislative Union led by Daniel 
 O'Connell, and supported by the large body of the middle 
 classes, and by practically all the Catholic clergy. At the outset 
 of this agitation the Irish working class, partly because they ac- 
 cepted O'Connell's explanation of the decay of Irish trade as 
 due to the Union, and partly because they did not believe he was 
 sincere in his professions of loyalty to the English monarchy, 
 nor in his desire to limit his aims to repeal, enthusiastically en- 
 dorsed and assisted his agitation. He, on his part, incorporated 
 the trades bodies in his association with rights equal to that of 
 regularly enrolled members, a proceeding which evoked consider- 
 able dissent from many quarters. Thus the "Irish Monthly 
 Magazine" (Dublin), a rabidly O'Connellite journal, in its issue 
 o-f September, 1832, complains that the National Union (of 
 Repealers) is in danger because "there is a contemporary union 
 composed of the tradesmen and operative classes, the members of 
 which are qualified to vote at its sittings, and who are in every 
 respect put upon a perfect equality with the members of the 
 National Union." And in its December number of the same year 
 it returns to the charge with the significant statement that "In 
 fact we apprehend great mischief and little good from the 
 trades union as at present constituted." The representative of 
 the English King in Ireland, Lord Lieutenant Anglesey, appar- 
 ently coincided in the opinion of this follower of O'Connell as to 
 the danger of Irish trade unions in politics, for when the Dublin
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 99 
 
 trades bodies projected a mammoth demonstration in favour 
 of Repeal, he immediately proclaimed it, and ordered the mili- 
 tary to suppress it, if necessary by armed force. But as O'Con- 
 nell grew in strength in the country and attracted to himself 
 more and more of the capitalist and professional classes in Ire- 
 land, and as he became more necessary to the schemes of the 
 Whig politicians in England, and thought these latter more 
 necessary to his success, he ceased to play for the favour of 
 organised labour, and gradually developed into the most bitter 
 and unscrupulous enemy of trade unionism Ireland has yet 
 produced, signalling the trades unions of Dublin out always for 
 his most venomous attack. 
 
 In 1835 O'Connell took his seat on the Ministerial side of 
 the House of Commons as a supporter of the Whig Government. 
 At that time the labouring population of England were the most 
 exploited, degraded, and almost dehumanised of all the peoples 
 of Europe. The tale of their condition reveals such inhumanity 
 on the part of their masters, such woeful degradation on the 
 side of the toilers, that were it not attested by the sober record 
 of witnesses before various Parliamentary Commissions the 
 record would be entirely unbelievable. Women worked down in 
 coal mines almost naked for a pitiful wage, often giving birth to 
 children when surprised by the pains of parturition amidst the 
 darkness and gloom of their places of employment; little boys 
 and girls were employed drawing heavy hutches (wagons) of 
 coal along the pit floors by means of a strap around their bodies 
 and passing through between their little legs; in cotton factories 
 little tots of eight, seven, and even six years of age of both 
 sexes were kept attending machinery, being hired like slaves from 
 workhouses for that purpose, and worked twelve, fourteen, and 
 even sixteen hours per day, living, sleeping, and working under 
 conditions which caused them to die off as with a plague; in 
 pottery works, bakeshops, clothing factories and workrooms the 
 overwork and unhealthy conditions of employment led to such 
 suffering and degradation and shortening of life that the very 
 existence of the working class was endangered. In the agricul- 
 tural districts the sufferings of the poor were so terrible that the 
 English agricultural labourer the most stolidly patient, unim- 
 agniative person on the face of the earth broke out into riots, 
 machine breaking, and hay-rick burning. As in Ireland, Captain 
 Rock or Captain Moonlight has been supposed to be the presid- 
 ing genius of the nocturnal revolts of the peasantry, so in 
 England, Captain Swing, an equally mythical personage, took
 
 100 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 the blame or the credit. In a booklet circulated amongst the 
 English agricultural labourers, Captain Swing is made to say: 
 *'! am not the author of these burnings. These fires are caused 
 by farmers having been turned out of their lands to make room 
 for foxes, peasants confined two years in prison for picking up 
 a dead partridge, and parsons taking a poor man's only cow for 
 the tithe of his cabbage garden." So great was the distress, so 
 brutal the laws, and so hopelessly desperate the labourers that 
 in the Special Assize held at Winchester in December, 1830, no 
 less than three hundred prisoners were put upon trial, a great 
 number of whom were sentenced to death. Of the number so 
 condemned, six were actually hanged, twenty transported for 
 life, and the rest for smaller periods. We are told in the 
 ''English Via Dolorosa," of William Heath, that "a child of 
 fourteen had sentence of death recorded against him; and two 
 brothers, one twenty, the other nineteen, were ruthlessly hanged 
 on Penenden Heath, whither they were escorted by a regiment 
 of Scots Greys." As to whom was responsible for all this suffer- 
 ing, contemporary witnesses leave no doubt. The London Times, 
 most conservative of all capitalist papers, in its issue of Decem- 
 ber 27, 1830, declared: "We do affirm that the actions of this 
 pitiable class of men (the labourers) are a commentary on the 
 treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and 
 middling classes. The present population must be provided for 
 in body and spirit on more liberal and Christian principles, or 
 the whole mass of labourers will start into legions of banditti 
 banditti less criminal than those who have made them so, those 
 who by a just but fearful retribution will soon become their 
 victims." And in 1833 a Parliamentary Commission reported 
 that "The condition of the agricultural labourers was brutal and 
 wretched ; their children during the day were struggling with the 
 pigs for food, and at night were huddled down on damp straw 
 tinder a roof of rotten thatch/' 
 
 In the large towns the same state of rebellion prevailed, the 
 military were continually on duty, and so many people were 
 killed that the coroners ceased to hold inquests. Such was the 
 state of England misery and revolt beneath, and sanguinary 
 repression coupled with merciless greed above at the time when 
 O'Connell, taking his seat in Parliament, threw all his force 
 on the side of capitalist privilege and against social reform. 
 
 In 1838 five cotton spinners in Glasgow, in Scotland, were 
 sentenced to seven years' transportation for acts they had com- 
 mitted in connection with trade union combination to better the
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY )i 
 
 miserable condition of their class. As the punishment was uni- 
 versally felt to be excessive, even in the brutal spirit of the 
 times, a Mr. Wakley, Member of Parliament for Finsbury, o 
 the 13th of February of that year, brought forward a motion: 
 in the House of Commons for a "Select Committee to enquire 
 into the constitution, practices, and effects of the Association! 
 of Cotton Operatives of Glasgow." O'Connell opposed the 
 motion, and used the opportunity to attack the Irish trade unions. 
 He said : 
 
 "There was no tyranny equal to that which was exercise<t 
 by the trade unionists in Dublin over their fellow labourers. 
 One rule of the workmen prescribed a minimum rate of wages* 
 so that the best workmen received no more than the worst. 
 Another part of their system was directed towards depriving 
 the masters of all freedom in their power of selecting workmen. 
 The names of the workmen being inscribed in a book, and the 
 employer compelled to take the first on the list." 
 
 He said that at Bandon a large factory had been closed^ 
 through the efforts of the men to get higher wages, ditto at 
 Belfast, and "it was calculated that wages to the amount of 
 500,000 per year were lost to Dublin by trade unions. The* 
 combination of tailors in that city, for instance, had raised the 
 price of clothes to such a pitch that it was worth a person's while 
 to go to Glasgow and wait a couple of days for a suit, the dif- 
 ference in the price paying the expense of the trip." He also 
 ascribed the disappearance of the shipbuilding trade from Dub- 
 lin to the evil effects of trade unions. 
 
 Because of O'Connell's speech his friends, the Whig Govern- 
 ment, appointed a committee, not to enquire into the Glasgow 
 cases, but to investigate the acts of the Irish, and especially of 
 the Dublin, trade unions. The Special Committee sat and col- 
 lected two volumes of evidence, O'Connell producing a nurnbtr 
 of witnesses to bear testimony against the Irish trade unionists,, 
 but the report of the committee was never presented to the 
 House of Commons. In June of the same year, 1838, O'Connell 
 had another opportunity to vent his animus against the working 
 class, and serve the interest of English and Irish capitalism,. 
 and was not slow to take advantage of it. In the year 1833,,. 
 mainly owing to the efforts of the organised factory operatives^ 
 and some high-spirited philanthropists, a law had been enacted* 
 forbidding the employment of children under nine years of age 
 in factories except silk mills, and forbidding those under thirteen- 
 from working more than forty-eight hours per week, or nine
 
 102 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 hours per day. The ages mentioned will convey to the reader 
 some idea of how infantile flesh and blood had been sacrificed 
 to sate the greed of the propertied class. Yet this eminently mod- 
 erate enactment was fiercely hated by the godly capitalists of 
 England, and by every unscrupulous device they could contrive 
 they strove to circumvent it. So constant and effective was their 
 evasion of its merciful provisions that on the 23rd of June the 
 famous friend of the factory operatives, Lord Ashley, in the 
 House of Commons, moved as an amendment to the Order of 
 the Day the second reading of a ''Bill to more effectually regulate 
 Factory Works," its purpose being to prevent or punish any fur- 
 ther infringement of the Act of 1833. O'Connell opposed the 
 motion, and attempted to justify the infringement of the law by 
 the employers by stating that "they (Parliament) had legislated 
 against the nature of things, and against the right of industry." 
 "Let them not," he said, "be guilty of the childish folly of regu- 
 lating the labour of adults, and go about parading before the 
 world their ridiculous humanity, which would end by converting 
 their manufacturers into beggars." The phrase about regulating 
 the labour of adults was borrowed from the defence set up by 
 the capitalists that preventing the employment of children also 
 interfered with the labour of adults freeborn Englishmen! 
 O'Connell was not above using this clap-trap, as he on the previous 
 occasion had not been above making the lying pretence that the 
 enforcement of a minimum wage prevented the payment of high 
 wages to any specially skilled artisan. 
 
