If the Scotch workman in London and the Scotch worker on the Clyde and
the Welsh miner in the coalfields round Cardiff felt it, much more must
the Irish docker; and it must never be forgotten that there is a triple
link of blood, interest, and common sympathy between the workers of the
two islands; and one has only to glance at the way the respective labour
Presses of the two countries kept in touch with each other for the past
year to realize how much an English labour problem the Irish political
problem really was.

This brings me to some further factors which can be discerned in the
rising--firstly, the fear of conscription; secondly, the hatred of
militarism; and, thirdly, the chronic loathing of Castle government.

With regard to conscription, there has always been a dread of it. They
had seen it come in England, and had watched anxiously the way it had
been introduced and applied, and the farce of the Tribunals, whose
action, in the words of the _Freeman's Journal_, would have been
sufficient to cause a revolution had they behaved in Ireland as they
behaved in England.

All during the summer months they had seen the cloud gathering, and
Irishmen caught by a legal technicality and forced into the system; but
all this came to a climax when the cry of cowardice was raised at
Liverpool, as five hundred young emigrants, who would never have been
helped to live for Ireland in their own country, were suddenly held up
by order of the Cunard Company--which, as a matter of fact, owed nearly
its whole prosperity to its coffin boats of the Famine days, and whose
glaringly seductive posters had emptied Ireland, neither for America nor
Ireland's sake, but purely to get the passage-money of the emigrants who
were now asked to go instead and "help England to give Constantinople to
Russia, even if it cost them their lives."

For they had a way of blunt speaking, these men whose everyday life was
an heroic fight for the home against "Hun" poverty.

When the cry of "cowardice" was raised, however, it was high time to
protest, and none voiced that protest so well as Dr. O'Dwyer, the Bishop
of Limerick, who wrote the following letter to the _Munster News_:--

"SIR,--The treatment which the poor Irish emigrant lads have received at
Liverpool is enough to make any Irishman's blood boil with anger and
indignation. What wrong have they done to deserve insults and outrage at
the hands of a brutal English mob? They do not want to