Chapter XI. An Irish Utopia
Were the hand of Locke to hold from heaven a scheme of government most perfectly adapted to the nature and capabilities of the Irish nation, it would drop to the ground a mere sounding scroll were there no other means of giving it effect than its intrinsic excellence. All true Irishmen agree in what ought to be done, but how to get it done is the question.
—Secret Manifesto (Ireland), 1793
In our last chapter we pointed out how the close of the Napoleonic Wars precipitated a commercial crisis in Great Britain and Ireland, and how in the latter country it also served to intensify the bitterness of the relations existing between landlord and tenant. During the continuance of the wars against Napoleon, agricultural prices had steadily risen, owing to the demand by the British government for provisions to supply its huge army and navy. With the rise in prices, rents had also risen, but when the close of the war cut off the demand, and prices consequently fell, rents did not fall along with them. A falling market and a stationary or rising rent roll could have but one result in Ireland—viz., agrarian war.
The landlords insisted upon their “pound of flesh,”’ and the peasantry organized in secret to terrorize their oppressors and protect themselves. In the year 1829 a fresh cause of popular misery came as a result of the act granting Catholic emancipation. Until that year no Catholic had the right to sit in the English House of Commons, to sit on the bench as a judge, or to aspire to any of the higher posts in the civil, military, or naval services. As the culmination of a long fight against this iniquitous “Protestant Ascendancy,”’ after he had aroused the entire Catholic population to a pitch of frenzy against the injustices inherent in it, the Catholic leader, Daniel O’Connell, presented himself as a candidate for the representation in Parliament of the County Clare, declaring that if elected he would refuse to take the oath then required of a member of Parliament, as it libeled the Catholic religion. In Ireland at that time open voting prevailed, every elector having to declare openly before the clerks of the election and all others who chose to attend, the name of the candidate for whom he voted. In Ireland at that time also, most of the tenants were tenants-at-will, removable at the mere pleasure of the agent or landlord. Hence elections were a combination of farce and tragedy—a farce as far as a means of ascertaining the real wish of the electors was concerned, a tragedy whenever any of the tenants dared to vote against the nominee of the landlord. The suffrage had been extended to all tenants paying an annual rental of forty shillings, irrespective of religious belief, but the terrible power of life and death possessed by the landlord made this suffrage ordinarily useless for popular purposes. Yet when O’Connell appealed to the Catholic peasantry of Clare to brave the vengeance of their landed tyrants, and vote for him in the interests of religious liberty, they nobly responded. O’Connell was elected, and as a result Catholic emancipation was soon afterwards achieved. But the ruling classes and the British government took their revenge by coupling with this reform a bill depriving the smaller tenants of the suffrage, and raising the amount of rent necessary to qualify for a vote to ten pounds.
Up till that time landlords had rather encouraged the growth of population on their estates, as it increased the number of their political adherents, but with the passage of this act of Parliament this reason ceased to exist, and they immediately began the wholesale eviction of their tenantry and the conversion of the arable lands into grazing farms. The Catholic middle, professional, and landed class by Catholic emancipation had the way opened to them for all the snug berths in the disposal of the government; the Catholics of the poorer class as a result of the same act were doomed to extermination, to satisfy the vengeance of a foreign government and an aristocracy whose power had been defied where it knew itself most supreme.
The wholesale eviction of the smaller tenants and the absorption of their farms into huge grazing ranches, thus closing up every avenue of employment to labor, meant death to the agricultural population, and hence the peasantry struck back by every means in their power. They formed lodges of the secret Ribbon Society, made midnight raids for arms upon the houses of the gentry, assembled at night in large bodies and plowed up the grasslands, making them useless for grazing purposes, filled up ditches, terrorized graziers into surrendering their ranches, wounded and killed those who had entered the service of graziers or obnoxious landlords, assassinated agents, and sometimes, in sheer despair, opposed their unarmed bodies to the arms of the military. Civil war of the most sanguinary character was convulsing the country; in May, 1831, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and a huge military force accompanied by artillery marched through Clare to overawe the people, but as he did not stop evictions, nor provide employment for the laborers whom the establishment of grazing had deprived of their usual employment on the farm, the “outrages” still continued. Nor were the professional patriots, or the newly emancipated Catholic rich, any more sympathetic to the unfortunate people. They had opened the way for themselves to place and preferment by using the laborer and cottier-farmer as a lever to overthrow the fortress of religious bigotry and ascendancy, and now when the fight was won, they abandoned these poor coreligionists of theirs to the tender mercies of their economic masters. To the cry of despair welling up from the hearts of the evicted families, crouching in hunger upon the roadside in sight of their ruined homes, to the heartbroken appeal of the laborer permanently disemployed by the destruction of his source of employment; to the wail of famishing women and children, the politicians invariably had but one answer: “Be law-abiding, and wait for the repeal of the Union.” We are not exaggerating. One of the most ardent repealers and closest friends of Daniel O’Connell, Mr. Thomas Steele, had the following manifesto posted up in the marketplace of Ennis and other parts of Clare, addressed to the desperate laborers and farmers:
Unless you desist, I denounce you as traitors to the cause of the liberty of Ireland…. I leave you to the government and the fire and bayonets of the military. Your blood be upon your own souls.
This language of denunciation was uttered to the heroic men and women who had sacrificed their homes, their security, and the hopes of food for their children to win the emancipation from religious tyranny of the well-fed snobs who thus abandoned them. It is difficult to see how a promised repeal of the Union some time in the future could have been of any use to the starving men of Clare, especially when they knew that their fathers had been starved, evicted, and tyrannized over before just as they were after the Union. At that time, however, it was deemed a highly patriotic act to ascribe all the ills that Irish flesh is heir to, to the Union. For example, Mr. O’Gorman Mahon, speaking in the House of Commons, London, on February 8, 1831, hinted that the snowstorm then covering Ireland was a result of the Legislative Union. He said:
Did the Hon. Members imagine that they could prevent the unfortunate men who were under five feet of snow from thinking they could better their condition by a repeal of the Union. It might be said that England had not caused the snow, but the people had the snow on them, and they thought that their connection with England had reduced them to the state in which they now were.
Another patriot, destined in after years to don the mantle of an Irish rebel, William Smith O’Brien, at this time, 1830, published a pamphlet advocating emigration as the one remedy for Irish misery.
On the other hand, a commission appointed by the House of Lords in 1839 to inquire into the causes of the unrest and secret conspiracies amongst the poorer class examined many witnesses in close touch with the life of the peasantry, and elicited much interesting testimony tending to prove that the evil was much more deeply rooted than any political scheme of government, and that its real roots were in the social conditions. Thus examined as to the attitude of the laborers towards the Ribbon Association, one witness declared: “Many look to the association for protection. They think they have no other protection.”
Question: “What are the principal objects they have in view?”
Answer: “To keep themselves upon their lands. I have often heard their conversation, when they say: ‘What good did emancipation do for us? Are we better clothed or fed, or are our children better clothed or fed? Are we not as naked as we were, and eating dry potatoes when we can get them? Let us notice the farmers to give us better food and better wages, and not give so much to the landlord, and more to the workman; we must not be letting them be turning the poor people off the ground.’”
And a Mr. Poulett Scroope, M.P., declared in one of his writings upon the necessity for a poor law:
The tithe question, the Church, the Grand jury laws, the more or fewer Catholics appointed to the Shrievalty or Magistracy—these are all topics for political agitation among idle mobs; but the midnight massacre, the daily plunder, the frequent insurrection, the insecurity of life and property throughout agricultural districts of Ireland, these are neither caused by agitation, nor can be put down with agitation.
It will be thus seen that the opinion of the independent member of Parliament coincided with that of the revolting laborers as to the relative unimportance to the toilers of Ireland of the subjects which then, as now, bulked most largely in the minds of politicians.
This was the state of things political and social in Ireland in the year 1831 and, as it was in Clare the final effective blow had been struck for religious emancipation, so it also was Clare that was destined to see the first effort to discover a peaceful way of achieving that social emancipation without which all other freedom, religious or political, must ever remain as Dead Sea fruit to the palate of labor.
In 1832 the great English socialist, Robert Owen, visited Ireland and held a number of meetings in the Rotunda, Dublin, for the purpose of explaining the principles of socialism to the people of that city. His audiences were mainly composed of the well-to-do inhabitants, as was, indeed, the case universally at that period when socialism was the fad of the rich instead of the faith of the poor. The Duke of Leinster, the Catholic Archbishop Murray, Lord Meath, Lord Cloncurry, and others occupied the platform, and as a result of the picture drawn by Owen of the misery then existing, and the attendant insecurity of life and property amongst all classes, and his outline of the possibilities which a system of socialist cooperation could produce, an association styling itself the Hibernian Philanthropic Society was formed to carry out his ideas. A sum of money was subscribed to aid the prospects of the society, a General Brown giving £1,000, Lord Cloncurry £500, Mr. Owen himself subscribing £1,000, and £100 being raised from other sources. The society was short-lived and ineffectual, but one of the members, Mr. Arthur Vandeleur, an Irish landlord, was so deeply impressed with all he had seen and heard of the possibilities of Owenite socialism that in 1831, when crime and outrage in the country had reached its zenith, and the insecurity of life in his own class had been brought home to him by the assassination of the steward of his estate for unfeeling conduct towards the laborers, he resolved to make an effort to establish a socialist colony upon his property at Ralahine, County Clare. For that purpose he invited to Ireland a Mr. Craig, of Manchester, a follower of Owen, and entrusted him with the task of carrying the project into execution.
Though Mr. Craig knew no Irish, and the people of Ralahine, as a rule, knew no English—a state of matters which greatly complicated the work of explanation—an understanding was finally arrived at, and the estate was turned over to an association of the people organized under the title of the Ralahine Agricultural and Manufacturing Co-operative Association.
In the preamble to the laws of the association, its objects were defined as follows:
The acquisition of a common capital.
The mutual assurance of its members against the evils of poverty, sickness, infirmity, and old age.
The attainment of a greater share of the comforts of life than the working classes now possess.
The mental and moral improvement of its adult members.
The education of their children.
The following paragraphs selected from the rules of the association will give a pretty clear idea of its most important features:
Basis of the Society
That all the stock, implements of husbandry, and other property belong to and are the property of Mr. Vandeleur, until the Society accumulates sufficient to pay for them; they then become the joint property of the Society.
We engage that whatever talents we may individually possess, whether mental or muscular, agricultural, manufacturing, or scientific, shall be directed to the benefit of all, as well by their immediate exercise in all necessary occupations as by communicating our knowledge to each other, and particularly to the young.
That, as far as can be reduced to practice, each individual shall assist in agricultural operations, particularly in harvest, it being fully understood that no individual is to act as steward, but all are to work.
That all the youth, male or female, do engage to learn some useful trade, together with agriculture and gardening, between the ages of nine and seventeen years.
That the committee meet every evening to arrange the business for the following day.
That the hours of labor be from six in the morning till six in the evening in summer, and from daybreak till dusk in winter, with the intermission of one hour for dinner.
That each agricultural laboring man shall receive eightpence, and every woman fivepence per day for their labor (these were the ordinary wages of the country; the secretary, storekeeper, smiths, joiners, and a few others received something more; the excess being borne by the proprietor) which it is expected will be paid out at the store in provisions, or any other article the society may produce or keep there; any other articles may be purchased elsewhere.
That no member be expected to perform any service or work but such as is agreeable to his or her feelings, or they are able to perform; but if any member thinks that any other member is not usefully employing his or her time, it is his or her duty to report it to the committee, whose duty it will be to bring that member’s conduct before a general meeting, who shall have power, if necessary, to expel that useless member.
Distribution and Domestic Economy
That all the services usually performed by servants be performed by the youth of both sexes under the age of seventeen years, either by rotation or choice.
That the expenses of the children’s food, clothing, washing, lodging, and education be paid out of the common funds of the society, from the time they are weaned till they arrive at the age of seventeen, when they shall be eligible to become members.
That a charge be made for the food and clothing, &c., of those children trained by their parents, and residing in their dwelling houses.
That each person occupying a house, or cooking and consuming their victuals therein, must pay for the fuel used.
That no charge be made for fuel used in the public room.
That it shall be a special object for the subcommittee of domestic economy, or the superintendent of that department, to ascertain and put in practice the best and most economical methods of preparing and cooking the food.