 On this question of the attitude to be taken up towards the 
 claims of labour O'Connell differed radically with one of his most 
 capable lieutenants, Feargus O'Connor. The latter being re- 
 turned to Parliament as a Repealer was struck by the miserable 
 condition of the real people of England in whose interests Ire- 
 land was supposed to be governed, and as the result of his inves- 
 tigation into its cause arrived at the conclusion that the basis of 
 the oppression of Ireland was economic, that labour in England 
 was oppressed by the same class and by the operation of the same 
 causes as had impoverished and ruined Ireland, and that the so- 
 lution of the problem in both countries required the union of the 
 democracies in one common battle against their oppressors. He 
 earnestly strove to impress this view upon O'Connell, only to find 
 that in the latter class feeling was much stronger than desire for 
 Irish National freedom, and that he, O'Connell, felt himself to 
 be much more akin to the propertied class of England than to the 
 working class of Ireland. This was proven by his actions in the
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 103 
 
 cases above cited. This divergence of opinion between O'Connelil 
 and O'Connor closed Ireland to the latter and gave him to the 
 Chartists as one of their most fearless and trusted leaders. Whet 
 he died, more than 50,000 toilers marched in the funeral proces 
 sion which bore his remains to his last resting-place. He was on<? 
 of the first of that long list of Irish fighters in Great Britain 
 whose unselfish sacrifices have gone to make a record for ac 
 "English" labour movement. That the propertied and oppressing 
 classes were well aware of the value of O'Connell's services 
 against the democracy, and were believed to be grateful for 
 the same was attested by the action of Richard Lalor Shiel 
 when, defending him during the famous State trials, he claimed 
 the consideration of the Court for O'Connell, because he had 
 stood between the people of Ireland and the people of England, 
 and so "prevented a junction which would be formidable enough 
 to overturn any administration that could be formed." But as 
 zealous as O'Connell and the middle class repealers were to pre- 
 vent any international action of the democracies, the Irish Work- 
 ing Class were as enthusiastic in their desire to consummate it. 
 Irish Chartist Associations sprang up all over the island, and 
 we are informed by a writer in the "United Irishmen" of John 
 Mitchel, 1848, that in Dublin they had grown so strong and so 
 hostile to O'Connellism that at one time negotiations were in 
 progress for a public debate between the Liberator and a repre- 
 sentative of the Dublin trades. But upon the arrest and im- 
 prisonment of O'Connell, he continues, the Working Class were 
 persuaded to abandon their separate organisations for the sake 
 of presenting a common front to the Government, a step they 
 afterwards regretted. To this letter John Mitchel, as editor, 
 appended a note reminding his readers of the anti-labour record 
 of O'Connell, and adducing it as a further reason for repudiating 
 his leadership. Yet it is curious that in his "History of Ireland" 
 Mitchel omits all reference to this disgraceful side of O'ConnelFs 
 career, as do indeed all the other Irish "Historians." If silence 
 gives consent, then all our history ( ?) writing scribes have con- 
 sented to, and hence approved of, this suppression of the facts 
 of history in order to assist in perpetuating the blindness and the 
 subjection of labour.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 OUR IRISH GIRONDINS SACRIFICE THE IRISH PEASANTRY UPON 
 THE ALTAR OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. 
 
 "There is a class of Revolutionists named Girondins whose fate in 
 history is remarkable enough. Men who rebel, and urge the lower classes 
 to rebel, ought to have other than formulas to go upon. Men who discern 
 in the misery of the toiling, complaining millions, not misery but only a 
 raw material which can be wrought upon and traded in for one's own 
 poor hide-bound theories and egoisms, to whom millions of living fellow- 
 creatures with beating hearts in their bosoms beating, suffering, hoping 
 are 'masses,' mere explosive masses, for blowing down Bastiles with, for 
 voting at hustings for 'us,' such men are of the questionable species." 
 
 Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 THE outbreak of the famine, which commenced on a small 
 scale in 1845, and increased in area and intensity until 1849, 
 brought to a head the class antagonism in Ireland, of which the 
 rupture with the trades was one manifestation, and again re- 
 vealed the question of property as the test by which the con- 
 duct of public men is regulated, even when those men assume the 
 garb of revolution. Needless to say, this is not the interpreta- 
 tion of the history of that awful period we are given by the 
 orthodox Irish or English writers upon that subject. Irish Na- 
 tionalists of all stripes and English critics of every variety 
 agree with wonderful unanimity in ascribing a split in the Repeal 
 Association which led to the formation by the seceders of the 
 body known as the "Irish Confederation" to the academic ques- 
 tion of whether force might or might not be employed to achieve 
 a political end. The majority of the Repeal Association, we 
 are told, subscribed to the principle enunciated by O'Connell that 
 "the greatest sublunary blessings were not worth the shedding 
 of a single drop of human blood," and John Mitchel, Father 
 Meehan, Gavan Duffy, Thomas Francis Meagher, Devin Reilly, 
 William Smith O'Brien, Fintan Lalor, and others repudiated 
 that doctrine, and on this point of purely theoretical divergence 
 
 104
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 105 
 
 the secession from O'Connell took place. It is difficult to believe 
 that any large number of Irishmen ever held such a doctrine 
 seriously; it is quite certain that the Irish Catholic priesthood, 
 O'Connell's chief lieutenants, did not hold nor counsel such a 
 doctrine during the Tithe War. O"Connell himself had declared 
 that he would willingly join in helping England in "bringing down 
 the American eagle in its highest pride of flight," which surely 
 would have involved war, and in the House of Commons on 
 one occasion in reply to Lord Lyndhurst, who had characterised 
 the Irish as "aliens in blood, in language, and in religion," 
 Richard Lalor Shiel, a champion of O'Connellism, had delivered 
 a magnificent oration vaunting of the prowess of the Irish sol- 
 diers in the English army. In passing we note that Shiel con- 
 sidered the above phrase of Lord Lyndhurst an insult; modern 
 Irish Nationalists triumphantly assert the idea embodied in 
 that phrase as the real basis of Irish nationalism. 
 
 Nor yet were the seceders, the Young Irelanders as they 
 were called, in favour of physical froce, save as a subject for 
 flights in poetry and oratory. In reality the secession took 
 place on a false issue; the majority on either side being disin- 
 clined to admit, even if they recognised, the real issue dividing 
 them. That issue was the old and ever present one of the 
 Democratic principle in human society versus the 'Aristocratic. 
 The Young Irelanders, young and enthusiastic, felt the force 
 of the Democratic principle then agitating European society, 
 indeed the very name of Young Ireland was an adaptation of the 
 names used by the Italian revolutionist Mazzini for the revolu- 
 tionary associations, Young Italy, Young Switzerland, Young 
 France, and Young Germany, he founded after the year 1831. 
 And as the progress of the revolutionary movement on the 
 Continent, accompanied as it was by the popularisation of So- 
 cialistic ideas among the revolutionary masses, synchronised with 
 the falling apart of the social system in Ireland owing to the 
 famine, the leaders of the Young Ireland party responded to 
 and moved along with the revolutionary current of events with- 
 out ever being able to comprehend the depth and force of the 
 stream upon whose surface they were embarked. The truth 
 of this is apparent to all who study their action when at last the 
 long talked of day for revolution had arrived. By that time, 
 1848, Ireland was in the throes of the greatest famine in her 
 history. 
 
 A few words explanatory of that famine may not be amiss 
 to some of our readers. The staple food of the Irish peasantry
 
 106 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 was the potato; all other agricultural produce, grains and cattle, 
 was sold to pay the landlord's rent. The ordinary value of the 
 potato crop was yearly approximately twenty million pounds in 
 English money ; in 1848, in the midst of the famine, the value of 
 agricultural produce in Ireland was 44,958,120. In that year 
 the entire potato crop was a failure, and to that fact the famine 
 is placidly attributed, yet those figures amply prove that there 
 was food enough in the country to feed double the population 
 were the laws of capitalist society set aside, and human rights 
 elevated to their proper position. It is a common saying amongst 
 Irish Nationalists that "Providence sent the potato blight but 
 England made the famine." .The statement is true, and only 
 needs amending by adding that "England made the famine by a 
 rigid application of the economic principles that lie at the base 
 of capitalist society." No man who accepts capitalist society 
 and the laws thereof can logically find fault with the statesmen 
 of England for their acts in that awful period. They stood for 
 the rights of property and free competition, and philosophically 
 accepted their consequences upon Ireland ; the leaders of the 
 Irish people also stood for the rights of property, and refused 
 to abandon them even when they saw their consequences in the 
 slaughter by famine of over a million of the Irish toilers. The 
 first failure of the potato crop took place in 1845, and between 
 September and December of that year 515 deaths from hunger 
 were registered, although 3,250,000 quarters of wheat and num- 
 berless cattle had been exported. From that time until 1850 the 
 famine spread, and the exports of food continued. Thus in 1848 
 it was estimated that 300,000 persons died of hunger and 1,826,132 
 quarters of wheat and barley were exported. Typhus fever, 
 which always follows on the heels of hunger, struck down as 
 many as perished directly of famine, until at last it became im- 
 possible in many districts to get sufficient labourers with strength 
 enough to dig separate graves for the dying. Recourse was had 
 to famine pits, into which the bodies were thrown promiscuously ; 
 whole families died in their miserable cabins, and lay and rotted 
 there, and travellers in remote parts of the country often stumbled 
 upon villages in which the whole population had died of hunger. 
 In 1847, "black '47," 250,000 died of fever; 21,770 of starvation. 
 Owing to the efforts of emigration agents and remittances sent 
 from relatives abroad in the same year, 89,783 persons embarked 
 for Canada. They were flying from hunger, but they could not 
 fly from the fever that follows in the wake of hunger, and 6,100 
 died and were thrown overboard on the voyage, 4,100 died on
 
 107 
 
 their arrival in Canada, 5,200 in hospitals, and 1,900 in interior 
 towns. 
 
 Great Britain was nearer than America, and many who 
 could not escape to the latter rushed to the inhospitable shores of 
 the former ; but pressure was brought to bear upon the steamship 
 companies, and they raised the rates upon all passengers by 
 steerage to an almost prohibitive price. In this flight to Eng- 
 land occurred one of the most fearful tragedies of all history, a 
 tragedy which, in our opinion, surpasses that of the Black Hole 
 of Calcutta in its accumulation of fearful and gruesome horrors. 
 On December 2, 1848, a steamer left Sligo with 200 steerage 
 passengers on board bound for Liverpool. On that bleak north- 
 western coast such a passage is at all times rough, and storms are 
 both sudden and fierce. Such a storm came on during the night, 
 and as the unusual number of passengers crowded the deck the 
 crew unceremoniously and brutally drove them below decks, and 
 battened down the hatches to prevent their re-emergence. In the 
 best of weather the steerage of such a coasting vessel is, even 
 when empty of human freight, foul, suffocating and unbearable; 
 the imagination fails to realise what it must have been on that 
 awful night when 200 poor wretches were driven into its depths. 
 To add to the horror, when some of the more desperate beat 
 upon the hatches and demanded release the mate, in a paroxysm 
 of rage, ordered tarpaulin to be thrown across the opening to 
 stifle their cries. It did stifle the cries, it also excluded the air 
 and the light, and there in that inferno those 200 human beings 
 fought, struggled and gasped for air while the elements warred 
 outside and the frail tub of a ship was tossed upon the surface of 
 the waters. At last, when some one stronger than the rest man- 
 aged to break through and reach the deck, he confronted the 
 ship's officers with the news that their brutality had made them 
 murderers, that grim death was reaping his harvest amongst the 
 passengers. It was too true. Out of the 200 passengers battened 
 down below decks, 72, more than a third of the entire number, 
 had expired, suffocated for want of air or mangled to death in 
 the blind struggle of despair in the darkness. Such is the tale 
 of that voyage of the ship "Londonderry," surely the most horri- 
 ble tale of the sea in the annals of any white people! 
 
