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 God
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 assured 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
assured 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