That all the washing be done together in the public washhouse; the expenses of soap, labor, fuel, &c., to be equally borne by all the adult members.
That each member pay the sum of one half-penny out of every shilling received as wages to form a fund to be placed in the hands of the committee, who shall pay the wages out of this fund of any member who may fall sick or meet with an accident.
Any damage done by a member to the stock, implements, or any other property belonging to the society to be made good out of the wages of the individual, unless the damage is satisfactorily accounted for to the committee.
Education and Formation of Character
We guarantee each other that the young children of any person dying, whilst a member of this society, shall be equally protected, educated, and cherished with the children of the living members, and entitled, when they arrive at the age of seventeen, to all the privileges of members.
That each individual shall enjoy perfect liberty of conscience, and freedom of expression of opinion, and in religious worship.
That no spirituous liquors of any kind, tobacco, or snuff be kept in the store, or on the premises.
That if any of us should unfortunately have a dispute with any other person, we agree to abide by a decision of the majority of the members, or any person to whom the matter in question may be by them referred.
That any person wishing to marry another do sign a declaration to that effect one week previous to the marriage taking place, and that immediate preparations be made for the erection, or fitting-up of a suitable dwelling house for their reception.
That any person wishing to marry another person, not a member, shall sign a declaration according to the last rule; the person not a member shall then be balloted for, and, if rejected, both must leave the society.
That if the conduct of any member be found injurious to the well-being of the society, the committee shall explain to him or her in what respect his or her conduct shall continue to transgress the rules, such member shall be brought before a general meeting, called for the purpose, and if the complaint be substantiated, three-fourths of the members present shall have power to expel, by ballot, such refractory member.
Government
The society to be governed, and its business transacted, by a committee of nine members, to be chosen half-yearly, by ballot, by all the adult male and female members, the ballot list to contain at least four of the last committee.
The committee to meet every evening and their transactions to be regularly entered into a minute book, the recapitulation of which is to be given at the society’s general meeting by the secretary.
That there be a general weekly meeting of the society; that the treasurer’s accounts be audited by the committee, and read over to the society; that the Suggestion Book be also read at this meeting.
The colony did not use the ordinary currency of the country, but instead adopted a “labor note” system of payment, all workers being paid in notes according to the number of hours worked, and being able to exchange the notes in the store for all the necessities of life. The notes were printed on stiff cardboard about the size of a visiting card, and represented the equivalent of a whole, a half, a quarter, an eighth, and a sixteenth of a day’s labor. There were also special notes printed in red ink representing respectively the labors of a day and a half, and two days.
In his account of the colony, published under the title of History of Ralahine, by Heywood & Sons, Manchester (a book we earnestly recommend to all our readers), Mr. Craig says:
The labor was recorded daily on a “labor sheet,” which was exposed to view during the following week. The members could work or not at their own discretion. If no work, no record, and, therefore, no pay. Practically the arrangement was of great use. There were no idlers.
Further on, he comments:
The advantages of the labor notes were soon evident in the saving of members. They had no anxiety as to employment, wages, or the price of provisions. Each could partake of as much vegetable food as he or she could desire. The expenses of the children from infancy, for food or education, were provided for out of the common fund.
The object should be to obtain a rule of justice, if we seek the law of righteousness. This can only be fully realized in that equality arising out of a community of property where the labor of one member is valued at the same rate as that of another member, and labor is exchanged for labor. It was not possible to attain to this condition of equality at Ralahine, but we made such arrangements as would impart a feeling of security, fairness and justice to all. The prices of provisions were fixed and uniform. A laborer was charged one shilling a week for as many vegetables and as much fruit as he chose to consume; milk was a penny per quart; beef and mutton fourpence, and pork two and one-half pence per pound. The married members occupying separate quarters were charged sixpence per week for rent, and twopence for fuel.
In dealing with Ireland no one can afford to ignore the question of the attitude of the clergy; it is therefore interesting to quote the words of an English visitor to Ralahine, a Mr. Finch, who afterward wrote a series of fourteen letters describing the community, and offered to lay a special report before a select committee of the House of Commons upon the subject. He says:
The only religion taught by the society was the unceasing practice of promoting the happiness of every man, woman, and child to the utmost extent in their power. Hence the Bible was not used as a school book; no sectarian opinions were taught in the schools; no public dispute about religious dogmas or party political questions took place; nor were members allowed to ridicule each other’s religion; nor were there any attempts at proselytism. Perfect freedom in the performance of religious duties and religious exercises was guaranteed to all. The teaching of religion was left to ministers of religion and to the parents; but no priest or minister received anything from the funds of the society. Nevertheless, both Protestant and Catholic priests were friendly to the system as soon as they understood it, and one reason was that they found these sober, industrious persons had now a little to give them out of their earnings, whereas formerly they had been beggars.
Mr. Craig also states that the members of the community, after it had been in operation for some time, were better Catholics than before they began. He had at first considerable difficulty in warding off the attacks of zealous Protestant proselytizers, and his firmness in doing so was one of the chief factors in winning the confidence of the people as well as their support in insisting upon the absolutely non-sectarian character of the teaching.
All disputes between the members were settled by appeals to a general meeting in which all adults of both sexes participated, and from which all judges, lawyers, and other members of the legal fraternity were rigorously excluded.
To those who fear that the institution of common property will be inimical to progress and invention, it must be reassuring to learn that this community of “ignorant” Irish peasants introduced into Ralahine the first reaping machine used in Ireland, and hailed it as a blessing at a time when the gentleman farmers of England were still gravely debating the practicability of the invention. From an address to the agricultural laborers of the County Clare, issued by the community on the introduction of this machine, we take the following passages, illustrative of the difference of effect between invention under common ownership and capitalist ownership:
This machine of ours is one of the first machines ever given to the working classes to lighten their labor and at the same time increase their comforts. It does not benefit any one person among us exclusively, nor throw any individual out of employment. Any kind of machinery used for shortening labor—except used in a cooperative society like ours—must tend to lessen wages, and to deprive working men of employment, and finally either to starve them, force them into some other employment (and then reduce wages in that also), or compel them to emigrate. Now, if the working classes would cordially and peacefully unite to adopt our system, no power or party could prevent their success.
This was published by order of the committee, 21st August, 1833, and when we observe the date we cannot but wonder at the number of things Clare—and the rest of Ireland—has forgotten since.
It must not be supposed that the landlord of the estate on which Ralahine was situated had allowed his enthusiasm for socialism to run away with his self-interest. On the contrary, when turning over his farms to the community he stipulated for the payment to himself of a very heavy rental in kind. We extract from Brotherhood, a Christian socialist journal published in the north of Ireland in 1891, a statement of the rental, and a very luminous summing-up of the lesson of Ralahine, by the editor, Mr. Bruce Wallace, long a hard and unselfish worker for the cause of socialism in Ireland:
The Association was bound to deliver annually, either at Ralahine, Bunratty, Clare, or Limerick, as the landlord might require, free of expense:
Wheat: 320 brls.
Barley: 249 brls.
Oats: 50 brls.
Butter: 10 cwt.
Pork: 30 cwt.
At the prices then prevailing, this amount of produce would be equivalent to about, £900, £700 of rent for the use of natural forces and opportunities, and £200 of interest upon capital. It was thus a pretty stiff tribute that these poor Irish toilers had to pay for the privilege of making a little bit of their native soil fruitful. This tribute was, of course, so much to be deducted from the means of improving their sunken condition. In any future efforts that may be made to profit by the example of Ralahine and to apply again the principles of cooperation in farming, there ought to be the utmost care taken to reduce to a minimum the tribute payable to nonworkers, and if possible to get rid of it altogether. If, despite this heavy burden of having to produce a luxurious maintenance for loungers, the condition of the toilers at Ralahine, as we shall see, was marvelously raised by the introduction of the cooperative principle amongst them, how much more satisfactorily would it have been raised had they been free of that depressing dead weight?
Such is the lesson of Ralahine. Had all the land and buildings belonged to the people, had all other estates in Ireland been conducted on the same principles, and the industries of the country also so organized, had each of them appointed delegates to confer on the business of the country at some common center as Dublin, the framework and basis of a free Ireland would have been realized. And when Ireland does emerge into complete control of her own destinies she must seek the happiness of her people in the extension on a national basis of the social arrangements of Ralahine, or else be but another social purgatory for her poor—a purgatory where the pangs of the sufferers will be heightened by remembering the delusive promises of political reformers.
In the most crime-ridden county in Ireland, this partial experiment in socialism abolished crime; where the fiercest fight for religious domination had been fought, it brought the mildest tolerance; where drunkenness had fed fuel to the darkest passions, it established sobriety and gentleness; where poverty and destitution had engendered brutality, midnight marauding, and a contempt for all social bonds, it enthroned security, peace, and reverence for justice; and it did this solely by virtue of the influence of the new social conception attendant upon the institution of common property bringing a common interest to all. Where such changes came in the bud, what might we not expect from the flower? If a partial experiment in socialism, with all the drawbacks of an experiment, will achieve such magnificent results, what could we not rightfully look for were all Ireland, all the world, so organized on the basis of common property, and exploitation and mastership forever abolished?
The downfall of the association came as a result of the iniquitous land laws of Great Britain refusing to recognize the right of such a community to hold a lease or to act as tenants. The landlord, Mr. Vandeleur, lost his fortune in a gambling transaction in Dublin, and fled in disgrace, unable to pay his debts. The persons who took over the estate under bankruptcy proceedings refused to recognize the community, insisted upon treating its members as common laborers on the estate, seized upon the buildings and grounds, and broke up the Association.
So Ralahine ended. But in the rejuvenated Ireland of the future, the achievement of those simple peasants will be dwelt upon with admiration as a great and important landmark in the march of the human race towards its complete social emancipation. Ralahine was an Irish point of interrogation erected amidst the wildernesses of capitalist thought and feudal practice, challenging both in vain for an answer. Other smaller communities were also established in Ireland during the same period. A Lord Wallscourt established a somewhat similar community on his estate in County Galway; The Quarterly Review of November, 1819, states that there was then a small community existent nine miles outside Dublin, which held thirty acres, supported a priest and a school of three hundred children, had erected buildings, made and sold jaunting cars, and comprised butchers, carpenters, and wheelwrights; the Quakers of Dublin established a Cooperative Woollen Factory, which flourished until it was destroyed by litigation set on foot by dissatisfied members who had been won over to the side of rival capitalists; and a communal home was established and long maintained in Dublin by members of the same religious sect, but without any other motive than that of helping forward the march of social amelioration. We understand that the extensive store of Messrs. Ganly & Sons on Usher’s Quay in Dublin was the home of this community, who lived, worked, and enjoyed themselves in the spacious halls, and slept in the smaller rooms of what is now the property of a capitalist auctioneer.
Chapter XII. A Chapter of Horrors: Daniel O’Connell and the Working Class
’Tis civilization, so ye say, and cannot be changed for the weakness of men, Take heed, take heed, ’tis a dangerous way to drive the wild wolf to the end of his den. Take heed of your civilization, ye, ’tis a pyramid built upon quivering hearts, There are times, as Paris in ’93, when the commonest men play terrible parts. Take heed of your progress, its feet are shod with the souls it slew, with its own pollutions, Submission is good, but the order of God may flame the torch of the revolutions.
—John Boyle O’Reilly
For both Ireland and Great Britain the period between the winning of Catholic emancipation (1829) and the year 1850 was marked by great misery and destitution amongst the producing classes, accompanied by abortive attempts at revolution in both countries, and the concession of some few unimportant political and social reforms. In Ireland the first move against the forces of privilege was the abolition of the tithes, or, more correctly speaking, the abolition of the harsh and brutal features attendant upon the collection of the tithes. The clergy of the Episcopalian Church, the church by law established in Ireland, were legally entitled to levy upon the people of each district, irrespective of religion, a certain tax for the upkeep of that church and its ministers. The fact that this was in conformity with the practice of the Catholic Church in countries where it was dominant did not, of course, make this any more palatable to the Catholic peasantry of Ireland, who continually saw a part of their crops seized upon and sold to maintain a clergy whose ministrations they never attended, and whose religion they detested. Eventually their discontent at the injustice grew so acute as to flare forth in open rebellion, and accordingly all over Ireland the tenants began to resist the collection of tithes by every means in their power.