 Amidst such conditions the Irish Confederation had been 
 preaching the moral righteousness of rebellion, and discoursing 
 learnedly in English to a starving people, the most of whom knew 
 only Irish, about the historical examples of Holland, Belgium, 
 Poland, and the Tyrol. A few men, notably John Mitchel, James
 
 108 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 Fintan Lalor, and Thomas Devin Reilly, to their credit be it said, 
 openly advocated, as the first duty of the people, the refusal to 
 pay rents, the retention of their crops to feed their own families, 
 and the breaking up of bridges and tearing up of railroad lines 
 in order to prevent the removal of food from the country. Had 
 such advice been followed by the Young Irelanders as a body 
 it would, as the events showed, have been enthusiastically adopted 
 by the people at large, in which event no force in the power of 
 England could have saved landlordism or the British Empire in 
 Ireland. As explained by Fintan Lalor, the keenest intellect in 
 Ireland in his day, it meant the avoidance of all pitched battles 
 with the English army, and drawing it into a struggle along lines 
 and on a plan of campaign where its discipline, training, and 
 methods would be a hindrance rather than a help, and where no 
 mobilisation, battalion drilling nor technical knowledge of mili- 
 tary science was required of the insurgent masses. In short, it 
 involved a social and a national revolution, each resting upon the 
 other. But the men who advocated this were in a hopeless mi- 
 nority, and the chiefs of the Young Irelanders were as rabidly 
 solicitous about the rights of the landlord as were the chiefs of 
 the English Government. While the people perished the Young 
 Irelanders talked, and their talk was very beautiful, thoroughly 
 grammatical, nicely polished, and the proper amount of passion 
 introduced always at the proper psychological moment. But still 
 the people perished. Eventually the Government seized upon the 
 really dangerous man the man who had hatred of injustice 
 deeply enough rooted to wish to destroy it at all costs, the man 
 who had faith enough in the masses to trust a revolutionary out- 
 break to their native impulses, and who possessed the faculty of 
 combining thought with action, John Mitchel. With his arrest 
 the people looked for immediate revolution, so did the Govern- 
 ment, so did Mitchel himself. All were disappointed. John 
 Mitchel was carried off to penal servitude in Van Diemeiv's 
 Land (Tasmania) after scorn fully refusing to sign a manifesto 
 presented to him in his ceil by Thomas Francis Meagher and 
 others, counselling the people not to attempt to rescue him. 
 The working class of Dublin and most of the towns were clam- 
 ouring for their leaders to give the word for a rising; in many 
 places in the country the peasantry were acting spontaneously. 
 Eventually news reaching Dublin in July, 1848, that warrants 
 were issued for the arrest of the chiefs of the Young Ireland 
 party they determined to appeal to the country. But everything 
 had to be done in a "respectable" manner ; English army on one
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 109 
 
 side, provided with guns, bands and banners ; Irish army on the 
 other side, also provided with guns, bands and banners, "serried 
 ranks with glittering steel," no more proletarian insurrection, 
 and no interference with the rights of property. When C. G. 
 Duffy was arrested on Saturday, 9th of July, in Dublin, the 
 Dublin workers surrounded the military escort on the way to 
 the prison at Newgate, stopped the carriage, pressed up to 
 Duffy and offered to begin the insurrection then and there. "Do 
 you wish to be rescued?" said one of the leaders. "Certainly 
 not," said Duffy. And the puzzled toilers fell back and allowed 
 the future Australian Premier to go to prison. In Cashel, Tip- 
 perary, Michael Doheny was arrested. The people stormed the 
 jail and rescued him. He insisted upon giving himself up again 
 and applied for bail. In Waterford Meagher was arrested. As 
 he was being taken through the city guarded by troops the people 
 erected a barricade in the way across a narrow bridge over the 
 River Suir, and when the carriage reached the bridge some one 
 cut the traces of the horses and brought the cavalcade to a stand- 
 still. Meagher ordered them to remove the barricade; they 
 begged him to give the word for insurrection and they would 
 begin then and there. The important city was in their hands, 
 but Meagher persisted in going with the soldiers, and the poor 
 working class rebels of Waterford let him go, crying out as 
 they did so, "You will regret it, you will regret it, and it is your 
 own fault." Meagher afterwards proved himself a fearless 
 soldier of a regular army, but as an insurgent he lacked the 
 necessary initiative. 
 
 But the crowning absurdity of all was the leadership of 
 William Smith O'Brien. He wandered through the country 
 telling the starving peasantry to get ready, but refusing to allow 
 them to feed themselves at the expense of the landlords who had 
 so long plundered, starved, and evicted them ; he would not allow 
 his followers to seize upon the carts of grain passing along the 
 roads where the people were dying for want of food ; at Mulli- 
 nahone he refused to allow his followers to fell trees to build a 
 barricade across the road until they had asked permission of the 
 landlords who owned the trees; when the people of Killenaule 
 had a body of dragoons entrapped between two barricades he 
 released the dragoons from their dangerous situation upon their 
 leader assuring him that he had no warrant for his, O'Brien's 
 arrest; in another place he surprised a party of soldiers in the 
 Town Hall with their arms taken apart for cleaning purposes, 
 and instead of confiscating the arms he told the soldiers that
 
 110 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 their arms were as safe there as they would be in Dublin Castle. 
 
 When we remember the state of Ireland then, with her pop- 
 ulation perishing of famine, all the above recital reads like a 
 page of comic opera. Unfortunately it is not; it is a page from 
 the blackest period of Ireland's history. Reading it we can 
 understand why Smith O'Brien has a monument in Dublin, al- 
 though Fintan Lalor's name and writings were boycotted for 
 more than fifty years. W. A. O'Connor, B.A., in his "History 
 of the Irish People," sums up Smith O'Brien's career thus: 
 "The man had broken up a peaceful organisation in the cause of 
 war, promised war to a people in desperate strait, went into the 
 country to wage war, then considered it guilt to do any act of 
 war." It must, of course, be conceded that Smith O'Brien was 
 a man of high moral probity, but it is equally necessary to affirm 
 that he was a landlord vehemently solicitous for the rights of his 
 class, and allowing his solicitude for those rights to stand be- 
 tween the millions of the Irish race and their hopes of life and 
 freedom. It ought, however, also to be remembered, in exten- 
 uation of his conduct in that awful crisis, that he had inherited 
 vast estates as the result of the social, national, and religious 
 apostacy of his forefathers, and in view of such an ancestry 
 it is more wonderful that he had dreamed of rebellion than that 
 he had repudiated revolution. 
 
 Had Socialist principles been applied to Ireland in those 
 days not one person need have died of hunger, and not one cent 
 of charity need have been subscribed to leave a smirch upon the 
 Irish name. But all except a few men had elevated landlord 
 property and capitalist political economy to a fetish to be wor- 
 shipped, and upon the altar of that fetish Ireland perished. At 
 the lowest computation 1,225,000 persons died of absolute hun- 
 ger; all of these were sacrificed upon the altar of capitalist 
 thought. 
 
 Early in the course of the famine the English Premier, 
 Lord John Russell, declared that nothing must be done to inter- 
 fere with private enterprise or the regular course of trade, and 
 this was the settled policy of the Government from first to last. 
 A Treasury "Minute" of August 31, 1846, provided that" depots 
 for the sale of food were to be established at Longford, Banagher, 
 Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and Sligo, and subordinate depots 
 at other places on the western coast," but the rules provided 
 that such depots were not to be opened where food could be ob- 
 tained from private dealers, and when opened food was to be 
 sold at prices which would permit of private dealers competing.
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 111 
 
 In all the Acts establishing relief works it was stipulated that all 
 the labour must be entirely unproductive, so as not to prevent 
 capitalists making a profit either then or in the future. Private 
 dealers made fortunes ranging from 40,000 to 80,000. In 1845 
 a Commissariat Relief Department was organised to bring in 
 Indian Corn for sale in Ireland, but none was to be sold until all 
 private stores were sold out: the State of Massachusetts hired an 
 American ship-of-war, the Jamestown, loaded it with grain, and 
 sent it to Ireland; the Government placed the cargo in storage, 
 claiming that putting it on the market would disturb trade. A 
 Poor Relief Bill in 1847 made provision for the employment of 
 labour on public works, but stipulated that none should be em- 
 ployed who retained more than a quarter of an acre of land; 
 this induced tens of thousands to surrender their farms for the 
 sake of a bite to eat and saved the landlords all the trouble and 
 expense of eviction. When this had been accomplished to a 
 sufficient extent 734,000 persons were discharged, and as they 
 had given up their farms to get employment on the works they 
 were now as helpless as men on a raft in mid ocean. Mr. Mul- 
 hall, in his "Fifty Years of National Progress," estimates the 
 number of persons evicted between 1838 and 1888 as 3,668,000 ; 
 the greater number of these saw their homes destroyed during 
 the years under consideration, and this Poor Relief Bill, nick- 
 named an "Eviction-Made-Easy Act," was one main weapon 
 for their undoing. In 1846, England, hitherto a Protectionist 
 country, adopted Free Trade, ostensibly in order to permit corn 
 to come freely and cheaply to the starving Irish. In reality, as 
 Ireland was a corn and grain exporting country, the measure 
 brought Continental agricultural produce to England into compe- 
 tition with that of Ireland, and hence by lowering agricultural 
 prices still further intensified the misery of the Irish producing 
 classes. The real meaning of the measure was that England, 
 being a manufacturing nation, desired to cheapen food in order 
 that its wageslaves might remain content with low wages, and 
 indeed one of the most immediate results of free trade in Eng- 
 land was a wholesale reduction of the wages of the manufactur- 
 ing proletariat. 
 
 The English capitalist class, with that hypocrisy that every- 
 where characterises the class in its public acts, used the misery of 
 the Irish as a means to conquer the opposition of the English 
 landlord class to free trade in grains, but in this, as in every other 
 measure of the famine years, they acted consistently upon the 
 lines of capitalist political economy. Within the limits of that
 
 112 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 social system and its theories their acts are unassailable and un- 
 impeachable; it is only when we reject that system and the in- 
 tellectual and social fetters it imposes that we really acquire the 
 right to denounce the English administration of Irsland during 
 the famine as a colossal crime against the human race. The 
 non-socialist Irish man or woman who fumes against that admin- 
 istration is in the illogical position of denouncing an effect of 
 whose cause he is a supporter. That cause was the system of 
 capitalist property. With the exception of those few men we 
 have before named, the Young Ireland leaders of 1848 failed to 
 rise to the grandeur of the opportunity offered them to choose 
 between human rights and property rights as a basis of nationality, 
 and the measure of their failure was the measure of their coun- 
 try's disaster.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 SOCIALISTIC TEACHING OF YOUNG IRELANDERS; THE THINKERS 
 AND THE WORKERS. 
 
 "What do ye at our door, 
 Ye guard our master's granaries from the thin hands of the poor." 
 
 Lady Wilde (Speransa). 
 "God of Justice, I cried, send Thy spirit down 
 
 On those lords so cruel and proud. 
 Soften their hearts and relax their frown, 
 
 Or else, I cried aloud, 
 Vouchsafe strength to the peasant's hand 
 
 To drive them at length from out the land." 
 Thomas Davis. 
 
