What's The Matter With Ireland? Part 5

The Irish Labor party has been accused of accepting Russian roubles, of hiding bags of bolshevik gold in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Liberty Hall. Whether it has taken Russian gold or not, it is frankly desirous of possessing the Russian form of government. James Connolly, who is largely responsible for the present Labor party in Ireland, was, like Lenin and Trotsky, a Marxian socialist, and worked for government by the proletariat. The Irish Labor party celebrated the Russian revolution by calling a "bolshevik" meeting and cheering under a red flag in the a.s.sembly room of the Mansion House.

And in its last congress, it reaffirmed its "adherence to the principles of freedom, democracy, and peace enunciated in the Russian revolution."

How strong are the revolutionaries? The Irish Labor party is new but it already contains about 300,000 members.[1] It plans to include every worker from the "white collar" to the "m.u.f.fler" labor. And the laborers alone make up seven-eighths of the population. For while there are just 252,000 members of the professional and commercial cla.s.ses, there are 4,137,000 who are in agricultural, industrial and indefinite cla.s.ses[2]--most of the farmers are held to be laborers because outside the great estates, holdings average at thirty acres and are worked by the holders themselves.[3]

There's the revolutionary rub. The Irish farmers make up the largest body of workers in Ireland. The Irish farmer sweated and bled for his land.

Would he yield it now for nationalization? I put the question up to William O'Brien, the lame, never-smiling tailor who is secretary of the Irish Labor party. He said that the farm hand should be taken into consideration.

The farm hand would profit by nationalization. At present he is condemned to slavery. At a hiring fair--called a "slave market" by the labor unions--he stands between the mooing cows and snorting pigs and offers his services for sale for as little as $100 a year. He may wish to get more money. But his employer is also very often his landlord. What happens? In the spring of 1919, 35,000 farm hands went on strike. Lord Bellew of Ballyragget and Lord Powerscourt of Enniskerry used the eviction threat to get the men back to work, and in Rhode, evictions actually took place.

The small farmer on bad land would profit by re-distribution. Many such live in the west and northwest of Ireland. Take a farmer of Donegal. There there's stony, boggy land. Fires must be built about the stones so that the soil will lose its grip upon them and they may be hauled away to help make fences. Immovable boulders are frequent, so frequent that the soil cannot be ploughed but must be spaded by hand. Seaweed for fertilizer must be plucked from the rocks in the sea, carried up the mountain side and laid black and thick in the sterile brown furrows. Near Dungloe in Donegal, one holding of 600 acres was recently valued at $10.50, and another of 400 at $3.70. So the Labor party is confident of bringing over the farmers to its point of view.

On the whole, it is said, the way of the labor propagandist is easy, for capital in Ireland is very weak. First, there is very little of it. In 1917 the total income tax of the British Isles was 300,000,000; Ireland with one-tenth the population contributed only one-fortieth of the tax. In the same year, the total excess profits tax was 290,000,000 and Ireland's proportion was slightly less than for the income tax.[4] Second, what capital there is, is not effectively organized. The first national commercial a.s.sociation is just forming in Dublin.

Whether the future prove the numerical strength of labor or not, the leaders are determined that labor will be organically strong. It is developing a pyramid form of government. Irish labor fosters the "one big union." In some towns all the labor, from teachers to dock-workers, have already coalesced. These unions select their district heads. The district heads are subsidiary to the general head in Dublin. When each union inside the big union is ready to take over its industry, and their district and general heads are ready to take over government there will be a general strike for this end. The strike will be supported by the army--the Citizens' Army of the workers.

"There you have," said James Connolly, who promoted the one big union, "not only the most effective combination for industrial warfare, but also for the social administration of the future."[5]

"Certainly we mean to take over industry by force if necessary," affirmed Thomas Johnson, treasurer of the Irish Labor party. He is a big-browed man with thick, pompadoured, gray hair, and the aspect of a live professor.

Some people call him the coming leader of Ireland. In answer to my statement that it wouldn't be a very hard job to take over Irish industry, he smiled and said: "That's why we welcome the entrance of outside capital into Ireland. The more industry is developed, the less we will have to do afterward."