The Episcopalian clergymen called on the aid of the law, and, escorted by police and military, seized the produce of the poor tenants and carried it off to be sold at auction; the peasantry, on the other hand, collected at dead of night and carried off the crops and cattle from farms upon which the distraint was to be made, and, when that was impossible, they strove by acts of violence to terrorize auctioneers and buyers from consummating the sale. Many a bright young life was extinguished on the gallows, or rotted away in prison cells, as a result of this attempt to sustain a hated religion by contributions exacted at the point of the bayonet, until eventually the struggle assumed all the aspect of a civil war. At several places when the military were returning from raiding the farm of some poor peasant, the country people gathered, erected barricades, and opposed their passage by force. Significantly enough of the temper and qualities of the people in those engagements, they generally succeeded in rescuing their crops and cattle from the police and military, and in demonstrating that Ireland still possessed all the material requisite for armed rebellion.
In one conflict at Newtownbarry, twelve peasants were shot and twenty fatally wounded; in another at Carrigshock, eleven policemen were killed and seventeen wounded; and at a great fight at Rathcormack, twelve peasants were killed in a fight with a large body of military and armed police. Eyewitnesses declared that the poor farmers and laborers engaged, stood the charge and volleys of the soldiers as firmly as if they had been seasoned troops, a fact that impressed the government more than a million speeches could have done. The gravity of the crisis was enhanced by the contrast between the small sum often involved, and the bloodshed necessary to recover it. Thus, at Rathcormack, twelve peasants were massacred in an attempt to save the effects of a poor widow from being sold to pay a sum of forty shillings due as tithes. The ultimate effect of all this resistance was the passage of a Tithes Commutation Act by which the collection of tithes was abolished, and the substitution in its place of a “tithe rent charge” by means of which the sums necessary for the support of the Episcopalian clergy were included in the rent and paid as part of that tribute to the landed aristocracy. In other words, the economic drain remained, but it was deprived of all the more odious and galling features of its collection. The secret Ribbon and Whiteboy Societies were the most effective weapons of the peasantry in this fight, and to their activities the victory is largely to be attributed. The politicians gave neither help nor countenance to the fight, and save for the advocacy of one small Dublin newspaper, conducted by a small but brilliant band of young Protestant writers, no journal in all Ireland championed their cause. For the Catholic clergy it is enough to say that while this tithe war was being waged, they were almost universally silent about that “grievous sin of secret conspiracy” upon which they are usually so eloquent. We would not dare to say that they recognized that, as the secret societies were doing their work against a rival priesthood, it was better to be sparing in their denunciations for the time being; perhaps that is not the explanation, but at all events it is noteworthy that as soon as the tithe war was won, all the old stock invectives against every kind of extraconstitutional action were immediately renewed.
Contemporaneously with this tithe war had grown up the agitation for repeal of the Legislative Union led by Daniel O’Connell and supported by the large body of the middle classes, and by practically all the Catholic clergy. At the outset of this agitation the Irish working class, partly because they accepted O’Connell’s explanation of the decay of Irish trade as due to the Union, and partly because they did not believe he was sincere in his professions of loyalty to the English monarchy, nor in his desire to limit his aims to repeal, enthusiastically endorsed and assisted his agitation. He, on his part, incorporated the trades bodies in his association with rights equal to that of regularly enrolled members, a proceeding which evoked considerable dissent from many quarters. Thus the Irish Monthly Magazine (Dublin), a rabidly O’Connellite journal, in its issue of September, 1832, complains that the National Union (of Repealers) is in danger because “there is a contemporary union composed of the tradesmen and operative classes, the members of which are qualified to vote at its sittings, and who are in every respect put upon a perfect equality with the members of the National Union.” And in its December number of the same year it returns to the charge with the significant statement that “in fact we apprehend great mischief and little good from the trades union as at present constituted.” The representative of the English King in Ireland, Lord Lieutenant Anglesey, apparently coincided in the opinion of this follower of O’Connell as to the danger of Irish trade unions in politics, for when the Dublin trade bodies projected a mammoth demonstration in favor of repeal, he immediately proclaimed it, and ordered the military to suppress it, if necessary, by armed force. But as O’Connell grew in strength in the country, and attracted to himself more and more of the capitalist and professional classes in Ireland, and as he became more necessary to the schemes of the Whig politicians in England, and thought these latter more necessary to his success, he ceased to play for the favor of organized labor, and gradually developed into the most bitter and unscrupulous enemy of trade unionism Ireland has yet produced, signalizing the trades of Dublin always out for his most venomous attack.
In 1835 O’Connell took his seat on the ministerial side of the House of Commons as a supporter of the Whig government. At that time the laboring population of England were the most exploited, degraded, and almost dehumanized of all the peoples of Europe. The tale of their condition reveals such inhumanity on the part of the masters, such woeful degradation on the side of the toilers, that were it not attested by the sober record of witnesses before various Parliamentary commissions, the record would be entirely unbelievable. Women worked down in coal mines, almost naked, for a pitiful wage, often giving birth to children when surprised by the pains of parturition amidst the darkness and gloom of their places of employment; little boys and girls were employed drawing heavy hutches (wagons) of coal along the pit floors by means of a strap around their bodies and passing through between their little legs; in cotton factories little tots of eight, seven, and even six years of age of both sexes were kept attending machinery, being hired like slaves from workhouses for that purpose, and worked twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen hours per day, living, sleeping, and working under conditions which caused them to die off as with a plague; in pottery works, bakeshops, clothing factories and workrooms the overwork and unhealthy conditions of employment led to such suffering and degradation and shortening of life that the very existence of the working class was endangered.
In the agricultural districts the sufferings of the poor were so terrible that the English agricultural laborer—the most stolidly patient, unimaginative person on the face of the earth—broke out into riots, machine breaking, and hay-rick burning. As in Ireland, Captain Rock or Captain Moonlight had been supposed to be the presiding genius of the nocturnal revolts of the peasantry, so in England, Captain Swing, an equally mythical personage, took the blame or the credit. In a booklet circulated amongst the English agricultural laborers, Captain Swing is made to say: “I am not the author of these burnings. These fires are caused by farmers having been turned out of their lands to make room for foxes, peasants confined two years in prison for picking up a dead partridge, and parsons taking a poor man’s only cow for the tithe of his cabbage garden.”
So great was the distress, so brutal the laws, and so hopelessly desperate the laborers, that in the special assize held at Winchester in December, 1830, no less than three hundred prisoners were put upon trial, a great number of whom were sentenced to death. Of the number so condemned, six were actually hanged, twenty transported for life, and the rest for smaller periods. We are told in the English Via Dolorosa, of William Heath, that “a child of fourteen had sentence of death recorded against him; and two brothers, one twenty, the other nineteen, were ruthlessly hanged on Penenden Heath, whither they were escorted by a regiment of Scots Greys.” As to whom was responsible for all this suffering, contemporary witnesses leave no doubt: the London Times, most conservative of all capitalist papers, in its issue of December 27, 1830, declared: “We do affirm that the actions of this pitiable class of men (the laborers) are a commentary on the treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and middling classes. The present population must be provided for in body and spirit on more liberal and Christian principles, or the whole mass of laborers will start into legions of banditti—banditti less criminal than those who have made them so; those who by a just but fearful retribution will soon become their victims.”
And in 1833 a Parliamentary commission reported that “the condition of the agricultural laborers was brutal and wretched; their children during the day were struggling with the pigs for food, and at night were huddled down on damp straw under a roof of rotten thatch.”
In the large towns the same state of rebellion prevailed, the military were continually on duty, and so many people were killed that the coroners ceased to hold inquests. Such was the state of England—misery and revolt beneath, and sanguinary repression coupled with merciless greed above—at the time when O’Connell, taking his seat in Parliament, threw all his force on the side of capitalist privilege and against social reform.
In 1838 five cotton spinners in Glasgow, in Scotland, were sentenced to seven years’ transportation for acts they had committed in connection with trade union combination to better the miserable condition of their class. As the punishment was universally felt to be excessive, even in the brutal spirit of the times, Mr. Walkley, member of Parliament for Finsbury, on the 13th of February of that year, brought forward a motion in the House of Commons for a “select committee to enquire into the constitution, practices, and effects of the Association of Cotton Operatives of Glasgow.” O’Connell opposed the motion, and used the opportunity to attack the Irish trade unions. He said:
There was no tyranny equal to that which was exercised by the trade unionists in Dublin over their fellow laborers. One rule of the workmen prescribed a minimum rate of wages so that the best workman received no more than the worst. Another part of their system was directed towards depriving the masters of all freedom in their power of selecting workmen, the names of the workmen being inscribed in a book, and the employer compelled to take the first on the list.
He said that at Bandon a large factory had been closed through the efforts of the men to get higher wages, ditto at Belfast, and “it was calculated that wages to the amount of £500,000 per year were lost to Dublin by trade unions. The combination of tailors in that city, for instance, had raised the price of clothes to such a pitch that it was worth a person’s while to go to Glasgow and wait a couple of days for a suit, the difference in the price paying the expense of the trip.” He also ascribed the disappearance of the shipbuilding trades from Dublin to the evil effects of trade unions.
Because of O’Connell’s speech his friends, the Whig government, appointed a committee, not to enquire into the Glasgow cases, but to investigate the acts of the Irish, and especially of the Dublin, trade unions. The Special Committee sat and collected two volumes of evidence, O’Connell producing a number of witnesses to bear testimony against the Irish trade unionists, but the report of the committee was never presented to the House of Commons. In June of the same year, 1838, O’Connell had another opportunity to vent his animus against the working class, and serve the interest of English and Irish capitalism, and was not slow to take advantage of it. In the year 1833, mainly owing to the efforts of the organized factory operatives and some high-spirited philanthropists, a law had been enacted forbidding the employment of children under nine years of age in factories except silk mills, and forbidding those under thirteen from working more than forty-eight hours per week, or nine hours per day. The ages mentioned will convey to the reader some idea of how infantile flesh and blood had been sacrificed to sate the greed of the propertied class. Yet this eminently moderate enactment was fiercely hated by the godly capitalists of England, and by every unscrupulous device they could contrive they strove to circumvent it. So constant and effective was their evasion of its merciful provisions that on the 23rd of June the famous friend of the factory operatives, Lord Ashley, in the House of Commons, moved as an amendment to the Order of the Day the second reading of a Bill to More Effectually Regulate Factory Works, its purpose being to prevent or punish any further infringement of the Act of 1833. O’Connell opposed the motion, and attempted to justify the infringement of the law by the employers by stating that “they [Parliament] had legislated against the nature of things, and against the right of industry.” “Let them not,” he said, “be guilty of the childish folly of regulating the labor of adults, and go about parading before the world their ridiculous humanity, which would end by converting their manufacturers into beggars.” The phrase about regulating the labor of adults was borrowed from the defense, set up by the capitalists, that preventing the employment of children also interfered with the labor of adults—freeborn Englishmen! O’Connell was not above using this claptrap, as he on a previous occasion had not been above making the lying pretense that the enforcement of a minimum wage prevented the payment of high wages to any specially skilled artisan.
On this question of the attitude to be taken up towards the claims of labor, O’Connell differed radically with one of his most capable lieutenants, Fergus O’Connor. The latter, being returned to Parliament as a repealer, was struck by the miserable condition of the real people of England in whose interests Ireland was supposed to be governed, and as the result of his investigation into its cause, he arrived at the conclusion that the basis of the oppression of Ireland was economic, that labor in England was oppressed by the same class and by the operation of the same causes as had impoverished and ruined Ireland, and that the solution of the problem in both countries required the union of the democracies in one common battle against their oppressors.
He earnestly strove to impress this view upon O’Connell, only to find, that in the latter class feeling was much stronger than desire for Irish national freedom, and that he, O’Connell, felt himself to be much more akin to the propertied class of England than to the working class of Ireland. This was proven by his actions in the cases above cited. This divergence of opinion between O’Connell and O’Connor closed Ireland to the latter and gave him to the Chartists as one of their most fearless and trusted leaders.