 WE have pointed out that the Young Ireland chiefs who had 
 so fervently declaimed about the revolution were utterly inca- 
 pable of accepting it when at last it presented itself to them, in- 
 deed Doheny uses that very word in describing the scenes at 
 Cashel. "It was the revolution," he said, "if we had accepted it." 
 We might with perfect justice apply to these brilliant but unfortu- 
 nate men the words of another writer, Lissagaray, in describing 
 a similar class of leaders in France, and say "having all their 
 life sung the glories of the Revolution, when it rose up before 
 them they ran away appalled, like the Arab fisher at the appari- 
 tion of the genie." To the average historian who treats of the 
 relations between Ireland and England as of a struggle between 
 two nations, without any understanding of the economic con- 
 ditions, or of the great world movements which caught both 
 countries in their grasp, the hesitancy and vacillation of the 
 Young Ireland chiefs in the crisis of their country's fate consti- 
 tutes an insoluble problem and has too often been used to point 
 a sneer at Irishmen when the writer was English, or to justify 
 a sickening apology when the writer was Irish. Neither action 
 is at all warranted. The simple fact is that the Irish workers 
 in town and country were ready and willing to revolt, and that 
 
 113
 
 114 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 the English Government of the time was saved from serious 
 danger only by the fact that Smith O'Brien and those who pat- 
 terned after him, dreaded to trust the nation to the passion of 
 the so-called lower classes. Had rebellion broken out at the time 
 in Ireland the English Chartists who had been arming and pre- 
 paring for a similar purpose would, as indeed Mitchel pointed out 
 continually in his paper, have seized the occasion to take the 
 field also. Many regiments of the English army were also 
 honey-combed with revolt, and had repeatedly shown their spirit 
 by publicly cheering for the Irish and Chartist cause. An 
 English leader of the Chartists, John Frost, was sentenced to a 
 heavy term of transportation for his seditious utterances at this 
 time, and another great English companion of the working class, 
 Ernest Jones, in commenting upon the case, declared defiantly 
 in a public meeting that "the time would come when John Mitchel 
 and John Frost would be brought back, and Lord John Russell 
 sent to take their place, and the Green Flag would fly in tri- 
 umph over Downing Street and Dublin Castle," Downing Street 
 being the residence of the Prime Minister. For uttering this 
 sentiment, Ernest Jones was arrested and sentenced to twelve 
 months' imprisonment. 
 
 In their attitude towards all manifestation of working class 
 revolt in England the Young Irelanders were sorely divided. In 
 his paper "The United Irishman" John Mitchel hailed it exult- 
 antly as an aid to Ireland, and as a presage of the victory of real 
 democracy, setting aside a large portion of his space in every 
 issue to chronicle the progress of the cause of the people in 
 England. His attitude in this matter was one of the most potent 
 causes of his enduring popularity amongst the masses. On the 
 other hand the section of Young Irelanders who had made Smith 
 O'Brien their idol for no other discoverable reason than the fact 
 that he was rich and most respectable, strove by every means 
 in their power to dissociate the cause of Ireland from the cause 
 of democracy. A wordy war between Mitchel and his critics 
 ensued, each side appealing to the precedent of 1798, with the 
 result that Mitchel was easily able to prove that the revolution- 
 ists of that period notably Wolfe Tone had not only allied the 
 cause of Ireland with the cause of democracy in general, but had 
 vehemently insisted upon the necessity of a social revolution 
 in Ireland at the expense of the landed aristocracy. Copying 
 from Fintan Lalor, Mitchel made the principles involved in those 
 ideas the slogans of his revolutionary campaign. He correctly 
 insisted upon a social insurrection as the only possible basis
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 115 
 
 for a national revolution, that the same insurrectionary upheaval 
 that destroyed and ended the social subjection of the producing 
 classes would end the hateful foreign tyranny reared upon it. 
 Two passages from his writings are especially useful as bearing 
 out and attesting to his position on those points points that are 
 still the fiercest subjects of dispute in Ireland. In his "Letter to 
 the small farmers of Ireland," March 4, 1848, he says, "But I am 
 told it is vain to speak thus to you; that the peace policy of 
 O'Connell is dearer to you than life and honour that many of 
 your clergy, too, exhort you to die rather than violate what the 
 English call 'law' and that you are resolved to take their bid- 
 ding. Then die die in your patience and perseverance, but be 
 well assured of this that the priest who bids you perish pa- 
 tiently amidst your own golden harvest preaches the gospel of 
 England, insults manhood and common sense, bears false wit- 
 ness against religion, and blasphemes the Providence of God." 
 
 When the Republican Government, which came into power 
 in Paris after the revolution February, 1848, recognizing that 
 it owed its existence to the armed working men, and that those 
 workers were demanding some security for their own class as 
 a recompense for their bloody toil, enacted a law guaranteeing 
 "the right to work" to all, and pledging the credit of the nation 
 to secure that right, Mitchel joyfully hailed that law as an indi- 
 cation that the absurd theories of what he rightfully styled the 
 "English system," or capitalism, had no longer a hold upon the 
 minds of the French people. We quote a portion of that article. 
 Our readers will note that the Free Trade referred to is Free 
 Trade in Labour as against State Protection of the rights of the 
 workers : 
 
 "Dynasties and thrones are not half as important as work- 
 shops, farms, and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties 
 and thrones, and even provisional governments, are good for 
 anything exactly in proportion as they secure fair play, justice, 
 and freedom to those who labour. 
 
 "It is here that France is really ahead of all the world. The 
 great Third Revolution has overthrown the enlightened pedantic 
 political economy (what we know in Ireland as the English 
 political economy, or the Famine Political Economy), and has 
 established once and for all the true and old principles of pro- 
 tection to labour, and the right and duty of combination among 
 workmen. 
 
 "By a decree of the Provisional Government dated Feb-> 
 ruary 25th :
 
 116 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 "It engages to guarantee work to all citizens. It recognises 
 the right of workmen to combine for the purpose of enjoying the 
 lawful proceeds of their labour." 
 
 "The French Republicans do not, like ignorant and bar- 
 barous English Whigs, recognise a right to pauper relief and 
 make it a premium upon idleness. They know that man has a 
 charter to eat bread in the sweat of his brow and not otherwise, 
 and they acknowledge that highest and most sacred mission of 
 government to take care that bread may be had for the earning. 
 For this reason they expressly, and in set terms, renounce 
 "competition" and "free trade" in the sense in which an English 
 Whig uses these ivords, and deliberately adopt combination and 
 protection that the nation should combine to protect by laws 
 its own national industry, and that individuals should combine 
 with other individuals to protect by trades associations the 
 several branches of national industry. 
 
 "The free trade and competition in other words the Eng- 
 lish system is pretty well understood now; its obvious purpose 
 and effect are to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, to 
 make capital the absolute ruler of the world, and labour a blind 
 and helpless slave. By free trade the manufacturers of Man- 
 chester are enabled to clothe India, China, and South America, 
 and the artizans of Manchester can hardly keep themselves 
 covered from the cold. By dint of free trade Belfast grows more 
 linen cloth than it ever did before ; but the men who weave it have 
 hardly a shirt to their backs. Free trade fills with corn the 
 stores of speculating capitalists, but leaves those who have sown 
 and reaped the corn without a meal. Free trade unpeoples vil- 
 lages and peoples poorhouses, consolidates farms and gluts the 
 graveyards with famished corpses. 
 
 "There is to be no more of this free trade in France. Men 
 can no longer 'do what they like with their own' there. 
 
 "February, 1848, came, and the pretext of the reform ban- 
 quet. Again Paris had her three days' agony, and was delivered 
 of her third and fairest born revolution. "There could be no 
 mistake this time ; the rubbish of thrones and dynasties is swept 
 out for ever, and the people sit sovereign in the land. One of 
 their first and greatest acts is the enactment of a commission to 
 inquire into the whole of the great labour question, and to all 
 the documents issued by this commission appear signed the 
 names of Louis Blanc and the insurgent of Lyons, Albert, 
 Ouvrier (workman). He is not ashamed of his title, though now 
 a great officer of the State. He is a working man, and is proud
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 117 
 
 of it 'in any bond, bill, quittance, or obligation/ Ouvrier. 
 
 ''Sixty-six years ago the farmers of France had their revo- 
 lution. Eighteen years ago the 'respectable' middle classes had 
 theirs, and have made a good penny in it since, but upon this 
 third and last all the world may see the stamp and impress 
 of the man who made it Albert Ouvrier, his mark. We have 
 all three revolutions to accomplish, and the sooner we set about 
 it the better. Only let us hope all the work may be done in one. 
 Let not the lessons of history be utterly useless. 
 
 "The detestable system of 'free trade' and 'fair competition' 
 which is described by Louis Blanc as 'that specious system of 
 leaving unrestricted all pecuniary dealings between man and man, 
 which leaves the poor man at the mercy of the rich, and promises 
 to cupidity that waits its time an easy victory over hunger that 
 cannot wait/ the system that seeks to make Mammon and not 
 God or justice rule this world in one word, the English or fam- 
 ine system must be abolished utterly, in farms or workshops, 
 in town and country, abolished utterly ; and to do this were worth 
 three revolutions, or three times three." 
 
 So wrote Mitchel when, burning with a holy hatred of 
 tyranny, he poured the vitriol of his scorn upon all the pedants 
 who strutted around him, pedants who were as scrupulous in 
 polishing a phrase for a lecture as a sword for a parade and 
 incapable of advancing beyond either. 
 
 His joy was, we now know, somewhat premature, as the 
 government which passed the law was itself a capitalistic gov- 
 ernment, and as soon as it found itself strong enough, and had 
 won over the army, repealed its own law, and suppressed, with the 
 most frightful bloodshed, the June insurrection of the workmen 
 striving to enforce its fulfilment. It is the latter insurrection 
 which Mitchel denounces in his Jail Journal when, led astray 
 by the garbled reports of English newspapers, he anathematises 
 the very men whom he had in this article, when fuller sources of 
 information were available, courageously and justly praised . 
 But another revolutionist, Devin Reilly, in the "Irish Felon/' 
 more correctly appraised the position of the June insurgents, and 
 also appreciated the fact that Ireland for its redemption required 
 something more far-reaching, something sounding deeper springs 
 of human action, something more akin to the teachings that in- 
 spired the heroic workers of France than was to be found in 
 the "personal probity," or "high principles," or "aristocratic 
 descent," or "eminent respectability" of a few leaders. 
 
