and fighting the Irish working class movement
has evolved, is evolving, amongst its members a higher conception of
mutual life, a realisation of their duties to each other and to
society at large, and are thus building for the future a way that
ought to gladden the hearts of all lovers of the race. In contrast to
the narrow, restricted outlook of the Capitalist class and even of
certain old-fashioned trade unionists, with their perpetual insistence
upon 'rights,' it insists, almost fiercely, that there are no rights
without duties, and the first duty is to help one another. This is,
indeed, revolutionary and disturbing, but not half as much as would be
a practical following out of the moral precepts of Christianity."

Here we get some measure of the man and of his creed. To the part he
played in the Easter Week Rebellion I must refer in its own proper
place. That the Dublin Strike and its consequences had a profound
effect on later events, this quotation from "AE" will show. In a famous
"open letter" to the employers he declared:

"The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you and will be
always brooding and scheming to strike a fresh 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 blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the
social order."

The poet oftentimes has the vision to see in clear outline what the
politician and the Pharisee cannot even glimpse.

At any rate this may be asserted, that from the year of the Dublin
Strike dates the uprise of Labour in Ireland. Connolly became a martyr
for his principles, whilst Larkin has been hunted from one end of the
world to the other because of his doctrines, undoubtedly of an
extremely revolutionary character. But able men have arisen to
continue the work they inaugurated and Labour in Ireland has now
formally insisted on its right to be a political Party as well as a
social organisation. It no longer circumscribes its aspirations to
purely industrial issues and social concerns, but it takes its place
on the stage of larger happenings and events and is like to play a
great part in the moulding of the Ireland that will arise when the old
vicious systems and forms are shattered for evermore.

CHAPTER XXIII

CARSON, ULSTER AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

With the nearness of t