an important one. The labour idea in
Ireland has not arrived. It is in process of "becoming," and when labour
problems are mentioned in this country a party does not come to the
mind, but two men only--they are Mr. Larkin and James Connolly, and they
are each in their way exceptional and curious men.

There is another class who implicate labour, and they do so because it
enables them to urge that as well as being grasping and nihilistic,
Irish labour is disloyal and treacherous.

The truth is that labour in Ireland has not yet succeeded in organising
anything--not even discontent. It is not self-conscious to any extent,
and, outside of Dublin, it scarcely appears to exist. The national
imagination is not free to deal with any other subject than that of
freedom, and part of the policy of our "masters" is to see that we be
kept busy with politics instead of social ideas. From their standpoint
the policy is admirable, and up to the present it has thoroughly
succeeded.

One does not hear from the lips of the Irish workingman, even in
Dublin, any of the affirmations and rejections which have long since
become the commonplaces of his comrades in other lands. But on the
subject of Irish freedom his views are instantly forthcoming, and his
desires are explicit, and, to a degree, informed. This latter subject
they understand and have fabricated an entire language to express it,
but the other they do not understand nor cherish, and they are not
prepared to die for it.

It is possibly true that before any movement can attain to really
national proportions there must be, as well as the intellectual ideal
which gives it utterance and a frame, a sense of economic misfortune to
give it weight, and when these fuse the combination may well be
irresistible. The organised labour discontent in Ireland, in Dublin, was
not considerable enough to impose its aims or its colours on the
Volunteers, and it is the labour ideal which merges and disappears in
the national one. The reputation of all the leaders of the insurrection,
not excepting Connolly, is that they were intensely patriotic Irishmen,
and also, but this time with the exception of Connolly, that they were
not particularly interested in the problems of labour.

The great strike of two years ago remained undoubtedly as a bitter and
lasting memory with Dublin labour--perhaps, even, it was not so much a
memory as a hatred. Still, it was not hatred of England which was evoked
at tha