When he died, more than fifty thousand toilers marched in the funeral procession which bore his remains to his last resting place. He was one of the first of that long list of Irish fighters in Great Britain whose unselfish sacrifices have gone to make a record for an “English” labor movement. That the propertied and oppressing classes were well aware of the value of O’Connell’s services against the democracy, and were believed to be grateful for the same, was attested by the action of Richard Lalor Shiel when, defending him during the famous state trials, he claimed the consideration of the court for O’Connell, because he had stood between the people of Ireland and the people of England, and so “prevented a junction which would be formidable enough to overturn any administration that could be formed.” But, as zealous as O’Connell and the middle-class repealers were to prevent any international action of the democracies, the Irish working class were as enthusiastic in their desire to consummate it. Irish Chartist Associations sprang up all over the island, and we are informed by a writer in the United Irishman of John Mitchel, 1848, that in Dublin they had grown so strong and so hostile to O’Connellism that at one time negotiations were in progress for a public debate between the liberator and a representative of the Dublin trades. But upon the arrest and imprisonment of O’Connell, he continues, the working class were persuaded to abandon their separate organizations for the sake of presenting a common front to the government, a step they afterwards regretted. To this letter John Mitchel, as editor, appended a note reminding his readers of the antilabor record of O’Connell, and adducing it as a further reason for repudiating his leadership. Yet it is curious that in his History of Ireland Mitchel omits all reference to this disgraceful side of O’Connell’s career, as do indeed all the other Irish “historians.” If silence gives consent, then all our history (?) writing scribes have consented to, and hence approved of, this suppression of the facts of history in order to assist in perpetuating the blindness and the subjection of labor.
Chapter XIII. Our Irish Girondins Sacrifice the Irish Peasantry upon the Altar of Private Property
There is a class of Revolutionists named Girondins whose fate in history is remarkable enough. Men who rebel, and urge the lower classes to rebel, ought to have other than formulas to go upon. Men who discern in the misery of the toiling, complaining millions, not misery but only a raw material which can be wrought upon and traded in for one’s own poor hidebound theories and egoisms, to whom millions of living fellow creatures with beating hearts in their bosoms—beating, suffering, hoping—are “masses,” mere explosive masses, for blowing down Bastilles with, for voting at hustings for “us,” such men are of the questionable species.
—Thomas Carlyle
The outbreak of the famine, which commenced on a small scale in 1845, and increased in area and intensity until 1849, brought to a head the class antagonism in Ireland, of which the rupture with the trades was one manifestation, and again revealed the question of property as the test by which the public conduct is regulated, even when those men assume the garb of revolution. Needless to say, this is not the interpretation of the history of that awful period we are given by the orthodox Irish or English writers upon the subject. Irish nationalists of all stripes and English critics of every variety agree, with wonderful unanimity, in ascribing a split in the Repeal Association which led to the formation by the seceders of the body known as the Irish Confederation to the academic question of whether force might or might not be employed to achieve a political end. The majority of the Repeal Association, we are told, subscribed to the principle, enunciated by O’Connell, that “the greatest sublunary blessings were not worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood,” and John Mitchel, Father Meehan, Gavan Duffy, Thomas Francis Meagher, Devin Reilly, William Smith O’Brien, Fintan Lalor, and others repudiated that doctrine, and on this point of purely theoretical divergence the secession from O’Connell took place.
It is difficult to believe that any large number of Irishmen ever held such a doctrine seriously; it is quite certain that the Irish Catholic priesthood, O’Connell’s chief lieutenants, did not hold or counsel such a doctrine during the Tithe War. O’Connell himself had declared that he would willingly join in helping England in “bringing down the American eagle in its highest pride of flight,” which surely would have involved war, and in the House of Commons on one occasion, in reply to Lord Lyndhurst, who had characterized the Irish as “aliens in blood, in language, and in religion,” Richard Lalor Shiel, a champion of O’Connellism, had delivered a magnificent oration vaunting the prowess of Irish soldiers in the English army. In passing we note that Shiel considered the above phrase of Lord Lyndhurst an insult; modern Irish nationalists triumphantly assert the idea, embodied in that phrase, as the real basis of Irish nationalism.
Nor yet were the seceders, the Young Irelanders as they were called, in favor of physical force, save as a subject for flights in poetry and oratory. In reality the secession took place on a false issue; the majority on either side being disinclined to admit, even if they recognized, the real issue dividing them. That issue was the old and ever-present one of the democratic principle in human society versus the aristocratic. The Young Irelanders, young and enthusiastic, felt the force of the democratic principle then agitating European society; indeed, the very name of Young Ireland was an adaptation of the names used by the Italian revolutionist Mazzini for the revolutionary associations—Young Italy, Young Switzerland, Young France, and Young Germany—he founded after the year 1831. And as the progress of the revolutionary movement on the Continent (accompanied as it was by the popularization of socialistic ideas among the revolutionary masses) synchronized with the falling apart of the social system in Ireland owing to the famine, the leaders of the Young Ireland party responded to and moved along with the revolutionary current of events without ever being able to comprehend the depth and force of the stream upon whose surface they were embarked. The truth of this is apparent to all who study their action when at last the long talked of day for revolution had arrived. By that time, 1848, Ireland was in the throes of the greatest famine in her history.
A few words explanatory of that famine may not be amiss to some of our readers. The staple food of the Irish peasantry was the potato; all other agricultural produce, grains and cattle, was sold to pay the landlord’s rent. The ordinary value of the potato crop was yearly approximately twenty million pounds in English money; in 1848, in the midst of the famine, the value of agricultural produce in Ireland was £44,958,120. In that year the entire potato crop was a failure, and to that fact the famine is placidly attributed, yet those figures amply prove that there was food enough in the country to feed double the population, were the laws of capitalist society set aside and human rights elevated to their proper position. It is a common saying amongst Irish nationalists that “Providence sent the potato blight; but England made the famine.” The statement is true, and only needs amending by adding that “England made the famine by a rigid application of the economic principles that lie at the base of capitalist society.” No man who accepts capitalist society and the laws thereof can logically find fault with the statesmen of England for their acts in that awful period. They stood for the rights of property and free competition, and philosophically accepted their consequences upon Ireland; the leaders of the Irish people also stood for the rights of property, and refused to abandon them even when they saw the consequences in the slaughter by famine of over a million of the Irish toilers.
The first failure of the potato crop took place in 1845, and between September and December of that year, 515 deaths from hunger were registered, although 3,250,000 quarters of wheat and numberless cattle had been exported. From that time until 1850 the famine spread, and the exports of food continued. Thus in 1848 it was estimated that 300,000 persons died of hunger and 1,826,132 quarters of wheat and barley were exported. Typhus fever, which always follows on the heels of hunger, struck down as many as perished directly of famine, until at last it became impossible in many districts to get sufficient laborers with strength enough to dig separate graves for the dying. Recourse was had to famine pits, into which the bodies were thrown promiscuously; whole families died in their miserable cabins, and lay and rotted there, and travelers in remote parts of the country often stumbled upon villages in which the whole population had died of hunger.
In 1847, “Black ’47,” 250,000 died of fever, 21,770 of starvation. Owing to the efforts of emigration agents and remittances sent from relatives abroad in the same year, 89,783 persons embarked for Canada. They were flying from hunger, but they could not fly from the fever that follows in the wake of hunger, and 6,100 died and were thrown overboard on the voyage, 4,100 died on their arrival in Canada, 5,200 in hospitals, and 1,900 in interior towns.
Great Britain was nearer than America, and many who could not escape to America rushed to the inhospitable shores of Britain; but pressure was brought to bear upon the steamship companies, and they raised the rates upon all passengers by steerage to an almost prohibitive price. In this flight to England occurred one of the most fearful tragedies of all history, a tragedy which, in our opinion, surpasses that of the Black Hole of Calcutta in its accumulation of fearful and gruesome horrors. On December 2, 1848, a steamer left Sligo with two hundred steerage passengers on board bound for Liverpool. On that bleak northwestern coast such a passage is at all times rough, and storms are both sudden and fierce. Such a storm came on during the night, and as the unusual number of passengers crowded the deck the crew unceremoniously and brutally drove them below decks, and battened down the hatches to prevent their reemergence. In the best of weather the steerage of such a coasting vessel is, even when empty of human freight, foul, suffocating, and unbearable; the imagination fails to realize what it must have been on that awful night when two hundred poor wretches were driven into its depths.
To add to the horror, when some of the more desperate beat upon the hatches and demanded release, the mate, in a paroxysm of rage, ordered tarpaulin to be thrown across the opening to stifle their cries. It did stifle the cries; it also excluded the air and the light, and there in that inferno those two hundred human beings fought, struggled, and gasped for air while the elements warred outside and the frail tub of a ship was tossed upon the surface of the waters. At last, when someone stronger than the rest managed to break through and reach the deck, he confronted the ship’s officers with the news that their brutality had made them murderers, that grim death was reaping his harvest amongst the passengers. It was too true. Out of the two hundred passengers battened down below decks, seventy-two, more than a third of the entire number, had expired, suffocated for want of air or mangled to death in the blind struggle of despair in the darkness. Such is the tale of that voyage of the ship Londonderry, surely the most horrible tale of the sea in the annals of any white people!
Amidst such conditions the Irish Confederation had been preaching the moral righteousness of rebellion, and discoursing learnedly in English to a starving people, the most of whom knew only Irish, about the historical examples of Holland, Belgium, Poland, and the Tyrol. A few men, notably John Mitchel, James Fintan Lalor, and Thomas Devin Reilly, to their credit be it said, openly advocated, as the first duty of the people, the refusal to pay rents, the retention of their crops to feed their own families, and the breaking up of bridges and tearing up of railroad lines to prevent the removal of food from the country. Had such advice been followed by the Young Irelanders as a body it would, as events showed, have been enthusiastically adopted by the people at large, in which event no force in the power of England could have saved landlordism or the British Empire in Ireland.
As explained by Fintan Lalor, the keenest intellect in Ireland in his day, it meant the avoidance of all pitched battles with the English army, and drawing it into a struggle along lines and on a plan of campaign where its discipline, training, and methods would be a hindrance rather than a help, and where no mobilization, battalion-drilling, or technical knowledge of military science was required of the insurgent masses. In short, it involved a social and a national revolution, each resting upon the other. But the men who advocated this were in a hopeless minority, and the chiefs of the Young Irelanders were as rabidly solicitous about the rights of the landlord as were the chiefs of the English government.
While the people perished, the Young Irelanders talked, and their talk was very beautiful, thoroughly grammatical, nicely polished, and the proper amount of passion introduced always at the proper psychological moment. But still the people perished. Eventually the government seized upon the really dangerous man—the man who had hatred of injustice deeply enough rooted to wish to destroy it at all costs, the man who had faith enough in the masses to trust a revolutionary outbreak to their native impulses, and who possessed the faculty of combining thought with action, John Mitchel. With his arrest the people looked for immediate revolution; so did the government, so did Mitchel himself. All were disappointed. John Mitchel was carried off to penal servitude in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) after scornfully refusing to sign a manifesto presented to him in his cell by Thomas Francis Meagher and others, counseling the people not to attempt to rescue him. The working class of Dublin and most of the towns were clamoring for their leaders to give the word for a rising; in many places in the country the peasantry were acting spontaneously.
Eventually news reached Dublin in July, 1848, that warrants were issued for the arrest of the chiefs of the Young Ireland party. They determined to appeal to the country. But everything had to be done in a “respectable” manner; English army on one side, provided with guns, bands, and banners; Irish army on the other side, also provided with guns, bands, and banners, “serried ranks with glittering steel,” no mere proletarian insurrection, and no interference with the rights of property. When C. G. Duffy was arrested on Saturday, 9th of July, in Dublin, the Dublin workers surrounded the military escort on the way to the prison at Newgate, stopped the carriage, pressed up to Duffy, and offered to begin the insurrection then and there. “Do you wish to be rescued?” said one of the leaders. “Certainly not,” said Duffy. And the puzzled toilers fell back and allowed the future Australian premier to go to prison.
In Cashel, Tipperary, Michael Doheny was arrested. The people stormed the jail and rescued him. He insisted upon giving himself up again and applied for bail. In Waterford, Meagher was arrested. As he was being taken through the city, guarded by troops, the people erected a barricade in the way across a narrow bridge over the River Suir, and when the carriage reached the bridge, some cut the traces of the horses and brought the cavalcade to a standstill. Meagher ordered them to remove the barricade; they begged him to give the word for insurrection and they would begin then and there. The important city was in their hands, but Meagher persisted in going with the soldiers, and the poor working-class rebels of Waterford let him go, crying out as they did so, “You will regret it, you will regret it, and it is your own fault.” Meagher afterwards proved himself a fearless soldier of a regular army, but as an insurgent he lacked the necessary initiative.
