In endeavouring to get at the 'true inwardness' of the industrial situation in Ireland at this moment, and to 'place' the spirit of Larkinism in its relation to the more traditionally intransigeant movement, it will be necessary to give a brief résumé of the conflicting atmospheres in which the Capital and Labour drama is being played in that country. The problem here is, of course, complicated by the presence of two or three factors-extrinsic, admittedly, to the essence of it, but generally governing its issues up till now-which are absent from the controversy in England. For one thing, the farm, more than the factory, decides the existing prosperity of the people of Ireland; for another, twothirds of both the town and rural workers, as we have said, are consumed with a now flaming, now smouldering, opposition to the hand that rules them; and for a third, the nominally religious susceptibilities of the North and South have for centuries prevented anything in the nature of a permanent Labour fusion.

As regards the first factor, it is pretty safe to assert that Socialism (on a collectivist basis, at any rate) is scarcely likely to win the suffrages of a peasantry who have seen their condition improve from serfdom to proprietorship. Adapting Connolly, we might say that they would be almost sure to regard it as the most foreign thing' ever proposed to them. Originally, the land of Ireland was split up into communes under the chiefs of the clans; and so it remained until taken and parcelled out by a succession of invaders. Several attempts were made in the early part of the 19th century (one of which is described in the 'Quarterly Review' for November, 1819) to revive the communal system in a small way, both for farming and general industry. It is not unnatural that our Socialist author should refer to these experiments approvingly, seeing that many of them were the direct outcome of Robert Owen's propaganda mission in Dublin on behalf of the new creed. Other writers (notably P. D. Kenny, in his Economics for Irishmen '), without condemning the earlier communism of the Irish, have anything but admiration for such survivals of its effects as may still be detected in the shiftlessness and lack of initiative of large numbers of the agricultural population. Perhaps

it is too severe to sum up the agrarian situation in Ireland at any time as a combination of 'communism, cupidity, scoundrelism of all kinds' (the Encyclopædia Britannica's' description of it during the forty years before the Union); but there is no doubt that some of the worst features of communism-mixed, of course, with the demoralisation caused by English misrule-have bitten deep into the character of the Irish peasant. This is far, however, from saying that the gospel of Socialism --even of Larkinism-with its denunciation of private property in the means of production, has any attractions for him. The great stumblingblock for Socialists has always been the man on the land'; and where, as in Ireland, individual ownership-if only of a 'farm' six yards by three in area, the size of some of the 'holdings' in Connaught is more and more aspired to, the economic doctrines which may appeal to the mechanic have little or no weight. The recent revolt, then, so far as it affected the farming sections of the community, was a revolt against the 'hated Sassenach' rather than against the inequalities of landed proprietorship.

The racial and religious factors in the industrial imbroglio of the towns are intertwined. Mr Bernard Shaw has said that England in Ireland is the Pope's policeman.' But it is equally true that the Pope in Ireland has often been England's policeman-with Good King William of Immortal Memory coming in as a somewhat less effective guardian of the status quo. At various periods in the last two centuries of Irish history the ferment of international events has tended to subdue the so-called religious quarrel between the two factions; and it has seemed as though the labouring men of both North and South were about to make a common stand against the evils of their economic condition. The most notable instance of such a fraternisation occurred, as Connolly shows in his book, during, and immediately after, the French Revolution. In the midst of the Republican ardour disseminated in Ireland by that event, the Society of United Irishmen, led by Wolfe Tone, came into being and, building on the principles laid down in the Contrat Social,' welded together both Catholics and Protestants in a fierce determination to overthrow the oppression of the aristocratic and

manufacturing interests. The following passages from 'Labour in Irish History' are worth quoting, not only for their description of the state of feeling then, but also for the bearing they have on the situation now:

'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 disappointment, to meet at last by the unifying waters of a common suffering

...

"The Protestant workers saw in it [the French upheaval] 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.'

The union of the two democracies' culminated for a moment in the Rebellion of '98, though the Protestants of the North soon withdrew, and the movement became purely sectarian. Two years later the Act of Union damped down the industrial fires for a time; and once more the anti-English nature of Irish insurrectionism became accentuated, even the Emmet conspiracy of 1802 being more Separatist than Socialist in character.