 When Mitchel was arrested and his paper suppressed two
 
 118 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 other papers sprang up to take the post of danger thus left 
 vacant. One "The Irish Tribune," represented the element 
 which stood for the "moral right of insurrection," and the other, 
 the "Irish Felon," embodied the ideas of those who insisted that 
 the English conquest of Ireland was two-fold, social, or eco- 
 nomic, and political, and that therefore the revolution must also 
 have these two aspects. These latter were at all times in the 
 fullest sympathy with the movements of the working class de- 
 mocracy at home and abroad. John Martin edited the "Irish 
 Felon," James Fintan Lalor and Devin Reilly were its chief 
 writers. Reilly, who hailed originally from Monaghan, had 
 long been a close observer of and sympathiser with the move- 
 ments of the working class, and all schemes of social redemption. 
 As a writer on the "Nation" newspaper he had contributed a 
 series of articles on the great French Socialist, Louis Blanc, in a 
 review of his great work "Dix Ans" (Ten Years), in which, 
 while dissenting from the "State Socialistic" schemes of social 
 regeneration favoured by Blanc he yet showed the keenest 
 appreciation of the gravity and universality of the social ques- 
 tion, as well as grasping the innate heroism and sublimity of the 
 working class movement. This attitude he preserved to the last 
 of his days. When in exile in America, after the insurrection, 
 he was chosen by the printers of Boston to edit a paper, the "Pro- 
 tective Union," they had founded on co-operative principles to 
 advocate the rights of labour, and was thus one of the first 
 pioneers of labour journalism in the United States a proud and 
 fitting position for a true Irish revolutionist. As writer in the 
 "American Review" he wrote a series of articles on the European 
 situation, of which Horace Greeley said that if collected and 
 published as a book they would create a revolution in Europe. 
 Commenting upon the uprising in France in June he says in the 
 "Irish Felon": 
 
 "We are not Communists we abhor communism for the 
 same reason we abhor poor law systems, and systems founded on 
 the absolute sovereignty of wealth. Communism destroys the 
 independence and dignity of labour, makes the workingman a 
 State pauper and takes his manhood from him. But, communism 
 or no communism, these 70,000 workmen had a clear right to ex- 
 istence they had the best right to existence of any men in 
 France, and if they could have asserted their right by force of 
 arms they would have been fully justified. The social system 
 in which a man willing to work is compelled to starve is a blas- 
 phemy, an anarchy, and no system. For the present these vie-
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 119 
 
 tims of monarchic rule, disowned by the republic, are conquered ; 
 10,000 are slain, 20,000 perhaps doomed to the Marquesas. 
 But for all that the rights of labour are not conquered, and will 
 not and cannot be conquered. Again and again the labourer will 
 rise up against the idler the ivorkingmcn will meet this bour- 
 geoisie, and grapple and war with them till their equality is es- 
 tablished, not in word, but in fact." 
 
 This was the spirit of the men grouped around the "Irish 
 Felon," its editor alone excepted. Students of Socialism will 
 recognize that many who are earnest workers for Socialism 
 to-day would, like Devin Reilly, have "abhorred" the crude 
 Communism of 1848. The fact that he insisted upon the un- 
 qualified right of the working class to work out its own salvation, 
 by force of arms if necessary, is what entitles Devin Reilly to a 
 high place of honour in the estimation of the militant proletariat 
 of Ireland. The opening passage in an "Address of the Medical 
 Students of Dublin to All Irish Students of Science and Art," 
 adopted at a meeting held in Northumberland Buildings, Eden 
 Quay, on April 4, 1848, and signed by John Savage as Chairman 
 and Richard Dalton Williams as Secretary, shows also that 
 amongst the educated young men of that generation there was a 
 general recognition of the fact that the struggle of Ireland against 
 her oppressors was naturally linked with and ought to be taken 
 in conjunction with the world-wide movement of the democracy. 
 It says "a war is waging at this hour all over Europe between 
 Intelligence and Labour on the one side and Despotism and Force 
 on the other," a sentiment which Joseph Brennan versified in a 
 poem on "Divine Right," in which the excellence of the senti- 
 ment must be held to atone for the poverty of the poetry. One 
 verse says: 
 
 "The only right acknowledged 
 By the people living now. 
 Is the right to obtain honour, 
 
 By the sweat of brain and brow. : 
 
 The Right Divine of Labour 
 To be first of earthly things, 
 That the Thinker and the Worker 
 Are manhood's only kings. 
 
 But the palm of honour for the clearest exposition of the 
 doctrine of revolution, social and political, must be given to 
 James Fintan Lalor, of Tenakill, Queen's County. Lalor, un- 
 fortunately, suffered from a slight physical disability, which in-
 
 120 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 capacitated him from attaining to any leadership other than in- 
 tellectual, a fact that in such a time and amidst such a people 
 was fatal to his immediate influence. Yet in his writings, as we 
 study them to-day, we find principles of action and of society 
 which have within them not only the best plan of campaign 
 suited for the needs of a country seeking its freedom through 
 insurrection against a dominant nation, but also held the seeds of 
 the more perfect social peace of the future. All his writings at 
 this period are so illuminating that we find it difficult to select 
 from the mass any particular passages which more deserve re- 
 production than others. But as an indication of the line of 
 argument pursued by this peerless thinker and as a welcome 
 contrast to the paralysing respect, nay, reverence, for landlord- 
 ism shown by Smith O'Brien and his worshippers, perhaps the 
 following passages will serve. In an articles entitled "The Faith 
 of a Felon," published July 8, 1848, he tells how he had striven 
 to convert the Irish Confederation to his views and failed, and 
 says: "They wanted an alliance with the landowners. They 
 chose to consider them as Irishmen, and imagined they could 
 induce them to hoist the green flag. They wished to preserve 
 an aristocracy. They desired, not a democratic, but merely a 
 national, revolution. Had the Confederation in the May or June 
 of '47 thrown heart and mind and means into the movement I 
 pointed out they would have made it successful, and settled at 
 once and forever all questions between us and England. The 
 opinions I then stated, and which I yet stand firm to, are these : 
 
 "1. That in order to save their own lives, the occupying 
 tenants of the soil of Ireland ought, next autumn, to refuse all 
 rent and arrears of rent then due, beyond and except the value 
 of the overplus of harvest produce remaining in their hands after 
 having deducted and reserved a due and full provision for their 
 own subsistence during the next ensuing twelve months. 
 
 "2. That they ought to refuse and resist being made beggars, 
 landless and homeless, under the English law of ejection. 
 
 "3. That they ought further, on principle, to refuse all rent 
 to the present usurping proprietors, until the people, the true 
 proprietors (or lords paramount, in legal parlance) have, in na- 
 tional congress or convention, decided what rents they are to pay, 
 and to whom they are to pay them. 
 
 "4. And that the people, on grounds of policy and economy, 
 ought to decide (as a general rule admitting of reservations) that 
 these rents shall be paid to themselves, the people, for public 
 purposes, and for behoof and benefit of them, the entire general
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 121 
 
 people.'' 
 
 "It has been said to me that such a war, on the principles I 
 propose, would be looked on with detestation by Europe. I assert 
 the contrary; I say such a war would propagate itself through- 
 out Europe. Mark the words of this prophecy the principle I 
 propound goes to the foundations of Europe, and sooner or later 
 will cause Europe to outrise. Mankind will yet be masters of the 
 earth. The right of the people to make the laws this produced 
 the first great modern earthquake, whose latent shocks, even now, 
 are heaving in the heart of the world. The right of the people to 
 own the land this will produce the next. Train your hands, and 
 your sons' hands, gentlemen of the earth, for you and they will 
 yet have to use them." 
 
 The paragraph is significant as demonstrating that Fintan 
 Lalor, like all the really dangerous revolutionists of Ireland, 
 advocated his principles as part of the creed of the democracy 
 of the world, and not merely as applicable only to the incidents 
 of the struggle of Ireland against England. But this latter is the 
 interpretation which the middle class politicians and historians 
 of Ireland have endeavoured to give his teachings after the fail- 
 ure of their attempt, continued for half a century, to ignore or 
 suppress all reference to his contribution to Irish revolutionary 
 literature. The working class democracy of Ireland will, it is 
 to be hoped, be, for their part, as assertive of the universality of 
 Lalor's sympathies as their bourgeois compatriots are in denying 
 it. That working class would be uselessly acquiescing in the 
 smirching of its own record were it to permit emasculation of 
 the message of this Irish apostle of revolutionary Socialism. And 
 in emphasising the catholicity of his sympathies as well as the 
 keenness of his insight into the social structure, that Irish work- 
 ing class will do well to confront the apostate patriotism of the 
 politicians and anti-Socialists of Ireland with the following bril- 
 liant passage from the work already quoted, and thus show how 
 Lalor answered the plea of those who begged him to moderate 
 or modify his position, to preach it as a necessity of Ireland's 
 then desperate condition, and not as a universal principle. 
 
 "I attest and urge the plea of utter and desperate necessity 
 to fortify her (Ireland's) claim, but not to found it. / rest it on 
 no temporary and passing conditions, but on principles that art 
 permanent, and imperishable, and universal available to all times 
 and to all countries as well as to our own I pierce through the 
 upper stratum of occasional and shifting circumstances to bot- 
 tom and base on the rock below. I put the question in its eternal
 
 122 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 form the form in which, how often so ever suppressed for a 
 season it can never be finally subdued, but will remain and re- 
 turn, outliving and outlasting the cowardice and corruption of 
 generations. I view it as ages will view it not through the mists 
 of a famine, but by the living lights of the firmament." 
 
 By such lights the teaching of Fintan Lalor are being viewed 
 to-day, with the result that, as he recedes from us in time his 
 grandeur as a thinker is more and more recognised; his form 
 rises clearer and more distinct to our view as the forms of the 
 petty agitators and phrase-mongering rebels who seemed to 
 dominate the scene at that historic period sink into their proper 
 place as unconscious factors in the British Imperial plan of con- 
 quest by famine. Cursed by the fatal gift of eloquence our Irish 
 Girondins of the Confederation enthralled the Irish people and 
 intoxicated themselves out of the possibility of serious thinking; 
 drunken with words they failed to realise that the ideas originat- 
 ing with Fintan Lalor and in part adopted and expounded with 
 such dramatic power by Mitchel, were a more serious menace 
 to the hated power of England than any the dream of a union 
 of classes could ever materialise on Irish soil; the bones of the 
 famine victims whitening on every Irish hill and valley, or toss- 
 ing on every wave of the Atlantic was the price Ireland paid 
 for the eloquence of its rebels, and their scornful rejection of the 
 Socialistic teachings of its thinkers.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 SOME MORE IRISH PIONEERS OF THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 
 
 "Either the Sermon on the Mount can rule this world or it cannot. 
 The Devil has a right to rule if we let him, but he has no right to call 
 his rule Christian Civilisation." John Boyle O'Reilly. 
 