But the crowning absurdity of all was the leadership of William Smith O’Brien. He wandered through the country telling the starving peasantry to get ready, but refusing to allow them to feed themselves at the expense of the landlords who had so long plundered, starved, and evicted them; he would not allow his followers to seize upon the carts of grain passing along the roads where the people were dying of want of food; at Mullinahone he refused to allow his followers to fell trees to build a barricade across the road until they had asked permission of the landlords who owned the trees; when the people of Killenaule had a body of dragoons entrapped between two barricades, he released the dragoons from their dangerous situation upon their leader assuring him that he had no warrant for his (O’Brien’s) arrest; in another place he surprised a party of soldiers in the town hall with their arms taken apart for cleaning purposes, and instead of confiscating the arms, he told the soldiers that their arms were as safe as they would be in Dublin Castle.
When we remember the state of Ireland then, with her population perishing of famine, all the above recital reads like a page of comic opera. Unfortunately it is not; it is a page from the blackest period of Ireland’s history. Reading it, we can understand why Smith O’Brien has a monument in Dublin, although Fintan Lalor’s name and writings have been boycotted for more than fifty years. W. A. O’Connor, B.A., in his History of the Irish People, sums up Smith O’Brien’s career thus: “The man had broken up a peaceful organization in the cause of war, promised war to a people in desperate strait, went into the country to wage war, then considered it guilt to do any act of war.” It must, of course, be conceded that Smith O’Brien was a man of high moral probity, but it is equally necessary to affirm that he was a landlord, vehemently solicitous for the rights of his class, and allowing his solicitude for those rights to stand between the millions of the Irish race and their hopes of life and freedom. It ought, however, also be remembered, in extenuation of his conduct in that awful crisis, that he had inherited vast estates as the result of the social, national, and religious apostasy of his forefathers, and in view of such an ancestry, it is more wonderful that he had dreamed of rebellion than that he had repudiated revolution.
Had socialist principles been applied to Ireland in those days, not one person need have died of hunger, and not one cent of charity need have been subscribed to leave a smirch upon the Irish name. But all except a few men had elevated landlord property and capitalist political economy to a fetish to be worshipped, and upon the altar of that fetish Ireland perished. At the lowest computation, 1,225,000 persons died of absolute hunger; all of these were sacrificed upon the altar of capitalist thought.
Early in the course of the famine the English premier, Lord John Russell, declared that nothing must be done to interfere with private enterprise or the regular course of trade, and this was the settled policy of the government from first to last. A Treasury minute of August 31, 1846, provided that “depots for the sale of food were to be established at Longford, Banagher, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and Sligo, and subordinate depots at other places on the western coast,” but the rules provided that such depots were not to be opened where food could be obtained from private dealers, and, when opened, food was to be sold at prices which would permit of private dealers competing. In all the acts establishing relief works, it was stipulated that all the labor must be entirely unproductive, so as not to prevent capitalists making a profit either then or in the future. Private dealers made fortunes ranging from £40,000 to £80,000.
In 1845 a Commissariat Relief Department was organized to bring in Indian corn for sale in Ireland, but none was to be sold until all private stores were sold out: the State of Massachusetts hired an American ship-of-war, the Jamestown, loaded it with grain, and sent it to Ireland; the government placed the cargo in storage, claiming that putting it on the market would disturb trade. A Poor Relief Bill in 1847 made provision for the employment of labor on public works, but stipulated that none should be employed who retained more than a quarter of an acre of land; this induced tens of thousands to surrender their farms for the sake of a bite to eat, and saved the landlords all the trouble and expense of eviction. When this had been accomplished to a sufficient extent, 734,000 persons were discharged, and as they had given up their farms to get employment on the works they were now as helpless as men on a raft in mid-ocean.
Mr. Mulhall, in his Fifty Years of National Progress, estimates the number of persons evicted between 1838 and 1888 as 3,668,000; the greater number of these saw their homes destroyed during the years under consideration, and this Poor Relief Bill, nicknamed an “Eviction-Made-Easy-Act,” was one main weapon for their undoing. In 1846, England, hitherto a Protectionist country, adopted free trade, ostensibly in order to permit corn to come freely and cheaply to the starving Irish. In reality, as Ireland was a corn- and grain-exporting country, the measure brought Continental agricultural produce to England into competition with that of Ireland, and hence, by lowering agricultural prices, still further intensified the misery of the Irish producing classes. The real meaning of the measure was that England, being a manufacturing nation, desired to cheapen food in order that its wage slaves might remain content with low wages, and indeed one of the most immediate results of free trade in England was a wholesale reduction of the wages of the manufacturing proletariat.
The English capitalist class, with that hypocrisy that everywhere characterizes the class in its public acts, used the misery of the Irish as a means to conquer the opposition of the English landlord class to free trade in grains, but in this, as in every other measure of the famine years, they acted consistently upon the lines of capitalist political economy. Within the limits of that social system and its theories their acts are unassailable and unimpeachable; it is only when we reject that system, and the intellectual and social fetters it imposes, that we really acquire the right to denounce the English administration of Ireland during the famine as a colossal crime against the human race. The nonsocialist Irish man or woman who fumes against that administration is in the illogical position of denouncing an effect of whose cause he is a supporter. That cause was the system of capitalist property. With the exception of those few men we have before named, the Young Ireland leaders of 1848 failed to rise to the grandeur of the opportunity offered them to choose between human rights and property rights as a basis of nationality, and the measure of their failure was the measure of their country’s disaster.
Chapter XIV. Socialistic Teaching of the Young Irelanders: The Thinkers and the Workers
What do ye at our door, Ye guard our master’s granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
—Lady Wilde (Speranza)
God of Justice, I cried, send Thy spirit down On those lords so cruel and proud. Soften their hearts and relax their frown,
Or else, I cried aloud, Vouchsafe strength to the peasant’s hand To drive them at length from out the land.
—Thomas Davis
We have pointed out that the Young Ireland chiefs who had so fervently declaimed about the revolution were utterly incapable of accepting it when at last it presented itself to them; indeed Doheny uses that very word in describing the scenes at Cashel. “It was the revolution,” he said, “if we had accepted it.” We might with perfect justice apply to these brilliant but unfortunate men the words of another writer, Lissagaray, in describing a similar class of leaders in France, and say “having all their life sung the glories of the Revolution, when it rose up before them they ran away appalled, like the Arab fisher at the apparition of the genie.” To the average historian who treats of the relations between Ireland and England as of a struggle between two nations, without any understanding of the economic conditions, or of the great world movements which caught both countries in their grasp, the hesitancy and vacillation of the Young Ireland chiefs in the crisis of their country’s fate constitutes an insoluble problem and has too often been used to point a sneer at Irishmen when the writer was English; or to justify a sickening apology when the writer was Irish. Neither action is at all warranted. The simple fact is that the Irish workers in town and country were ready and willing to revolt, and that the English government of the time was saved from serious danger only by the fact that Smith O’Brien and those who patterned after him dreaded to trust the nation to the passion of the so-called lower classes.
Had rebellion broken out at the time in Ireland, the English Chartists, who had been arming and preparing for a similar purpose, would, as indeed Mitchel pointed out continually in his paper, have seized the occasion to take the field also. Many regiments of the English army were also honeycombed with revolt, and had repeatedly shown their spirit by publicly cheering for the Irish and Chartist cause. An English leader of the Chartists, John Frost, was sentenced to a heavy term of transportation for his seditious utterances at this time, and another great English champion of the working class, Ernest Jones, in commenting upon the case, declared defiantly in a public meeting that “the time would come when John Mitchel and John Frost would be brought back, and Lord John Russell sent to take their place, and the Green Flag would fly in triumph over Downing Street and Dublin Castle.” Downing Street was the residence of the English prime minister. For uttering this sentiment, Ernest Jones was arrested and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment.
In their attitude towards all manifestation of working-class revolt in England, the Young Irelanders were sorely divided. In his paper The United Irishman, John Mitchel hailed it exultantly as an aid to Ireland, and as a presage of the victory of real democracy, setting aside a large portion of his space in every issue to chronicle the progress of the cause of the people in England. His attitude in this matter was one of the most potent causes of his enduring popularity amongst the masses. On the other hand, the section of Young Irelanders who had made Smith O’Brien their idol for no other discoverable reason than the fact that he was rich and most respectable, strove by every means in their power to disassociate the cause of Ireland from the cause of democracy. A wordy war between Mitchel and his critics ensued, each side appealing to the precedent of 1798, with the result that Mitchel was easily able to prove that the revolutionists of that period—notably Wolfe Tone—had not only allied the cause of Ireland with the cause of democracy in general, but had vehemently insisted upon the necessity of a social revolution in Ireland at the expense of the landed aristocracy.
Copying Fintan Lalor, Mitchel made the principles involved in those ideas the slogans of his revolutionary campaign. He insisted correctly upon a social insurrection as the only possible basis for a national revolution, that the same insurrectionary upheaval that destroyed and ended the social subjection of the producing classes would end the hateful foreign tyranny reared upon it. Two passages from his writings are especially useful as bearing out and attesting his position on those points—points that are still the fiercest subjects of dispute in Ireland. In his letter to the farmers of Ireland, March 4, 1848, he says, “But I am told it is vain to speak thus to you; that the peace policy of O’Connell is dearer to you than life and honor—that many of your clergy, too, exhort you to die rather than violate what the English call ‘law’—and that you are resolved to take their bidding. Then die—die in your patience and perseverance, but be well assured of this—that the priest who bids you perish patiently amidst your own golden harvest preaches the gospel of England, insults manhood and common sense, bears false witness against religion, and blasphemes the Providence of God.”
When the republican government, which came into power in Paris after the revolution of February, 1848, recognizing that it owed its existence to the armed working men, and that those workers were demanding some security for their own class as a recompense for their bloody toil, enacted a law guaranteeing “the right to work” to all, and pledging the credit of the nation to secure that right, Mitchel joyfully hailed that law as an indication that the absurd theories of what he rightfully styled the “English system,” or capitalism, had no longer a hold upon the minds of the French people. We quote a portion of that article. Our readers will note that the free trade referred to is free trade in labor as against state protection of the rights of the workers:
Dynasties and thrones are not half so important as workshops, farms and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties and thrones, and even provisional governments, are good for anything exactly in proportion as they secure fair play, justice, and freedom to those who labor.
It is here that France is really ahead of all the world. The great Third Revolution has overthrown the enlightened pedantic political economy (what we know in Ireland as the English political economy, or the Famine Political Economy), and has established once and for all the true and old principles of protection to labor, and the right and duty of combination among workmen by a decree of the Provisional Government dated February 25th: “It engages to guarantee work to all citizens. It recognizes the right of workmen to combine for the purpose of enjoying the lawful proceeds of their labor.”
The French Republicans do not, like ignorant and barbarous English Whigs, recognize a right to pauper relief and make it a premium upon idleness. They know that man has a charter to eat bread in the sweat of his brow and not otherwise, and they acknowledge that highest and most sacred mission of government to take care that bread may be had for the earning. For this reason they expressly, and in set terms, renounce “competition” and “free trade” in the sense in which an English Whig uses these words, and deliberately adopt combination and protection—that the nation should combine to protect by laws its own national industry, and that individuals should combine with other individuals to protect by trades associations the several branches of national industry.
The free trade and competition—in other words the English system—is pretty well understood now; its obvious purpose and effect are to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, to make capital the absolute ruler of the world, and labour a blind and helpless slave. By free trade the manufacturers of Manchester are enabled to clothe India, China, and South America, and the artisans of Manchester can hardly keep themselves covered from the cold. By dint of free trade Belfast grows more linen cloth than it ever did before; but the men who weave it have hardly a shirt to their backs. Free trade fills with corn the stores of speculating capitalists, but leaves those who have sown and reaped the corn without a meal. Free trade unpeoples villages and peoples poorhouses, consolidates farms and gluts the graveyards with famished corpses.
There is to be no more of this free trade in France. Men can no longer “do what they like with their own” there.
February, 1848, came, and the pretext of the reform banquet. Again Paris had her three days’ agony, and was delivered of her third and fairest born revolution.
There could be no mistake this time; the rubbish of thrones and dynasties is swept out for ever, and the people sit sovereign in the land. One of their first and greatest acts is the enactment of a commission to inquire into the whole of the great labor question, and to all the documents issued by this commission appear signed the names of Louis Blanc and the insurgent of Lyons, Albert Ouvrier (workman). He is not ashamed of his title, though now a great officer of the State. He is a working man, and is proud of it “in any bond, bill, quittance, or obligation,” Ouvrier.