THE REPUBLIC FIRST

Labor agrees with Sinn Fein not only that Irish industry must be developed but also that Ireland must have independence. After the national war, the cla.s.s war must come. First freedom from exploitation by capitalistic nations, and then freedom from capitalistic individuals. Many socialists, it is said, do not understand why Ireland should not plunge at once into the cla.s.s war. It was a matter of regret to James Connolly that many of his fellow socialists the world over would never understand his partic.i.p.ation in the rebellion of 1916. Nora Connolly, the smiling boy-like girl who smokes and works by a grate in Liberty Hall, says that on the eve of his execution, when he lay in bed with his leg shattered by a gun wound, her father said to her: "The socialists will never understand why I am here.

They all forget I am an Irishman."

But James Connolly's fellow socialists in Ireland understand "why he was there," They back his partic.i.p.ation in the national war. And they know every Irishman will. So they go to the workers and say: "Jim Connolly died to make Ireland free." Then while the workers cheer, they swiftly show why Connolly advocated the cla.s.s war, too: "Jim Connolly lived to make Ireland free. He believed that the world is for the man who works in it, but in Ireland he saw seven-eighths of the people in the working cla.s.s, and he knew that to these people life means crowded one-room homes, endless Fridays, no schools or virtually none, and churches where resignation is preached to them. So his life was a dangerous fight to organize workers that they might become strong enough to take what is theirs." At Liberty Hall, one is told that the martyr's name is magnetizing the ma.s.ses into the Irish Labor party. And, in order to propagate his ideas, the people are contributing their coppers towards a fund for the permanent establishment of the James Connolly Labor College.

So labor fights for a republic first. At the last general elections it withdrew all its labor party candidates that the Sinn Fein candidates might have a clear field to demonstrate to the world how unified is Irish sentiment in favor of a republic. And at the International Labor and Socialist conference held in Berne in 1919, Cathal O'Shannon, the bright young labor leader who goes about with his small frame swallowed up in an overcoat too big for him, made this declaration:

"Irish labor reaffirms its declaration in favor of free and absolute self-determination of each and every people, the Irish included, in choosing the sovereignty and form of government under which it shall live.

It rejoices that this self-determination has now been a.s.sured to the Jugo-Slavs, Czecho-Slovaks, Alsatians and Lorrainers, as well as to the Finns, Poles, Ukrainians, and now to the Arabs. This is not enough and it is not impartial. To be one and the other, this principle must also be applied in the same sense and under the same conditions to the peoples of Ireland, India, Egypt, and to such other people as have not yet secured the exercise of the inherent right.... Irish labor claims no more and no less for Ireland than for the others."

After the republic, a workers' republic? After Sinn Fein, the Labor party?

Madame Markewicz is high in the councils of both Sinn Fein and Labor. One day, lost in one of her trance-like meditations in which she states her intuitions with absolute disregard of expediency, she said to me:

"Labor will swamp Sinn Fein."

[Footnote 1. Figures supplied by William O'Brien, secretary Irish Labor party and Trade Union congress, 1919.]

[Footnote 2. Census of 1911.]

[Footnote 3. Figures supplied by Department of Agriculture of Ireland, 1919.]

[Footnote 4. Figures read by Thomas Lough, M.P., in House of Commons, May 14, 1918.]

[Footnote 5. "Reconquest of Ireland," By James Connolly. Maunsel and Company. 1917. P. 328.]

IV

AE'S PEACEFUL REVOLUTION

"THE CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH"

It was very dark. I could not find the number. The flat-faced little row of houses was set far back on the green. But at last I mounted some lofty steps, and entered a brown linoleum-covered hallway. In the front parlor sat the hostess. She was like some family portrait with her hair parted and drawn over her ears, with her black taffeta gown surmounted by a cameo-pinned lace collar. She poured tea. In a back parlor whose walls were hung with unframed paintings, a big brown-bearded man was pa.s.sing teacups to women who were lounging in chairs and to men who stood black against the red glow of the grate. The big man was George Russell, the famous AE, poet, painter and philosopher, the "north star of Ireland."

At last he sat down on the edge of a chair--his blue eyes atwinkle as if he knew some good secret of the happy end of human struggling and was only waiting the proper moment to tell. This much he did reveal as he gestured with the pipe that was more often in his hand than in his mouth: it is his belief that all acts purposed for good work out towards good. He gives ear to all sincere radicals, Sinn Feiners and "Reds." But he states that he believes he is the only living pacifist, and disputes the value of b.l.o.o.d.y methods. He advocates the peaceful revolution of co-operation. His powerfully gentle personality has an undoubted effect on the revolutionaries, and while neither element wants to embrace pacifism, both want AE's revolution to go forward with theirs.