 LOOKING backward to that eventful period (after '48) we can 
 now see that all hopes of a revolutionary movement had perished 
 for that generation, had been strangled in the love embraces of 
 our Girondins ; but that fact naturally was not so apparent to the 
 men of the time. Hence it is not to be wondered at that jour- 
 nalistic activity on the part of the revolutionists did not cease with 
 the suppression of the "United Irishman," the "Irish Tribune," 
 or the "Irish Felon." A small fugitive publication entitled the 
 "Irish National Guard," published apparently by a body of cour- 
 ageous Dublin workingmen of advanced opinions, also led a 
 chequered existence championing the cause of revolution, and in 
 January, 1849, another paper, "The Irishman," was set on foot 
 by Bernard Fullam, who had been business manager of the "Na- 
 tion." Fullam also started a new organisation, the "Democratic 
 Association," which is described as "an association with aims 
 almost entirely socialistic and revolutionary." This association 
 also spread amongst the Irish workers in Great Britain, and had 
 the cordial support and endorsement of Feargus O'Connor, who 
 saw in it the realisation of his long-hoped for dream of a com- 
 mon programme uniting the democracies of Ireland and Great 
 Britain. But the era of revolution was past for that generation 
 in both countries, and it was too late for the working class revolu- 
 tionists to repair the harm the middle-class doctrinaires had done. 
 The paper died in May, 1850, after an existence of seventeen 
 months. Among its contributors was Thomas Clarke Luby, 
 afterwards one of the chief writers on the staff of the "Irish 
 People," organ of the Fenian Brotherhood, a fact that explains 
 much of the advanced doctrine advocated by that journal. An- 
 
 123
 
 124 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 other of the staff of the "Irishman" in those days was Joseph 
 Brennan, whom we have already quoted as writing in the "Irish 
 Tribune." Brennan finally emigrated to America and contributed 
 largely to the pages of the New Orleans "Delta," many of his 
 poems in that journal showing the effects of his early association 
 with the currents of social-revolutionary thought in Ireland. 
 
 Before leaving this period a few words should be said of 
 the impress left upon the labour movement of Great Britain by 
 the working class Irish exiles. An English writer, H. S. Fox- 
 well, has said that "Socialist propagandism has been mainly car- 
 ried on by men of Celtic or Semitic blood," and, however true 
 that may be, as a general statement, it is at least certain that 
 to the men of Celtic blood the English-speaking countries are 
 indebted for the greater part of the early propaganda of the 
 Socialist conception of society. We have already referred to 
 Feargus O'Connor; another Irishman who carved his name deep 
 on the early structures of the labour and socialist movement in 
 England as an author and Chartist leader was James BronterrC 
 O'Brien. Among his best known works are: "Rise, Progress 
 and Phases of Human Slavery : How it came into the world, and 
 how it may be made to go out of it," published in 1830 ; "Address 
 to the Oppressed and Mystified People of Great Britain," 1851 ; 
 "European Letters;" and the pages of the "National Reformer," 
 which he founded in 1837. At first an advocate of physical force, 
 he in his later days gave himself up almost exclusively to the 
 development of a system of land banks, in which he believed he 
 had found a way to circumvent the political and military power 
 of the capitalist class. Bronterre O'Brien is stated to have been 
 the first to coin in English the distinctive title of "social demo- 
 crat," as an appellation for the adherents of the new order. 
 
 An earlier Irish apostle of the Socialist movement of the 
 working class, John Doherty, is much less known to the present 
 generation than O'Brien, yet his methods bore more of the marks 
 of constructive revolutionary statesmanship, and his message was 
 equally clear. He appears to have been an almost dominant figure 
 in the labour movement of England and Ireland between the 
 years 1830 and 1840, spent little time in the development of 
 Socialist theories, but devoted all his energies to organizing the 
 working class and teaching it to act on its own initiative. He 
 was General Secretary of the "Federation of Spinning Societies," 
 which aimed to unite all the textile industries in one great na- 
 tional industrial union and was widespread throughout Great 
 Britain and Ireland; he founded a "National Association for the
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 125 
 
 Protection of Labour," which directed its efforts towards build- 
 ing up a union of the working class effective alike for economic 
 and political ends, and reached to 100,000 members, the Belfast 
 trades applying in a body for affiliation; he founded and edited 
 a paper, "The Voice of the People," in 1831, which, although 
 sevenpence per copy, attained to a circulation of 30,000, and is 
 described as "giving great attention to Radical politics, and the 
 progress of revolution on the Continent." In his "History of 
 Trades Unionism," Sidney Webb quotes Francis Place the best 
 informed man in the labour movement in England of his day 
 as declaring that during the English Reform Bill crisis in 1832 
 Doherty, instead of being led astray, as many labour leaders were, 
 to rally to the side of the middle class reformers, was "advising 
 the working class to use the occasion for a Social Revolution." 
 This was indeed the keynote of Doherty's message: whatever 
 was to be done was to be done by the working class. He is 
 summed up as of "wide information, great natural shrewdness, 
 and far-reaching aims." Was born in Larne in 1799. 
 
 Another Doherty, Hugh, attained to some prominence in 
 Socialistic circles in England, and we find him in 1841 in London 
 editing a Socialist paper, "The Phalanx," which devoted itself to 
 the propagation of the views of the French Socialist, Fourier. 
 It had little influence on the labour movement owing to its ex- 
 tremely doctrinaire attitude, but appears to have had circulation 
 and correspondents in the United States. It was one of the first 
 journals to be set up by a type-setting machine, and one of its 
 numbers contains a minute description of the machine, which 
 forms curious reading to-day. 
 
 In general the effect upon the English labour movement of 
 the great influx of Irish workers seems to us to have been bene- 
 ficial. It is true that their competition for employment had at 
 first a seriously evil effect upon wages, but, on the other hand, 
 a study of the fugitive literature of the movement of that time 
 shows that the working class Irish exiles were present and active 
 in the ranks of militant labour in numbers out of all proportion 
 to the ratio they bore to the population at large. And always 
 they were the advanced, the least compromising, the most irrecon- 
 cilable element in the movement. Of course the Socialist sec- 
 tarians and philosophers did not love the Irish Charles Kingsley, 
 that curious combination of Prelate, Socialist, Chauvinist and 
 Virulent Bigot, can scarcely remain within the bounds of decent 
 language when he brings an Irishman into the thread of his 
 narratives but the aversion was born out of their fear of the
 
 126 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 Irish workers' impatience of compromise and eagerness for action. 
 And hence the very qualities which endeared the Irish worker to 
 the earnest rebel against capitalist iniquity estranged him from 
 the affections of those whose social position enabled them to be- 
 come the historians of his movements.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE WORKING CLASS: THE INHERITORS OF THE IRISH IDEALS OF 
 THE PAST THE REPOSITORY OF THE HOPES OF THE FUTURE 
 
 "Is a Christian to starve, to submit, to bow down 
 
 As at some high consecrated behest, 
 Hugging close the old maxims, that 'Weakness is strength,' 
 
 And 'Whatsoever is is the best'? 
 O, texts of debasement ! O creed of deep shame ! 
 
 O, Gospel of infamy treble, 
 
 Who strikes when he's struck, and takes when he starves, 
 In the eyes of the Lord is no rebel." 
 
 7. F. O'Donnell. 
 
 THIS book does not aspire to be a history of labour in Ireland; 
 it is rather a record of labour in Irish History. For that reason 
 the plan of the book has precluded any attempt to deal in detail 
 with the growth, development, or decay of industry in Ireland, 
 except as it affected our general argument. That argument called 
 for an explanation of the position of labour in the great epochs 
 of our modern history, and with the attitude of Irish leaders 
 toward the hopes, aspirations, and necessities of those who live 
 by labour. Occasionally, as when analysing the "prosperity" of 
 Grattan's Parliament, and the decay of Irish trade following the 
 Legislative Union in 1800, we have been constrained to examine 
 the fundamental causes which make for the progress, industrially 
 or commercially, of some nations and the retrogression of others. 
 For this apparent digression no apology is made, and none is 
 called for; it was impossible to present our readers with a clear 
 idea of the historical position of labour at any given moment with- 
 out explaining the economic and political causes which contributed 
 to make possible or necessary its attitude. For the same reason it 
 has been necessary sometimes to retrace our footsteps over some 
 period already covered in order to draw attention to a phase of 
 the subject, the introduction of which in the previous narrative 
 
 127
 
 128 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 would have marred the view of the question then under exam- 
 ination. Thus the origin of trade unionism in Ireland has not 
 been dealt with, although in the course of our study we have 
 shown that the Irish trades were well organised. Nor are we 
 now prepared to enter upon that subject. Perhaps at some more 
 propitious moment we will be enabled to examine the materials 
 bearing upon the matter, and trace the growth of the institution 
 in Ireland. Sufficient for the present to state that Trades Guilds 
 existed in Ireland as upon the Continent and England, during 
 Roman Catholic, pre-Reformation days; that after the Reforma- 
 tion those Trade Guilds became exclusively Protestant, and even 
 anti-Catholic, within the English Pale; that they continued to 
 refuse admission to Catholics even after the passage of the 
 Catholic Emancipation Act, and that these old Trade Guilds were 
 formally abolished by law in 1840. But the Catholic and Protes- 
 tant workmen who were excluded from guild membership (Epis- 
 copalians only being eligible) did nevertheless organise themselves, 
 and it was their trade unions which dominated the labour world 
 to the wrath of the capitalists and landlords, and the chagrin of 
 the Governments. One remarkable and instructive feature of 
 their organisation in town and country was the circumstance that 
 every attempt at political rebellion in Ireland was always pre- 
 ceded by a remarkable development of unrest, discontent, and 
 class consciousness amongst their members, demonstrating clearly 
 that to the mind of the thoughtful Irish worker political and 
 social subjection were very nearly related. In the "Dublin 
 Chronicle," January 28, 1792, there is a record of a great strike 
 of the journeymen tailors of Dublin, in the course of which, it is 
 stated, armed tailors went to the workrooms of Messrs. Miller, 
 Ross Lane, Leet, Merchant's Quay, Walsh, Castle Street, and 
 Ward, Cope Street, attacked certain scabs who were working 
 there, cut off the hands of two, and threw others in the river. 
 In another and later issue of the same journal there is a record 
 of how a few coal porters (dock labourers) were seized by His 
 Majesty's press-gang with the intention of compelling them to 
 serve in the navy, and how the organised quay labourers, on 
 hearing of it, summoned their members, and marching upon the 
 guard-house where the men were detained, attacked it, defeated 
 the guard and released their comrades. In the same paper, Janu- 
 ary 3, 1793, there is a letter from a gentleman resident at Carrick- 
 macross, Co. Monaghan, describing how an armed party of De- 
 fenders paraded through that town on its way to Ardee, how the 
 army was brought out to attack them and a number were killed.
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 129 
 
 On January 24, 1793, another correspondent tells how a battle 
 took place between Bailieborough and Kingscourt, Co. Cavan, 
 "between those deluded persons styling themselves Defenders and 
 a part of the army," when eighteen labourers were killed, five 
 badly wounded, and thirty taken prisoners "and lodged in Cavan 
 gaol." There is also on July 23, 1793, the following account of 
 a battle at Limerick : 
 
 "Last night we hear that an express arrived from Limerick 
 with the following intelligence that on Saturday night a mob 
 of 7 or 8,000 attacked that city and attempted to burn it; that 
 the army, militia and citizens were obliged to join to repel these 
 daring offenders, and to bring the artillery into the streets, and 
 that after a severe and obstinate resistance the insurgents were 
 dispersed with a loss of 140 killed and several wounded." Simi- 
 lar battles between the peasantry and the soldiery, aided by the 
 local landlords, occurred in the county Wexford. 
 