Sixty-six years ago the farmers of France had their revolution. Eighteen years ago the “respectable” middle classes had theirs, and have made a good penny in it since, but upon this third and last all the world may see the stamp and impress of the man who made it—Albert Ouvrier, his mark. We have all three revolutions to accomplish, and the sooner we set about it the better. Only let us hope all the work may be done in one. Let not the lessons of history be utterly useless.
The detestable system of “free trade” and “fair competition” which is described by Louis Blanc as “that specious system of leaving unrestricted all pecuniary dealings between man and man, which leaves the poor man at the mercy of the rich, and promises to cupidity, that waits its time, an easy victory over hunger that cannot wait,” the system that seeks to make Mammon and not God or justice rule this world—in one word, the English or famine system—must be abolished utterly; in farms or workshops, in town and country, abolished utterly; and to do this were worth three revolutions, or three times three.
So wrote Mitchel when, burning with a holy hatred of tyranny, he poured the vitriol of his scorn upon all the pedants who strutted around him, pedants who were as scrupulous in polishing a phrase for a lecture as a sword for a parade—and incapable of advancing beyond either.
His joy was, we now know, somewhat premature, as the government which passed the law was itself a capitalistic government, and as soon as it found itself strong enough, and had won over the army, repealed its own law, and suppressed, with the most frightful bloodshed, the June insurrection of the workmen striving to enforce its fulfilment. It is the latter insurrection which Mitchel denounces in his Jail Journal when, led astray by the garbled reports of English newspapers, he anathematizes the very men whom he had in this article, when fuller sources of information were available, courageously and justly praised. But another revolutionist, Devin Reilly, in The Irish Felon, more correctly appraised the position of the June insurgents, and also appreciated the fact that Ireland for its redemption required something more far-reaching, something sounding deeper springs of human action, something more akin to the teachings that inspired the heroic workers of France than was to be found in the “personal probity,” or “high principles,” or “aristocratic descent,” or “eminent respectability” of a few leaders.
When Mitchel was arrested and his paper suppressed, two other papers sprang up to take the post of danger thus left vacant. One, The Irish Tribune, represented the element which stood for the “moral right of insurrection,” and the other, The Irish Felon, embodied the ideas of those who insisted that the English conquest of Ireland was twofold, social, or economic, and political, and that therefore the revolution must also have these two aspects. These latter were at all times in the fullest sympathy with the movements of the working-class democracy at home and abroad. John Martin edited The Irish Felon; James Fintan Lalor and Devin Reilly were its chief writers. Reilly, who hailed originally from Monaghan, had long been a close observer of, and sympathizer with, the movements of the working class, and all schemes of social redemption. As a writer on The Nation newspaper he had contributed a series of articles on the great French socialist Louis Blanc, in a review of his great work Dix ans (Ten Years), in which, while dissenting from the “state socialistic” schemes of social regeneration favoured by Blanc, he yet showed the keenest appreciation of the gravity and universality of the social question, as well as grasping the innate heroism and sublimity of the working-class movement. This attitude he preserved to the last of his days.
When in exile in America after the insurrection, he was chosen by the printers of Boston to edit a paper, the Protective Union, they had founded on cooperative principles to advocate the rights of labor, and was thus one of the first pioneers of labor journalism in the United States—a proud and fitting position for a true Irish revolutionist. As writer in The American Review he wrote a series of articles on the European situation, of which Horace Greeley said that, if collected and published as a book, they would create a revolution in Europe. Commenting upon the uprising in France in June, he says in The Irish Felon:
We are not Communists—we abhor communism for the same reason we abhor poor-law systems, and systems founded on the absolute sovereignty of wealth. Communism destroys the independence and dignity of labor, makes the workingman a state pauper and takes his manhood from him. But, communism or no communism, these 70,000 workmen had a clear right to existence—they had the best right to existence of any men in France, and if they could have asserted their right by force of arms they would have been fully justified. The social system in which a man willing to work is compelled to starve, is a blasphemy, an anarchy, and no system. For the present these victims of monarchic rule, disowned by the republic, are conquered; 10,000 are slain, 20,000 perhaps doomed to the Marquesas. But for all that the rights of labor are not conquered, and will not and cannot be conquered. Again and again the laborer will rise up against the idler—the workingmen will meet this bourgeoisie, and grapple and war with them till their equality is established, not in word, but in fact.
This was the spirit of the men grouped around The Irish Felon, its editor alone excepted. Students of socialism will recognize that many who are earnest workers for socialism today would, like Devin Reilly, have “abhorred” the crude communism of 1848. The fact that he insisted upon the unqualified right of the working class to work out its own salvation, by force of arms if necessary, is what entitles Devin Reilly to a high place of honor in the estimation of the militant proletariat of Ireland. The opening passage in an Address of the Medical Students of Dublin to All Irish Students of Science and Art, adopted at a meeting held in Northumberland Buildings, Eden Quay, on April 4, 1848, and signed by John Savage as chairman and Richard Dalton Williams as secretary, shows also that amongst the educated young men of that generation there was a general recognition of the fact that the struggle of Ireland against her oppressors was naturally linked with, and ought to be taken in conjunction with, the worldwide movement of the democracy. It says “a war is waging at this hour all over Europe between intelligence and labor on the one side and despotism and force on the other,” a sentiment which Joseph Brennan versified in a poem on “Divine Right,” in which the excellence of the sentiment must be held to atone for the poverty of the poetry. One verse says:
The only right acknowledged
By the people living now,
Is the right to obtain honor
By the sweat of brain and brow.
The Right Divine of Labor
To be first of earthly things,
That the Thinker and the Worker
Are manhood’s only kings
But the palm of honor for the clearest exposition of the doctrine of revolution, social and political, must be given to James Fintan Lalor, of Tenakill, Queen’s County. Lalor, unfortunately, suffered from a slight physical disability, which incapacitated him from attaining to any leadership other than intellectual, a fact that, in such a time and amidst such a people, was fatal to his immediate influence. Yet in his writings, as we study them today, we find principles of action and of society which have within them not only the best plan of campaign suited for the needs of a country seeking its freedom through insurrection against a dominant nation, but also held the seeds of the more perfect social peace of the future. All his writings at this period are so illuminating that we find it difficult to select from the mass any particular passages which more deserve reproduction than others. But as an indication of the line of argument pursued by this peerless thinker, and as a welcome contrast to the paralyzing respect, nay, reverence, for landlordism evidenced by Smith O’Brien and his worshippers, perhaps the following passages will serve. In an article entitled The Faith of a Felon, published July 8, 1848, he tells how he had striven to convert the Irish Confederation to his views and failed, and says:
They wanted an alliance with the landowners. They chose to consider them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce them to hoist the green flag. They wished to preserve an aristocracy. They desired, not a democratic, but merely a national, revolution. Had the Confederation, in the May or June of ’47, thrown heart and mind and means into the movement, I pointed out they would have made it successful, and settled at once and forever all questions between us and England. The opinions I then stated and which I yet stand firm to, are these:
1. That in order to save their own lives, the occupying tenants of the soil of Ireland ought, next autumn, to refuse all rent and arrears of rent then due, beyond and except the value of the overplus of harvest-produce remaining in their hands, after having deducted and reserved a due and full provision for their own subsistence during the next ensuing twelve months.
2. That they ought to refuse and resist being made beggars, landless and homeless, under the English law of ejection.
3. That they ought further, on principle, to refuse all rent to the present usurping proprietors, until the people, the true proprietors (or lords paramount, in legal parlance) have, in national congress or convention, decided what rents they are to pay, and to whom they are to pay them.
4. And that the people, on grounds of policy and economy, ought to decide (as a general rule admitting of reservations) that these rents shall be paid to themselves, the people, for public purposes, and for behoof and benefit of them, the entire general people.
It has been said to me that such a war, on the principles I propose, would be looked on with detestation by Europe. I assert the contrary; I say such a war would propagate itself throughout Europe. Mark the words of this prophecy—the principle I propound goes to the foundations of Europe, and sooner or later will cause Europe to outrise. Mankind will yet be masters of the earth. The right of the people to make the laws—this produced the first great modern earthquake, whose latent shocks, even now, are heaving in the heart of the world. The right of the people to own the land—this will produce the next. Train your hands, and your sons’ hands, gentlemen of the earth, for you and they will yet have to use them.
The paragraph is significant, as demonstrating that Fintan Lalor, like all the really dangerous revolutionists of Ireland, advocated his principles as part of the creed of the democracy of the world, and not merely as applicable only to the incidents of the struggle of Ireland against England. But this latter is the interpretation which the middle-class politicians and historians of Ireland have endeavored to give his teachings after the failure of their attempt, continued for half a century, to ignore or suppress all reference to his contribution to Irish revolutionary literature. The working-class democracy of Ireland will, it is to be hoped, be, for their part, as assertive of the universality of Lalor’s sympathies as their bourgeois compatriots are in denying it. That working class would be uselessly acquiescing in the smirching of its own record, were it to permit emasculation of the message of this Irish apostle of revolutionary socialism. And, in emphasizing the catholicity of his sympathies as well as the keenness of his insight into the social structure, that Irish working class will do well to confront the apostate patriotism of the politicians and anti-Socialists of Ireland with the following brilliant passage from the work already quoted, and thus show how Lalor answered the plea of those who begged him to moderate or modify his position, to preach it as a necessity of Ireland’s then desperate condition, and not as a universal principle.
I attest and urge the plea of utter and desperate necessity to fortify her (Ireland’s) claim, but not to found it. I rest it on no temporary and passing conditions, but on principles that are permanent, and imperishable, and universal—available to all times and to all countries as well as to our own—I pierce through the upper stratum of occasional and shifting circumstances to bottom and base on the rock below. I put the question in its eternal form—the form in which, how often so ever suppressed for a season, it can never be finally subdued, but will remain and return, outliving and outlasting the cowardice and corruption of generations. I view it as ages will view it—not through the mists of a famine, but by the living lights of the firmament.
By such lights the teachings of Fintan Lalor are being viewed today, with the result that, as he recedes from us in time, his grandeur as a thinker is more and more recognized; his form rises clearer and more distinct to our view, as the forms of the petty agitators and phrasemongering rebels who seemed to dominate the scene at that historic period sink into their proper place, as unconscious factors in the British imperial plan of conquest by famine. Cursed by the fatal gift of eloquence, our Irish Girondins of the Confederation enthralled the Irish people and intoxicated themselves out of the possibility of serious thinking; drunken with words, they failed to realize that the ideas originating with Fintan Lalor, and in part adopted and expounded with such dramatic power by Mitchel, were a more serious menace to the hated power of England than any that the dream of a union of classes could ever materialize on Irish soil; the bones of the famine victims, whitening on every Irish hill and valley, or tossing on every wave of the Atlantic, were the price Ireland paid for the eloquence of its rebels, and their scornful rejection of the socialistic teachings of its thinkers.
Chapter XV. Some More Irish Pioneers of the Socialist Movement
Either the Sermon on the Mount can rule this world or it cannot. The Devil has a right to rule if we let him, but he has no right to call his rule Christian civilization.
—John Boyle O’Reilly
Looking backward to that eventful period (after ’48) we can now see that all hopes of a revolutionary movement had perished for that generation, had been strangled in the love embraces of our Girondins; but that fact naturally was not so apparent to the men of the time. Hence it is not to be wondered at that journalistic activity on the part of the revolutionists did not cease with the suppression of The United Irishman, The Irish Tribune, or The Irish Felon. A small fugitive publication entitled the Irish National Guard, published apparently by a body of courageous Dublin workingmen of advanced opinions, also led a checkered existence championing the cause of revolution, and in January, 1849, another paper, The Irishman, was set on foot by Bernard Fullam, who had been business manager of The Nation. Fullam also started a new organization, the Democratic Association, which is described as “an association with aims almost entirely socialistic and revolutionary.” This association also spread amongst the Irish workers in Great Britain, and had the cordial support and endorsement of Fergus O’Connor, who saw in it the realization of his long-hoped-for dream of a common program uniting the democracies of Ireland and Great Britain. But the era of revolution was past for that generation in both countries, and it was too late for the working-class revolutionists to repair the harm the middle-class doctrinaires had done. The paper died in May, 1850, after an existence of seventeen months. Among its contributors was Thomas Clarke Luby, afterwards one of the chief writers on the staff of The Irish People, organ of the Fenian Brotherhood, a fact that explains much of the advanced doctrine advocated by that journal. Another of the staff of The Irishman in those days was Joseph Brennan, whom we have already quoted as writing in The Irish Tribune. Brennan finally emigrated to America and contributed largely to the pages of the New Orleans Delta, many of his poems in that journal showing the effects of his early association with the currents of social-revolutionary thought in Ireland.