From this time onwards the battle of employers and employed (and unemployed) was to be fought out against a varying background of civil and religious disability, famine, feud, and the ever-recurrent agitation for Repeal. This atmosphere, as was said at the beginning, has undoubtedly militated in some degree against such a steady growth of Trade Unionism among the workers of Ireland as we find among the workers of England. Economic servitude and political helotry combined have clouded the issue. Pitiable as their condition has been, and is, the poor of Dublin have shown a remarkable disposition on occasions to rally round the 'Patriot' in preference to the Social Revolutionist, even when the former has been either hostile or indifferent

to their claims. For all that, the principle of workingclass cohesion for industrial objects has been eagerly grasped, if not persistently carried out; and, even so far back as 1824, we read that the artisans of Dublin were perfectly organised, and that many of the employers were already beginning to complain of the tyranny of the Trade Unions. The two democracies,' in response to the appeal of Chartism, drew together again during the five or six years that preceded the famine of 1847-9. Irish Chartist associations sprang up all over the country; and probably at no time before or since has there been such a zealous desire among the workers of Ireland to ally themselves, not only with their fellows of a different faith, but also with the revolutionists in England and on the Continent. Internationalism was very much in the air in the early forties; and the Irish industrial population, instructed by such men as Feargus O'Connor, John Mitchell and James Fintan Lalor, gave a ready acceptance to the programme of joint revolutionary action on the part of the democracies.

For the rest of the century the social outbreaks which attained to any magnitude were almost wholly confined to the agrarian districts, and need not be touched on here. The misery, degradation and filthy poverty of the Dublin poor resulted now and then in spasmodic and easily-suppressed strikes. But the spirit of patient, far-seeing organisation on Trade Union lines, which characterises the English and Scottish Labour movement, was conspicuously missing. 'Patriotism,' whether of the 'clean-cut' or 'constitutional' brand, had come to its own again, ruled every debate, and coloured every dispute. The generally advancing prosperity of Belfast served to intensify the estrangement between the Unionist and the Nationalist workers, which the latters' uncompromising adherence to their Home Rule notions had now made once more such a dominating factor in the situation. Irish capitalism, whether Papist or Protestant, was only too plainly drawing away from the fundamental 'Cause,' and leaving the rags and bones of the religious controversy to the groundlings while it got on with more important concerns.

Meanwhile, the housing, feeding and industrial conditions of the poorer workers in the capital city cried to

Heaven for redress. One need not sport the ultrarevolutionary colours in order to condemn the callous and inhuman way in which the slum-dwellers have been crushed by the iron heel of commercial competition and greed. Maxim Gorky's 'Creatures that once were men'-and women-could be applied aptly enough to large numbers of the ugly, dirty, stunted, twisted objects whom one meets shuffling along, or sitting forlornly in the doorways of the evil-smelling, pestiferous courts which make Dublin one of the minor plague-spots of the world. Why are the people thus? Many things have conspired to keep them so. The migration of the aristocracy, the lack of industries on a large scale, the tenement system, the iniquitous rack-renting of rooms, drink, a supine Corporation, scandalously low wages, their own natural ingrained laziness-all these nauseous elements contribute to the squalor of the poor of Dublin. But, though personal habits, superstitions and outworn sentiments have much to do with their condition, the economic cause is at the root of it all. An irrational distribution of labour, a mal-distribution of wealth-that is the main reason of poverty anywhere. In Dublin it stares at one. Two significant events-the Larkinite rising and the Sinn Fein rebellion-in the last four years have removed neither the cause nor the effect; but in supplementing each other to a certain degree they succeeded in throwing a strong light, the one on the evils of unrestricted capitalism in Ireland, and the other on the unabated desire of the 'irreconcilables' to snatch (if possible) a victory for patriotism and socialism at the same time.

Not that, as we have said, the Sinn Fein Rebellion of 1916 had any necessary connexion with, or was a direct corollary of, the Larkinite rising of three years before. That rising was anti-capitalist, both in its origin and objects; and only took on an anti-Governmental tinge after its needlessly violent suppression. The most impartial student of the facts will admit that the strikers had one of the strongest cases in the world. Even the 'Irish Times' was forced to agree that Larkinism was a 'revolt against intolerable conditions of life'; and even William Martin Murphy, perhaps the most prominent of the Dublin employers at whom the strikes