 In the report of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords, 
 1793, speaking of the Defenders (who, as we have stated before, 
 were the organised labourers striving to better their condition by 
 the only means open to them), it says "they first appeared in the 
 county Louth," "soon spread through the counties of Meath, 
 Cavan, Monaghan and parts adjacent," and "their measures ap- 
 pear to have been concerted and conducted with the utmost 
 secrecy and a degree of regularity and system not usual to people 
 in such mean condition, and as if directed by men of a superior 
 rank." 
 
 All this, be it noted, was on the eve of the revolutionary 
 struggle of 1798, and shows how the class struggles of the Irish 
 workers formed the preparatory school for the insurrectionary 
 effort. 
 
 The long drawn out struggle of the fight against tithes and 
 the militant spirit of the Irish trades and Ribbonmen we have 
 already spoken of as providing the revolutionary material for 
 1848, which Smith O'Brien and his followers were unfit to use. 
 For the next revolutionary period, that known as the Fenian Con- 
 spiracy, the same coincidence of militant class feeling and revo- 
 lutionary nationalism is deeply marked. Indeed, it is no wonder 
 that the real nationalists of Ireland, the Separatists, have always 
 been men of broad human sympathies and intense democracy, for 
 it has ever been in the heart of the working class at home they 
 found their most loyal support, and in the working class abroad 
 their most resolute defenders. 
 
 The Fenian Brotherhood was established in 1857, according
 
 130 
 
 to the statement of Mr. John O'Mahony, one of its two chiefs 
 James Stephens being the other. Of O 'Mahony Mr John 
 O'Leary says in his "Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, 
 that he was an advanced democrat of Socialistic opinions and 
 W A O'Connor, in his "History of the Irish People, declares 
 that both O'Mahony and Stephens had entered into the secret 
 societies of France, O'Mahony "from mere sympathy." A fur 
 ther confirmation of this view of the character of the men 
 sponsible for the Fenian Society is found in a passage in a journs 
 established in the interests of Fenianism, and published m London 
 after the suppression of the organ of the Brotherhood, the Irish 
 People " in Dublin, in 1865. This journal, the "Flag of Ireland, 
 quoting from the Paris correspondent of the "Irishman," says 
 on October 3, 1868 : 
 
 "It took its rise in the Latin Quarter of this city when John 
 O'Mahony, Michael Doheny, and James Stephens were here in 
 exile after '48. 
 
 "This was the triumvirate from whose plotting brains the 
 idea of Fenianism sprung. O'Mahony, deep in lore of Ireland 
 and loving her traditions, found its name for the new society; 
 Doheny, with his dogged, acute and vigorous character, stamped 
 it with much of the force that helped it into life, but to Stephens 
 is due the direction it took in line of sympathy with the move- 
 ments of the Revolution on the Continent. He saw that the Irish 
 question was no longer a question of religion ; his common sense 
 was too large to permit him to consider it a question of race 
 even; he felt it was the old struggle which agitated France at 
 the end of last century, transferred to new ground ; the opposing 
 forces were the same, with this difference, that in Ireland the 
 people had not the consolation in all cases of saluting their tyrants 
 as their countrymen." 
 
 The circumstance that the general chosen by Stephens to be 
 the Commander-in-chief of the Irish Republican army was no 
 less a character than General Cluseret, afterwards Commander- 
 in-chief of the Federals during the Commune of Paris, says 
 more for the principles of the men who were the brains of the 
 Fenian movement than any testimony of subordinates. 
 
 Coincident with the inception of Fenianism, 1857, com- 
 menced in Ireland a determined labour agitation which culmi- 
 nated in a vigorous movement amongst the baker journeymen 
 against night labour and in favour of a reduction of the working 
 hours. Great meetings were held all over the country during the 
 years 1858-60, in which the rights of labour were most vehemently
 
 131 
 
 asserted and the tyranny of the Irish employers exposed and 
 denounced. In Wexford, Kilkenny, Clonmel and Water ford 
 night-work was abolished and day labour established. The move- 
 ment was considered so serious that a Parliamentary Committee 
 sat to investigate it; from its report, as quoted by Karl Mam 
 in his great work on "Capital," we take the following excerpts: 
 
 "In Limerick, where the grievances of the journeymen are 
 demonstrated to be excessive, the movement has been defeated 
 by the opposition of the master bakers, the miller bakers being 
 the greatest opponents. The example of Limerick led to a retro- 
 gression in Ennis and Tipperary. In Cork, where the strongest 
 possible demonstration of feeling took place, the masters by exer- 
 cising their power of turning the men out of employment, have 
 defeated the movement. In Dublin the master bakers have 
 offered the most determined opposition to the movement, and by 
 discountenancing as much as possible the journeymen promoting 
 it, have succeeded in leading the men into acquiescence in Sunday 
 work and night work, contrary to the convictions of the men. 
 
 "The Committee believe that the hours of labour are limited 
 by natural laws which cannot be violated with impunity. That 
 for master bakers to induce their workmen by the fear of losing 
 employment, to violate their religious convictions and their better 
 feelings, to disobey the laws of the land, and to disregard publk 
 opinion, is calculated to provoke ill-feeling between workmen and 
 masters and affords an example dangerous to religion, morality 
 and social order. The Committee believe that any constant work 
 beyond twelve hours a day encroaches on the domestic and pri- 
 vate life of the working man, and so leads to disastrous moral 
 results, interfering with each man's home, and the discharge of 
 his family duties as a son, a brother, a husband, a father. That 
 work beyond twelve hours has a tendency to undermine the health 
 of the working man, and so leads to premature old age and 
 death, to the great injury of families of working men thus de- 
 prived of the care and support of the head of the family when 
 most required." 
 
 The reader will observe that the cities where this movement 
 was strongest, where the workers had made the strongest fight 
 and class feeling was highest were the places where Fenianism 
 developed the most; it is a matter of historical record that 
 Dublin, Cork, Wexford, Clonmel, Kilkenny, Wa-erford and 
 Ennis and their respective counties were the most responsive to 
 the message of Fenianism. Richard Pigott, who, before he suc- 
 cumbed to the influence of the gold offered by the London
 
 1J2 
 
 "Times," had a long and useful career as responsible figurehead 
 for advanced journals in Ireland, and who in that capacity ac- 
 quired a thorough knowledge of the men and movements for 
 whom he was sponsor, gives in his "Recollections of an Irish 
 Journalist" this testimony as to the personnel of Fenianism, a 
 testimony, it will be observed, fully bearing out our analysis of 
 the relation between the revolutionary movement and the work- 
 ing class : 
 
 "It is notorious that Fenianism was regarded with uncon- 
 cealed aversion, not to say deadly hatred, by not merely the land- 
 lords and the ruling class, but by the Catholic clergy, the middle 
 class Catholics, and the great majority of the farming classes. 
 ft was in fact only amongst the youngest and most intelligent 
 if the labouring class, of the young men of the large towns and 
 cities engaged in the humbler walks of mercantile life, of the 
 irtisan and working classes that it found favour." 
 
 Karl Marx quotes from "Reports of the Poor Law In- 
 .>pectors on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin, 
 1870," to show that between the years 1849 and 1869, while 
 wages in Ireland had risen fifty or sixty per cent., the prices of 
 all necessaries had more than doubled. He gives the following 
 extract from the official accounts of an Irish workhouse : 
 
 AVERAGE WEEKLY COST PER HEAD 
 
 Year ended 
 
 Provisions and 
 Necessaries 
 
 Clothing Total 
 
 29th Sept., 1849 
 1869 
 
 Is. 3y 4 d. 
 
 2s. 7y 4 d. 
 
 3d. 
 
 6d. 
 
 Is. 6^d. 
 3s. l#d. 
 
 These facts demonstrate that in the period during which the 
 Kenian movement obtained its hold upon the Irish masses in the 
 cities the workers were engaged in fierce struggles with their 
 employers, and the price of all necessities of life had increased 
 twofold two causes sufficient to produce revolutionary ferment 
 *ven in a country without the historical justification for revolu- 
 tion possessed by Ireland. Great Britain was also in the throes 
 of a fierce agitation as a result of the terrible suffering of the 
 working class resultant from the industrial crisis of 1866-7. The 
 'Morning Star," a London paper, stated that in six districts of 
 ixmdon 15,000 workmen were in a state of destitution with their 
 families; ''Reynold's Newspaper," on January 20, 1867, quoted
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 133 
 
 from a large poster, which it says was placarded all over London, 
 the words "Fat Oxen, Starving Men the fat oxen from their 
 palaces of glass have gone to feed the rich in their luxurious 
 abode, while the starving poor are left to rot and die in their 
 wretched dens," and commented that "this reminds one of the 
 secret revolutionary associations which prepared the French 
 people for the events of 1789. At this moment, while English 
 workmen with their wives and children are dying of cold and 
 hunger, there are millions of English gold the produce of Eng- 
 lish labour being invested in Russian, Spanish, Italian and other 
 foreign enterprises." And the London "Standard" of April 5, 
 1866, stated : "A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday 
 in one part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thou- 
 sands of the East End did not parade with their black flags 
 en masse the human torrent was imposing enough. Let us re- 
 member what these people suffer. They are dying of hunger. 
 That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 ot them. 
 In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, 
 are packed next door +o the most enormous accumulation of 
 wealth the world ever >aw cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 
 helpless, starving people. These thousands are now breaking in 
 upon the other quarters." 
 
 This state of hunger and revolt in Great Britain offers an 
 explanation of the curious phenomenon mentioned by A. M. 
 Sullivan in "New Ireland," that the Home Rule or constitutional 
 journals held their own easily in Ireland itself against the "Irish 
 People," but in Great Britain the Fenian journal simply swept 
 the field clear of its Irish competitors. The Irish working class 
 exiles in Great Britain saw that the nationalist aspirations of 
 their race pointed to the same conclusion, called for the same 
 action, as the material interests of their class viz., the complete 
 overthrow of the capitalist government and the national and social 
 tyranny upon which it rested. Any thoughtful reader of the 
 poems of J. F. O'Donnell such, for instance, as "An Artisan's 
 Garret," depicting in words that burn the state of mind of an 
 unemployed Fenian artisan of Dublin beside the bedside of his 
 wife dying of hunger or the sweetly pleading poetry of J. K, 
 Casey (Leo) cannot wonder at the warm reception journals con- 
 taining such teaching met in Great Britain amidst the men and 
 women of Irish race and of a subject class. 
 