Before leaving this period a few words should be said of the impress left upon the labor movement of Great Britain by the working-class Irish exiles. An English writer, H. S. Foxwell, has said that “socialist propagandism has been mainly carried on by men of Celtic or Semitic blood,” and, however true that may be, as a general statement, it is at least certain that to the men of Celtic blood the English-speaking countries are indebted for the greater part of the early propaganda of the socialist conception of society. We have already referred to Fergus O’Connor; another Irishman who carved his name deep on the early structures of the labor and socialist movement in England as an author and Chartist leader was James Bronterre O’Brien. Among his best known works are Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery: How It Came into the World, and How It May Be Made to Go Out of It, published in 1830; Address to the Oppressed and Mystified People of Great Britain, 1851; European Letters; and the pages of the National Reformer, which he founded in 1837. At first an advocate of physical force, he in his later days gave himself almost exclusively to the development of a system of land banks, in which he believed he had found a way to circumvent the political and military power of the capitalist class. Bronterre O’Brien is stated to have been the first to coin in English the distinctive title of “social democrat,” as an appellation for the adherents of the new order.
An earlier Irish apostle of the socialist movement of the working class, John Doherty, is much less known to the present generation than O’Brien, yet his methods bore more of the marks of constructive revolutionary statesmanship, and his message was equally clear. He appears to have been an almost dominant figure in the labor movement of England and Ireland between the years 1830 and 1840, spent little time in the development of socialist theories, but devoted all his energies to organizing the working-class and teaching it to act on its own initiative. He was general secretary of the Federation of Spinning Societies, which aimed to unite all the textile industries in one great national industrial union and was widespread throughout Great Britain and Ireland; he founded a National Association for the Protection of Labor, which directed its efforts towards building up a union of the working class, effective alike for economic and political ends, and reached to one hundred thousand members, the Belfast trades applying in a body for affiliation; he founded and edited a paper, The Voice of the People, in 1831, which, although sevenpence per copy, attained to a circulation of thirty thousand, and is described as “giving great attention to Radical politics, and the progress of revolution on the Continent.”
In his History of Trades Unionism, Sidney Webb quotes Francis Place—the best informed man in the labor movement in the England of his day—as declaring that, during the English Reform Bill crisis in 1832, Doherty, instead of being led astray, as many labor leaders were, to rally to the side of the middle-class reformers, was “advising the working class to use the occasion for a social revolution.” This was indeed the keynote of Doherty’s message: Whatever was to be done was to be done by the working class. He is summed up as of “wide information, great natural shrewdness, and far-reaching aims.” He was born in Larne in 1799.
Another Doherty, Hugh, attained to some prominence in socialistic circles in England, and we find him in 1841 in London editing a socialist paper, The Phalanx, which devoted itself to the propagation of the views of the French socialist Fourier. It had little influence on the labor movement owing to its extremely doctrinaire attitude, but appears to have had circulation and correspondents in the United States. It was one of the first journals to be set up by a typesetting machine, and one of its numbers contains a minute description of the machine, which forms curious reading today.
In general, the effect upon the English labor movement of the great influx of Irish workers seems to us to have been beneficial. It is true that their competition for employment had at first a seriously evil effect upon wages, but, on the other hand, a study of the fugitive literature of the movement of that time shows that the working-class Irish exiles were present and active in the ranks of militant labor in numbers out of all proportion to the ratio they bore to the population at large. And always they were the advanced, the least compromising, the most irreconcilable element in the movement. Of course the socialist sectarians and philosophers did not love the Irish—Charles Kingsley, that curious combination of prelate, socialist, chauvinist, and virulent bigot, can scarcely remain within the bounds of decent language when he brings an Irishman into the thread of his narrative—but the aversion was born out of their fear of the Irish workers’ impatience of compromise and eagerness for action. And hence, the very qualities which endeared the Irish worker to the earnest rebel against capitalist iniquity estranged him from the affections of those whose social position enabled them to become the historians of his movements.
Chapter XVI. The Working Class: The Inheritors of the Irish Ideals of the Past—the Repository of the Hopes of the Future
Is a Christian to starve, to submit, to bow down As at some high consecrated behest, Hugging close the old maxims, that “Weakness is strength,” And “Whatsoever is is the best?” O, texts of debasement! O, creed of deep shame! O, Gospel of infamy treble. Who strikes when he’s struck, and takes when he starves, In the eyes of the Lord is no rebel.
—J. F. O’Donnell
This book does not aspire to be a history of labor in Ireland; it is rather a record of labor in Irish history. For that reason the plan of the book has precluded any attempt to deal in detail with the growth, development, or decay of industry in Ireland, except as it affected our general argument. That argument called for an explanation of the position of labor in the great epochs of our modern history, and with the attitude of Irish leaders towards the hopes, aspirations, and necessities of those who live by labor. Occasionally, as when analyzing the “prosperity” of Grattan’s Parliament, and the decay of Irish trade following the Legislative Union of 1800, we have been constrained to examine the fundamental causes which make for the progress, industrially or commercially, of some nations and the retrogression of others.
For this apparent digression no apology is made, and none is called for; it was impossible to present our readers with a clear idea of the historical position of labor at any given moment without explaining the economic and political causes which contributed to make possible or necessary its attitude. For the same reason it has been necessary sometimes to retrace our footsteps over some period already covered, in order to draw attention to a phase of the subject, the introduction of which in the previous narrative would have marred the view of the question then under examination. Thus the origin of trade unionism in Ireland has not been dealt with, although in the course of our study we have shown that the Irish trades were well organized. Nor are we now prepared to enter upon that subject. Perhaps at some more propitious moment we will be enabled to examine the materials bearing upon the matter, and trace the growth of the institution in Ireland. Sufficient for the present to state that trades guilds existed in Ireland as upon the Continent and England, during Roman Catholic, pre-Reformation days; that after the Reformation those trade guilds became exclusively Protestant, and even anti-Catholic, within the English pale; that they continued to refuse admission to Catholics even after the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act, and that these old trade guilds were formally abolished by law in 1840.
But the Catholic and Protestant workmen who were excluded from guild membership (Episcopalians only being eligible) did nevertheless organize themselves, and it was their trade unions which dominated the labor world to the wrath of the capitalists and landlords, and the chagrin of the governments. One remarkable and instructive feature of their organization in town and country was the circumstance that every attempt at political rebellion in Ireland was always preceded by a remarkable development of unrest, discontent, and class consciousness amongst their members, demonstrating clearly that, to the mind of the thoughtful Irish worker, political and social subjection were very nearly related. In the Dublin Chronicle, January 28, 1792, there is a record of a great strike of the journeymen tailors of Dublin, in the course of which, it is stated, armed tailors went to the workrooms of Messrs. Miller, Ross Lane; Leet, Merchant’s Quay; Walsh, Castle Street; and Ward, Cope Street, attacked certain scabs who were working there, cut off the hands of two, and threw others in the river.
In another and later issue of the same journal there is a record of how a few coal porters (dock laborers) were seized by His Majesty’s press gang with the intention of compelling them to serve in the navy, and how the organized quay laborers, on hearing of it, summoned their members, and marching upon the guardhouse where the men were detained, attacked it, defeated the guard, and released their comrades. In the same paper, January 3, 1793, there is a letter from a gentleman resident at Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, describing how an armed party of Defenders paraded through that town on its way to Ardee, how the army was brought out to attack them and a number were killed. On January 24, 1793, another correspondent tells how a battle took place between Bailieborough and Kingscourt, Co. Cavan, “between those deluded persons styling themselves Defenders and a part of the army,” when eighteen laborers were killed, five badly wounded, and thirty taken prisoners “and lodged in Cavan gaol.” There is also on July 23, 1793, the following account of a battle at Limerick:
Last night we hear that an express arrived from Limerick with the following intelligence—that on Saturday night a mob of 7 or 8,000 attacked that city and attempted to burn it; that the army, militia, and citizens were obliged to join to repel these daring offenders, and to bring the artillery into the streets, and that after a severe and obstinate resistance the insurgents were dispersed with a loss of 140 killed and several wounded.
Similar battles between the peasantry and the soldiery, aided by the local landlords, occurred in the county Wexford.
In the reports of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords, 1793, speaking of the Defenders (who, as we have stated before, were the organized laborers striving to better their condition by the only means open to them), it says “they first appeared in the county Louth,” “soon spread through the counties of Meath, Cavan, Monaghan and parts adjacent,” and “their measures appear to have been concerted and conducted with the utmost secrecy and a degree of regularity and system not usual to people in such mean condition, and as if directed by men of a superior rank.”
All this, be it noted, was on the eve of the revolutionary struggle of 1798, and shows how the class struggle of the Irish workers formed the preparatory school for the insurrectionary effort.
The long-drawn-out struggle of the fight against tithes and the militant spirit of the Irish trades and Ribbonmen we have already spoken of, as providing the revolutionary material for 1848, which Smith O’Brien and his followers were unfit to use. For the next revolutionary period, that known as the Fenian Conspiracy, the same coincidence of militant class feeling and revolutionary nationalism is deeply marked. Indeed it is no wonder that the real nationalists of Ireland, the separatists, have always been men of broad human sympathies and intense democracy, for it has ever been in the heart of the working class at home that they found their most loyal support, and in the working class abroad their most resolute defenders.
The Fenian Brotherhood was established in 1857, according to the statement of John O’Mahony, one of its two chiefs, James Stephens being the other. Of O’Mahony, John O’Leary says, in his Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, that he was an advanced democrat of socialistic opinions, and W. A. O’Connor, in his History of the Irish People, declares that both O’Mahony and Stephens had entered into the secret societies of France, O’Mahony “from mere sympathy.” A further confirmation of this view of the character of the men responsible for the Fenian Society is found in a passage in a journal established in the interests of Fenianism, and published in London after the suppression of the organ of the Brotherhood, The Irish People, in Dublin, in 1865. This journal, The Flag of Ireland, quoting from the Paris correspondent of The Irishman, says on October 3, 1868:
It took its rise in the Latin Quarter of this city when John O’Mahony, Michael Doheny, and James Stephens were here in exile after ’48.
This was the triumvirate from whose plotting brains the idea of Fenianism sprung. O’Mahony, deep in lore of Ireland and loving her traditions, found its name for the new society; Doheny, with his dogged, acute and vigorous character, stamped it with much of the force that helped it into life, but to Stephens is due the direction it took in line of sympathy with the movements of the Revolution on the Continent. He saw that the Irish question was no longer a question of religion; his common sense was too large to permit him to consider it a question of race even; he felt it was the old struggle which agitated France at the end of last century, transferred to new ground; the opposing forces were the same, with this difference, that in Ireland the people had not the consolation in all cases of saluting their tyrants as their countrymen.
The circumstances that the general chosen by Stephens to be the commander-in-chief of the Irish Republican Army was no less a character than General Cluseret, afterwards commander-in-chief of the Federals during the Commune of Paris, says more for the principles of the men who were the brains of the Fenian movement than any testimony of subordinates.
Coincident with the inception of Fenianism, 1857, commenced in Ireland a determined labor agitation which culminated in a vigorous movement amongst the baker journeymen against night labor and in favor of a reduction of the working hours. Great meetings were held all over the country during the years 1858–60, in which the rights of labor were most vehemently asserted and the tyranny of the Irish employers exposed and denounced. In Wexford, Kilkenny, Clonmel, and Waterford night work was abolished and day labor established. The movement was considered so serious that a Parliamentary committee sat to investigate it; from its report, as quoted by Karl Marx in his great work on Capital, we take the following excerpts:
In Limerick, where the grievances of the journeymen are demonstrated to be excessive, the movement had been defeated by the opposition of the master bakers, the miller bakers being the greatest opponents. The example of Limerick led to a retrogression in Ennis and Tipperary. In Cork, where the strongest possible demonstration of feeling took place, the masters by exercising their power of turning men out of employment, have defeated the movement. In Dublin the master bakers have offered the most determined opposition to the movement, and, by discountenancing as much as possible the journeymen promoting it, have succeeded in leading the men into acquiescence in Sunday work and night work, contrary to the convictions of the men.
