not break the
spirit that was behind it. Some men will say the Rebellion of Easter
Week had its beginnings in the Dublin Strike of 1913; others that
Carson was the cause of it; whilst many ascribe it to the criminal
folly and short-sightedness of Redmond and his followers, who allowed
British politicians to bully and betray them at every point and made
Parliamentarianism of their type intolerable to the young soul of
Ireland. History in due course will assign each its due meed of
responsibility, but of this we are certain, that the men who came out
in Easter Week and bore arms were largely the men whom Larkin had
organised and whom Connolly's doctrine had influenced. From the point
of view of mental calibre Connolly was by far the abler man. He was
not as well known outside Labour circles in Dublin as he has come to
be since his death, but to anyone who has given any thought or study
to his life and writings he must appear a person of single-minded
purpose, great ability, ordered methods of thought and a fine
Nationalism, which was rooted in the principles of Wolfe Tone and the
United Irishmen. Connolly preached the gospel of social democracy with
a fine and almost inspired fervour. He was an internationalist in the
full Socialist sense, but seeing the harrowing sights that beset him
every day in the abominable slums of Dublin City he was an Irish
Reformer above all else. Mr Robert Lynd writes of him, in his
Introduction to Connolly's _Labour in Ireland_:

"To Connolly Dublin was in one respect a vast charnel-house of the
poor. He quotes figures showing that in 1908 the death-rate in Dublin
City was 23 per 1000 as compared with a mean death-rate of 15.8 in the
seventy-six largest English towns. He then quotes other figures,
showing that while among the professional and independent classes of
Dublin children under five die at a rate of 0.9 per 1000 of the
population of the class the rate among the labouring poor is 27.7. To
acquiesce in conditions such as are revealed in these figures is to be
guilty of something like child murder. We endure such things because
it is the tradition of comfortable people to endure them. But it would
be impossible for any people that had its social conscience awakened
to endure them for a day. Connolly was the pioneer of the social
conscience in Ireland."

In the chapter on "Labour in Dublin" Connolly himself thus refers to
the Dublin Strike and what it meant:

"Out of all this turmoil