 Just as '98 was an Irish expression of the tendencies em- 
 bodied in the first French Revolution, as '48 throbbed in sym- 
 pathy with the democratic and social upheavals on the Continent
 
 134 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 of Europe and England, so Fenianism was a responsive throb 
 in the Irish heart to those pulsations in the heart of the European 
 working class which elsewhere produced the International Work- 
 ing Men's Association. Branches of that Association flourished 
 in Dublin and Cork until after the Paris Commune, and it is an 
 interesting study to trace the analogy between the course of de- 
 velopment of the Socialist movement of Europe after the Com- 
 mune and that of the Irish revolutionary cause after the failure 
 of '67. In both cases we witness the abandonment of insurrec- 
 tionism and the initiation of a struggle in which the revolting 
 class, while aiming at revolution, consistently refuse the arbitra- 
 ment of an armed struggle. When the revolutionary nationalists 
 threw in their lot with the Irish Land League, and made the land 
 struggle the basis of their warfare, they were not only placing 
 themselves in touch once more with those inexhaustible quarries 
 of material interests from which all the great Irish statesmen 
 from St. Laurence O'Toole to Wolfe Tone drew the stones upon 
 which they built their edifice of a militant patriotic Irish organiza- 
 tion, but they were also, consciously or unconsciously, placing 
 themselves in accord with the principles which underlie and 
 inspire the modern movement of labour. This fact was recog- 
 nised at the time by most dispassionate onlookers. Thus in a 
 rather amusing book published in France in 1887, under the title 
 of "Chez Paddy," Englished as "Paddy at Home," the author, 
 a French aristocrat, Baron E. de Mandat-Crancey, giving an 
 account of a tour in Ireland in 1886, in the course of which 
 he made the acquaintance of many of the Land League leaders, 
 as well as visited at the mansions of a number of the landlords, 
 makes this comment: 
 
 "For in fact, however they may try to dissimulate it, the 
 Irish claims, if they do not yet amount to Communism as their 
 avowed object and they may still retain a few illusions upon 
 that point still it is quite certain that the methods employed 
 by the Land League would not be disowned by the most ad- 
 vanced Communists." 
 
 It was a recognition of this fact which induced the "Irish 
 World," the chief advocate of the Land League in America, to 
 carry the sub-title of "American Industrial Liberator," and to 
 be the mouthpiece of the nascent labour movement of those days, 
 as it was also a recognition of this fact which prompted the Irish 
 middle class leaders to abandon the land fight, and to lend their 
 energies to an attempt to focus the whole interest of Ireland 
 upon a Parliamentary struggle as soon as ever a temporary set-
 
 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 135 
 
 back gave them an opportunity to counsel a change of tactics. 
 
 They feared to call into existence a spirit of inquiry into 
 the rights of property which wculd not halt at a negation of the 
 sacredness of fortunes founded upon rent, but might also chal- 
 lenge the rightfulness of fortunes drawn from profit and interest. 
 They instinctively realized that such an inquiry would reveal that 
 there was no fundamental difference between such fortunes ; that 
 they were made, not from land in the one case nor workshops 
 in the other, but from the social subjection of the non-possessing 
 class, compelled to toil as tenants on the land or as employees 
 in workshop or factory. 
 
 For the same reason the Land League (which was founded 
 in 1879 at Irishtown, Co. Mayo, at a meeting held to denounce 
 the exactions of a certain priest in his capacity as a rackrenting 
 landlord) had had at the outset to make headway in Ireland 
 against the opposition of all the official Home Rule Press, and 
 in Great Britain amongst the Irish exiles to depend entirely upon 
 the championship of poor labourers and English and Scottish 
 Socialists. In fact those latter were, for years, the principal 
 exponents and interpreters of Land League principles to the 
 British masses, and they performed their task unflinchingly at 
 a time when the "respectable" moneyed men of the Irish com- 
 munities in Great Britain cowered in dread of the displeasure 
 of their wealthy British neighbours. 
 
 Afterwards, when the rising tide of victorious revolt in 
 Ireland compelled the Liberal Party to give a half-hearted ac- 
 quiescence to the demands of the Irish peasantry; and the Home 
 Rule-Liberal alliance was consummated, the Irish business men 
 in Great Britain came to the front and succeeded in worming 
 themselves into all the places of trust and leadership in the Irish 
 organisations. One of the first and most bitter fruits of that 
 alliance was the use of the Irish vote against the candidates of 
 the Socialist and Labour Parties. Despite the horrified and ener- 
 getic protests of such men as Michael Davitt. the solid phalanx 
 of Irish voters was again and again hurled against the men who 
 had fought and endured suffering, ostracism and abuse for Ireland 
 at a time when the Liberal Government was packing Irish jails 
 with unconvicted Irish men and women. In so manoeuvring to 
 wean the Irish masses in Great Britain away from their old 
 friends, the Socialist and Labour Clubs, and to throw them into 
 the arms of their old enemies, the Liberal capitalists, the Irish 
 bourgeois politicians were very astutely following their class 
 interests, even while they cloaked their action under the name of
 
 136 LABOUR IN IRISH HISTORY 
 
 patriotism. Obviously a union of Irish patriotism and Socialist 
 activity, if furthered and endorsed by Irish organisations in Great 
 Britain, could not long be kept out of, or if introduced could not 
 well be fought in, Ireland. Hence their frantic and illogical 
 endeavour to twist and distort the significance of Irish history", 
 and to put the question of property, its ownership and develop- 
 ment, out of order in all discussions on Irish nationality. 
 
 But that question so dreaded rises again ; it will not down, 
 and cannot be suppressed. The partial success of the Land 
 League has effected a change in Ireland, the portent of which 
 but few realise. Stated briefly, it means that the recent Land 
 Acts, acting contemporaneously with the development of trans- 
 Atlantic traffic, are converting Ireland from a country governed 
 according to the conception of feudalism into a country shaping 
 itself after capitalistic laws of trade. To-day the competition 
 of the trust-owned farms of the United States and the Argentine 
 Republic is a more deadly enemy to the Irish agriculturist than 
 the lingering remnants of landlordism or the bureaucratic official- 
 ism of the British Empire. Capitalism is now the enemy, it 
 reaches across the ocean ; and after the Irish agriculturist has 
 gathered his harvest and brought it to market he finds that a 
 competitor living three thousand miles away under a friendly 
 flag has undersold and beggared him. The merely political heresy 
 under which middle class doctrinaires have for nearly 250 years 
 cloaked the Irish fight for freedom has thus run its course. The 
 fight made by the Irish septs against the English pale and all it 
 stood for; the struggle of the peasants and labourers of the 18th 
 and 19th centuries ; the great social struggle of all the ages will 
 again arise and re-shape itself in Ireland to suit the new condi- 
 tions. That war which the Land League -fought, and then aban- 
 doned before it was either lost or won, will be taken up by the 
 Irish toilers on a broader field with sharper weapons, and a more 
 comprehensive knowledge of all the essentials of permanent vic- 
 tory. As the Irish septs of the past were accounted Irish or 
 English according as they rejected or accepted the native or 
 foreign social order, as they measured their oppression or free- 
 dom by their loss or recovery of the collective ownership of their 
 lands, so the Irish toilers from henceforward will base their fight 
 for freedom not upon the winning or losing the right to talk in 
 an Irish Parliament, but upon their progress towards the mastery 
 of those factories, workshops and farms upon which a people's 
 bread and liberties depend. 
 
 As we have again and again pointed out, the Irish question
 
 137 
 
 is a social question, the whole age-long fight of the Irish people 
 against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis into a 
 fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of produc- 
 tion, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The 
 people or the invaders ; and if the invaders, which set of them 
 the most recent swarm of land thieves, or the sons of the thieves 
 of a former generation? These were the bottom questions of 
 Irish politics, and all other questions were valued or deprecated 
 in the proportion to which they contributed to serve the interests 
 of some of the factions who had already taken their stand in this 
 fight around property interests. Without this key to the meaning 
 of events, this clue to unravel the actions of "great men," Irish 
 history is but a welter of unrelated facts, a hopeless chaos of 
 sporadic outbreaks, treacheries, intrigues, massacres, murders, 
 and purposeless warfare. With this key all things become under 
 standable and traceable to their primary origin ; without this key 
 the lost opportunities of Ireland seem such as to bring a blush to 
 the cheek of the Irish worker; with this key Irish history is a 
 lamp to his feet in the stormy paths of to-day. Yet plain as this 
 is to us to-day, it is undeniable that for two hundred years at 
 least all Irish political movements ignored this fact, and were 
 conducted by men who did not look below the political surface. 
 These men to arouse the passions of the people invoked the mem- 
 ory of social wrongs, such as evictions and famines, but for these 
 wrongs proposed only political remedies, such as changes in taxa- 
 tion or transference of the seat of Government (class rule) from 
 one country to another. Hence they accomplished nothing, be- 
 cause the political remedies proposed were unrelated to the social 
 subjection at the root of the matter. The revolutionists of the 
 past were wiser, the Irish Socialists are wiser to-day. In their 
 movement the North and the South will again clasp hands, again 
 will it be demonstrated, as in '98, that the pressure of a common 
 exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant 
 working class, earnest champions of civil and religious liberty out 
 of Catholics, and out of both a united Social democracy.
 
 IN THIS CRITICAL PERIOD OF IRELAND'S 
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 Katharine Hughes's New Book 
 
 "IRELAND" 
 
 A Few Quotations From The Reviewers 
 
 "The Evening Post" 
 
 If, under the whippings of our daily press, one in- 
 clines to believe that Ireland at the moment is a 
 schemer, a malingerer, a fattener on other (and bet- 
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 She apparently worked with care, inclining to sup- 
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 drawn from English rather than from Irish sources. 
 
 "America" 
 
 The studies of "Ireland" . . . form one of the 
 best works that have yet appeared on that subject
 
 and is well worth reading by all who wish to secure 
 a clear, logical, and comprehensive knowledge of 
 the political, social and economical conditions of 
 Ireland today. The work has little sentiment, but 
 abounds in interesting and convincing facts that are 
 taken from sources that cannot be questioned. The 
 booklet deserves a wide circulation. 
 
 "The Gaelic American" 
 
 A rich fund of material about Irish political, eco- 
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 down the little book with the feeling that nothing 
 essential to a proper understanding of Ireland's po- 
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 While the case is stated briefly it is stated thor- 
 oughly. 
 
 Miss Hughes studied Irish conditions during 
 visits made to Ireland while she was Assistant to 
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 she saw convinced her that "England is lying across 
 the vitals of Ireland" and that in addition for seven 
 and a half centuries the former has been slowly 
 disemboweling the latter. 
 
 The book contains a brief but illuminating survey 
 of conditions in Ireland since the Irish Parliament 
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 1800. It describes how Ireland was made to share
 
 England's debt with the result that taxation in- 
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 ished until Ireland has today only about half the 
 number of inhabitants that it had fifty years 
 ago. . . . 
 
 Part of the book is devoted to a fine description 
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 Sinn Fein constitution is given in an appendix. 
 
 "Ireland" is a book which should be in the hands 
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 erty, every seeker after the truth about Ireland, 
 whether he or she be Irish or American, and every 
 citizen who believes that nations should not be 
 governed against the will of their inhabitants by 
 brute force. 
 
 "The Monitor" 
 
 In a splendid review of over two columns con- 
 cludes with: "Now, whatever Ireland elects but 
 hold ! If you want to know clearly, thoroughly, once 
 for all what Ireland does elect then read the pam- 
 phlet 'Ireland 1 by Katherine Hughes." 
 
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 The remarkable book is from the Donnelly Press, 
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