The Committee believe that the hours of labor are limited by natural laws which cannot be violated with impunity. That for master bakers to induce their workmen by the fear of losing employment, to violate their religious convictions and their better feelings, to disobey the laws of the land, and to disregard public opinion, is calculated to provoke ill-feeling between workmen and masters—and affords an example dangerous to religion, morality, and social order. The Committee believe that any constant work beyond twelve hours a day encroaches on the domestic and private life of the working man, and leads to disastrous moral results, interfering with each man’s home, and the discharge of his family duties as son, brother, husband, or father. That work beyond twelve hours has a tendency to undermine the health of the working man, and so leads to premature old age and death, to the great injury of families of working men, thus deprived of the care and support of the head of the family when most required.
The reader will observe that the cities where this movement was strongest, where the workers had made the strongest fight and class feeling was highest, were the places where Fenianism developed the most; it is a matter of historical record that Dublin, Cork, Wexford, Clonmel, Kilkenny, Waterford, and Ennis and their respective counties were the most responsive to the message of Fenianism. Richard Pigott, who, before he succumbed to the influence of the gold offered by the London Times, had a long and useful career as responsible figurehead for advanced journals in Ireland, and who in that capacity acquired a thorough knowledge of the men and movements for whom he was sponsor, gives in his Recollections of an Irish Journalist this testimony as to the personnel of Fenianism, a testimony, it will be observed, fully bearing out our analysis of the relation between the revolutionary movement and the working class:
It is notorious that Fenianism was regarded with unconcealed aversion, not to say deadly hatred, not merely by the landlords and the ruling class, but by the Catholic clergy, the middle-class Catholics, and the great majority of the farming classes. It was in fact only amongst the youngest and most intelligent of the laboring class, of the young men of the large towns and cities engaged in the humbler walks of mercantile life, of the artisan and working classes, that it found favor.
Karl Marx quotes from Reports of the Poor Law Inspectors on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin, 1870, to show that between the years 1849 and 1869, while wages in Ireland had risen 50 or 60 percent, the prices of all necessaries had more than doubled. He gives the following extract from the official accounts of an Irish workhouse:
Average Weekly Cost per Head
These facts demonstrate that in the period during which the Fenian movement obtained its hold upon the Irish masses in the cities, the workers were engaged in fierce struggles with their employers, and the price of all necessaries of life had increased twofold—two causes sufficient to produce revolutionary ferment, even in a country without the historical justification for revolution possessed by Ireland. Great Britain was also in the throes of a fierce agitation as a result of the terrible suffering of the working class resultant from the industrial crisis of 1866–67. The Morning Star, London paper, stated that in six districts of London, fifteen thousand workmen were in a state of destitution with their families; Reynolds’ Newspaper, on January 20, 1867, quoted from a large poster, which it says was placarded all over London, the words “Fat Oxen, Starving Men—the fat oxen from their palaces of glass, have gone to feed the rich in their luxurious abode, while the starving poor are left to rot and die in their wretched dens,” and commented that “this reminds one of the secret revolutionary associations which prepared the French people for the events of 1789. At this moment, while English workmen with their wives and children are dying of cold and hunger, there are millions of English gold—the produce of English labor—being invested in Russian, Spanish, Italian, and other foreign enterprises.” And the London Standard of April 5, 1866, stated:
A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East End did not parade with their black flags en masse the human torrent was imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are forty thousand of them. In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed—next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw—cheek by jowl with this are forty thousand helpless, starving people. These thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters.
This state of hunger and revolt in Great Britain offers an explanation of the curious phenomenon mentioned by A. M. Sullivan in New Ireland, that the Home Rule or constitutional journals held their own easily in Ireland itself against The Irish People, but in Great Britain the Fenian journal simply swept the field clear of its Irish competitors. The Irish working-class exiles in Great Britain saw that the nationalist aspirations of their race pointed to the same conclusion, called for the same action, as the material interests of their class—viz., the complete overthrow of the capitalist government and the national and social tyranny upon which it rested. Any thoughtful reader of the poems of J. F. O’Donnell—such, for instance, as An Artisan’s Garret, depicting in words that burn, the state of mind of an unemployed Fenian artisan of Dublin, beside the bedside of his wife dying of hunger—or the sweetly pleading poetry of J. K. Casey (Leo), cannot wonder at the warm reception journals containing such teaching met in Great Britain amidst the men and women of Irish race and of a subject class.
Just as ’98 was an Irish expression of the tendencies embodied in the first French Revolution, as ’48 throbbed in sympathy with the democratic and social upheavals on the continent of Europe and England, so Fenianism was a responsive throb in the Irish heart to those pulsations in the heart of the European working class which elsewhere produced the International Working Men’s Association. Branches of that association flourished in Dublin and Cork until after the Paris Commune, and it is an interesting study to trace the analogy between the course of development of the socialist movement of Europe after the Commune and that of the Irish revolutionary cause after the failure of ’67. In both cases we witness the abandonment of insurrectionism and the initiation of a struggle in which the revolting class, while aiming at revolution, consistently refuse the arbitrament of an armed struggle.
When the revolutionary nationalists threw in their lot with the Irish Land League and made the land struggle the basis of their warfare, they were not only placing themselves in touch once more with those inexhaustible quarries of material interests from which all the great Irish statesmen from St. Laurence O’Toole to Wolfe Tone drew the stones upon which they built their edifice of a militant patriotic Irish organization, but they were also, consciously or unconsciously, placing themselves in accord with the principles which underlie and inspire the modern movement of labor.
This fact was recognized at the time by most dispassionate onlookers. Thus, in a rather amusing book published in France in 1887 under the title of Chez Paddy, Englished as Paddy at Home, the author, a French aristocrat, Baron E. de Mandat-Grancey, giving an account of a tour in Ireland in 1886, in the course of which he made the acquaintance of many of the Land League leaders, as well as visited at the mansions of a number of the landlords, makes this comment:
For in fact, however they may try to dissimulate it, the Irish claims, if they do not yet amount to communism as their avowed object—and they may still retain a few illusions upon that point—still it is quite certain that the methods employed by the Land League would not be disowned by the most advanced communists.
It was a recognition of this fact which induced The Irish World, the chief advocate of the Land League in America, to carry the subtitle of American Industrial Liberator, and to be the mouthpiece of the nascent labor movement of those days, as it was also a recognition of this fact which prompted the Irish middle-class leaders to abandon the land fight, and to lend their energies to an attempt to focus the whole interest of Ireland upon a Parliamentary struggle as soon as ever a temporary setback gave them an opportunity to counsel a change of tactics.
They feared to call into existence a spirit of inquiry into the rights of property which would not halt at a negation of the sacredness of fortunes founded upon rent, but might also challenge the rightfulness of fortunes drawn from profit and interest. They instinctively realized that such an inquiry would reveal that there was no fundamental difference between such fortunes: that they were made, not from land in the one case nor workshops in the other, but from the social subjection of the nonpossessing class, compelled to toil as tenants on the land or as employees in workshop or factory.
For the same reason the Land League (which was founded in 1879 at Irishtown, Co. Mayo, at a meeting held to denounce the exactions of a certain priest in his capacity as a rack-renting landlord) had had at the outset to make headway in Ireland against the opposition of all the official Home Rule press, and in Great Britain amongst the Irish exiles to depend entirely upon the championship of poor laborers and English and Scottish socialists. In fact those latter were, for years, the principal exponents and interpreters of Land League principles to the British masses, and they performed their task unflinchingly at a time when the “respectable” moneyed men of the Irish communities in Great Britain cowered in dread of the displeasure of their wealthy British neighbors.
Afterwards, when the rising tide of victorious revolt in Ireland compelled the Liberal Party to give a half-hearted acquiescence to the demands of the Irish peasantry, and the Home Rule–Liberal alliance was consummated, the Irish businessmen in Great Britain came to the front and succeeded in worming themselves into all the places of trust and leadership in the Irish organizations. One of the first and most bitter fruits of that alliance was the use of the Irish vote against the candidates of the Socialist and Labor Parties. Despite the horrified and energetic protests of such men as Michael Davitt, the solid phalanx of Irish voters was again and again hurled against the men who had fought and endured suffering, ostracism, and abuse for Ireland, at a time when the Liberal government was packing Irish jails with unconvicted Irish men and women. In so maneuvering to wean the Irish masses in Great Britain away from their old friends, the Socialist and Labor clubs, and to throw them into the arms of their old enemies the Liberal capitalists, the Irish bourgeois politicians were very astutely following their class interests, even while they cloaked their action under the name of patriotism. Obviously a union of Irish patriotism and socialist activity, if furthered and endorsed by Irish organizations in Great Britain, could not long be kept out of, or if introduced could not well be fought in, Ireland. Hence their frantic and illogical endeavor to twist and distort the significance of Irish history, and to put the question of property, its ownership and development, out of order in all discussions on Irish nationality.
But that question so dreaded rises again; it will not lie down, and cannot be suppressed. The partial success of the Land League has effected a change in Ireland, the portent of which but few realize. Stated briefly, it means that the recent Land Acts, acting contemporaneously with the development of transatlantic traffic, are converting Ireland from a country governed according to the conception of feudalism into a country shaping itself after capitalistic laws of trade. Today the competition of the trust-owned farms of the United States and the Argentine Republic is a more deadly enemy to the Irish agriculturist than the lingering remnants of landlordism or the bureaucratic officialism of the British Empire. Capitalism is now the enemy, it reaches across the ocean; and, after the Irish agriculturist has gathered his harvest and brought it to market, he finds that a competitor living three thousand miles away under a friendly flag has undersold and beggared him. The merely political heresy under which middle-class doctrinaires have for nearly 250 years cloaked the Irish fight for freedom has thus run its course.
The fight made by the Irish septs against the English pale and all it stood for; the struggle of the peasants and laborers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the great social struggle of all the ages will again arise and reshape itself to suit the new conditions. The war which the Land League fought, and then abandoned, before it was either lost or won, will be taken up by the Irish toilers on a broader field with sharper weapons, and a more comprehensive knowledge of all the essentials of permanent victory. As the Irish septs of the past were accounted Irish or English according as they rejected or accepted the native or foreign social order, as they measured their oppression or freedom by their loss or recovery of the collective ownership of their lands, so the Irish toilers henceforward will base their fight for freedom not upon the winning or losing the right to talk in an Irish Parliament, but upon their progress towards the mastery of those factories, workshops, and farms upon which a people’s bread and liberties depend.
As we have again and again pointed out, the Irish question is a social question; the whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself, in the last analysis, into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people or the invaders; and if the invaders, which set of them—the most recent swarm of land thieves, or the sons of the thieves of a former generation? These were the bottom questions of Irish politics, and all other questions were valued or deprecated in the proportion to which they contributed to serve the interests of some of the factions who had already taken their stand in this fight around property interests. Without this key to the meaning of events, this clue to unravel the actions of “great men,” Irish history is but a welter of unrelated facts, a hopeless chaos of sporadic outbreaks, treacheries, intrigues, massacres, murders, and purposeless warfare. With this key all things become understandable and traceable to their primary origin; without this key the lost opportunities of Ireland seem such as to bring a blush to the cheek of the Irish worker; with this key Irish history is a lamp to his feet in the stormy paths of today. Yet plain as this is to us today, it is undeniable that for two hundred years at least all Irish political movements ignored this fact, and were conducted by men who did not look below the political surface. These men, to arouse the passions of the people, invoked the memory of social wrongs, such as evictions and famines, but for these wrongs proposed only political remedies, such as changes in taxation or transference of the seat of government (class rule) from one country to another. Hence they accomplished nothing, because the political remedies proposed were unrelated to the social subjection at the root of the matter. The revolutionists of the past were wiser, the Irish socialists are wiser today. In their movement the North and the South will again clasp hands, again will it be demonstrated, as in ’98, that the pressure of a common exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class, earnest champions of civil and religious liberty out of Catholics, and out of both a united social democracy.
Labour in Irish History was published in November 1910. Articles from the book first appeared in The Harp and Workers’ Republic.
1.Poyning’s Law made the Dublin Parliament subordinate to the Parliament in London.