His gaiety at the little Sunday evenings which he holds quite regularly, goes far, I am told, towards easing the strain on the taut nerves of the Sinn Fein intellectuals who attend them. On the Sunday evening I was present the subject of jail journals was broached. Darrell Figgis had just written one. In a dim corner of the room was miniatured the ivory face and the red gold beard of the much imprisoned Figgis.

"Why write a jail journal?" queried AE, smiling towards the corner. "The rare book, the book that bibliophiles will pray to find twenty years from now, will be written by an Irishman who never went to jail."

Some one, I think that it was "Jimmy" Stephens, author of "The Crock of Gold," who sat cross-legged on the end of a worn wicker chaise longue and talked with all the facility with which he writes, mentioned the countess's plan of living in the Coombe district. AE returned that as far as he knew the countess was the only member of parliament who felt called upon to live with her const.i.tuency.

Then suddenly the whole room seemed to join a chorus of protest against President Wilson. At the Peace Conference all power was his. He was backed by the richest, greatest nation in the world. But he failed to keep his promise of gaining the self-determination of small nations. Was he yielding to the anti-Irish sentiment brought about by English control of the cables and English propaganda in the United States--was he to let his great republic be intellectually dependent on the ancient monarchy?

"Perhaps," said AE to me after a few meditative puffs of his pipe, "you feel like the American who was with us on a similar occasion a few weeks ago. At last he burst out with: 'It's no conception which Americans have of their president that he should take the place and the duties of G.o.d Omnipotent in the world,'"

One day I went to discuss Irish labor with AE. I climbed up to that most curious of all magazine offices--the _Irish Homestead_ office up under the roof of Plunkett House. It is a semi-circular room whose walls are covered with the lavender and purple people of AE's brush. AE was ambushed behind piles of newspapers, and behind him in a grate filled with smouldering peat blocks sat the black tea kettle. As a reporter, one of the few things for which I am allowed to retain respect is the editorial dead line. So I a.s.sured AE that I would be glad to return when he had finished writing. But with a courtesy that is evidently founded on an inversion of the American rule that business should always come before people, he a.s.sured me that he could sit down at the fire with me at once.

Now I knew that he had great sympathy with laborers. I recalled his terrible letter against Dublin employers in the great strike of 1913 when he foretold that the success of the employers in starving the Dublin poor would necessarily lead to "red ruin and the breaking up of laws.... The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and seeking to strike a new blow. The children will be taught to curse you.

The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they--it is you who are pulling down the pillars of the social order."[1] But I knew, too, that he was opposed to violence, so I wondered what he would say to this:

"A labor leader just told me that it was his belief that industrial revolution would take place in Ireland in two or three years. Labor waits only till it has secured greater unity between the north and south. Then it will take over industry and government by force."

"I had hoped--I am trying to convince the labor leaders here," he said finally, "of the value of the Italian plan for the taking over of industry.

The Italian seaman's union co-operatively purchased and ran boats on which they formerly had been merely workers."

Russia he spoke of for a moment. People shortly over from Russia told him, as he had felt, that the soviet was not the dreadful thing it was made out to be. But a dictatorship of the workers he would not like. He wanted, he said with an upward movement of his big arms, he wanted to be free.

"Now I am for the building of a co-operative commonwealth on co-operative societies. Ireland can and is developing her own industries through co-operation. She is developing them without aid from England and in the face of opposition in Ireland.

"England, you see, is used to dealing with problems of empire--with nations and great metropolises. When we bring her plans that mean life or death to just villages, the matter is too small to discuss. She is bored.

"Ireland offers opposition in the person of the 'gombeen man.' He is the local trader and money lender. And co-operative buying and selling takes away his monopoly of business.

"Paddy Gallagher up in Dungloe in the Rosses will give you an idea of the poverty of the Irish countryside, of the extent that the poverty is due to the gombeen men, 'the bosses of the Rosses,' and of the ability of the co-operative society to develop and create industry even in such a locality.

"Societies like Paddy Gallagher's are springing up all over Ireland. The rapid growth may be estimated from the fact that in 1902 their trade turnover was $7,500,000, and in 1918, $50,000,000. These little units do not merely develop industry; they also bind up the economic and social interests of the people.

"In a few years these new societies and others to be created will have dominated their districts, and political power will follow, and we will have new political ideals based on a democratic control of agriculture and industry, and states and people will move harmoniously to a given end.

"Ireland might attain, by orderly evolution, to a co-operative commonwealth in fifty to two hundred years.