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James Connolly

 The Re-Conquest of Ireland

(1915)

Chapter IV
Labour in Dublin

Whilst there have been long available statistics of the high rents and poor housing of the Dublin working class, there have not been, and are not even now available, statistics of the wages and labour conditions of Dublin.

The information which might be supplied to the general public by such statistics has for the most part been left to be gathered piecemeal by the workers themselves, and to be applied piecemeal in an unconnected fashion as it became necessary to use it for purposes of organisation and agitation. Used in such fashion it was never collected into one co-ordinated whole, such for instance, as Mr. Rowntree has given us in his study of the East End of London. One reason for this neglect of the social conditions of Dublin has been that in Ireland everything connected with the question of poverty insensibly became identified with one side or the other in the political fight over the question of national government. The reform temperament, if I may use such a phrase, could not escape being drawn into the fight for political reform, and the conservative temperament quite as naturally became a pawn in the game of political reaction. Now, it is well to remember that a conservative temperament is not naturally allied to social abuses or industrial sweating, but may be, very often is, the most painstaking of all the elements making for the correction of such abuses within certain limits; it is also well to be clear upon the fact that a readiness to fight, or even to die for national freedom, might co-exist in the same person with a vehement support of industrial despotism or landlord tyranny. Thus it has happened that all the literary elements of society, those who might have been, under happier political circumstances, the champions of the down-trodden Irish wage labourer or the painstaking investigators of social conditions, were absorbed in other fields, and the working class left without any means of influencing outside public opinion. As a result, outside public opinion in Dublin gradually came to believe that poverty and its attendant miseries in a city were things outside of public interest, and not in the remotest degree connected with public duties or civic patriotism. Poverty and misery were, in short, looked upon as evils which might call for the exercise of private benevolence, but their causes were to be looked for solely in the lapses or weaknesses of individual men and women, and not in the temporary social arrangements of an ever-changing industrial order.

In this Dublin, with all this welter of high political ideals and low industrial practices, vaulting Imperialism and grovelling sweating, there arose the working-class agitator. First as the Socialist, analysing and dissecting the differences between the principles and practices of the local bosses of the political parties, drawing attention to the fact that wages were lower and rents higher in Dublin than in England, that railwaymen received in Ireland from five shillings to ten shillings per week less for the same work than they did in England, that municipal employees were similarly relatively underpaid, that in private employment the same thing was true, and that the Irish worker had fought everybody's battles but his own. That there was no law upon the Statute Book, no order of the Privy Council, and no proclamation of the Lord Lieutenant which compelled or sought to compel Irish employers to pay lower wages than were paid for similar work in England, or Irish house-owners to charge higher rents. That the argument about struggling Irish industries as opposed to wealthy English ones was being used to bolster up firms which had been so long established that their position was as secure as that of any English firm; and yet, sheltering behind this argument, they continued to pay sweating wages of the worst kind.

It was further insisted that as the Irish farmer had only succeeded in breaking the back of Irish landlordism by creating a public opinion which made allegiance to the farmer synonymous with allegiance to Ireland, which treated as a traitor to Ireland all those who acted against the interests of the farmer, so the Irish working class could in its turn only emancipate itself by acting resolutely upon the principle that the cause of Labour was the cause of Ireland, and that they who sought to perpetuate the enslavement and degradation of Labour were enemies of Ireland, and hence part and parcel of the system of oppression. That the Conquest of Ireland had meant the social and political servitude of the Irish masses and therefore the Re-Conquest of Ireland must mean the social as well as the political independence from servitude of every man, woman and child in Ireland. In other words, the common ownership of all Ireland by all the Irish.

In the soil thus prepared there came at a lucky moment the organisation of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. This Union has, from its inception, fought shy of all theorising or philosophising about history or tradition, but addressing itself directly to the work nearest its hand, has fought to raise the standard of labour conditions in Dublin to at least an approximation of decent human conditions. To do this it has used as its inspiring battle-cry, as the watchword of its members, as the key-word of its message, the affirmation that “An injury to one is the concern of all” – an affirmation which we all admire when we read of it as the enunciation of some Greek or Roman philosopher, but which we are now being asked to abhor when, translated into action, it appears in our midst as ‘The Sympathetic Strike’. Writing without time to consult books, we remember that one of the Wise Men of old, when asked “What was the most Perfect State?” answered “That in which an injury to the meanest citizen was considered as an outrage upon the whole body”. And the reply has come down the ages to us as the embodiment of wisdom. Is it an illustration of the conflict between our theories and our practice that the lowest paid, least educated body of workers are the only people in Ireland who try to live up to this ideal, and that this attempt of theirs should lead to their being branded as outlaws?

What is the sympathetic strike? It is the recognition by the Working Class of its essential unity, the manifestation in our daily industrial relations that our brother’s fight is our fight, our sister’s troubles are our troubles, that we are all members one of another. In practical operation it means that when any body of workers is in conflict with their employers, that all other workers should co-operate with them in attempting to bring that particular employer to reason by refusing to handle his goods. That, in fact, every employer who does not consent to treat his workpeople upon a civilised basis should be treated as an enemy of civilisation, and placed and kept outside the amenities and facilities offered by civilised communities. In other words, that he and his should be made ‘tabu’, treated as unclean, as ‘tainted’, and therefore likely to contaminate all others. The idea is not new. It is as old as humanity. Several historical examples will readily occur to the mind of the thoughtful reader. The Vehmgerichte of Germany of the Middle Ages, where the offending person had a stake driven into the ground opposite his door by orders of the secret tribunal; and from that moment was as completely cut off from his fellows as if he were on a raft in mid-ocean, is one instance. The boycott of Land League days is another. In that boycott the very journals and politicians who are denouncing the Irish Transport Union used a weapon which in its actual operations was more merciless, cruel and repulsive than any sympathetic strike has ever yet been. And even the Church, in its strength and struggles when it was able to command obedience to its decrees of excommunication, supplied history with a stern application of the same principle which for thoroughness we could never hope to equal. Such instances could be almost indefinitely multiplied. When the peasants of France rose in the Jacquerie against their feudal barons, did not the English nobles join in sympathetic action with those French barons against the peasantry, although at that moment the English were in France as invaders and despoilers of the territory of those same French feudal barons? When the English peasantry revolted against their masters, did not all English aristocrats join in sympathetic action to crush them? When the German peasantry rose during the Reformation, did not Catholic and Protestant aristocrats cease exterminating each other to join in a sympathetic attempt to exterminate the insurgents? When, during the French Revolution, the French people overthrew kings and aristocrats, did not all the feudal lords and rulers of Europe take sympathetic action to restore the French monarchy, even although doing it involved throwing all industrial life in Europe into chaos and drenching a Continent with blood?

Historically, the sympathetic strike can find ample justification. But – and this point must be emphasised – it was not mere cool reasoning that gave it birth in Dublin. In that city it was born out of desperate necessity. Seeing all classes of semi-skilled labour in Dublin so wretchedly underpaid and so atrociously sweated, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union taught them to stand together and help one another, and out of this advice the more perfect weapon has grown.

That the Labour Movement there has utilised it before elsewhere is due to the fact that in that city what is known as general or unskilled labour bears a greater proportion to the whole body of workers than elsewhere. And hence the workers are a more movable, fluctuating body, are more often, as individuals, engaged in totally dissimilar industries than in the English cities, where skilled trades absorb so great a proportion and keep them so long in the one class of industry.

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

Chapter V
Belfast and Its Problems

From a municipal point of view Belfast is a distinct improvement upon Dublin. Municipally, it can compare favourably with any similar city in Great Britain, and its industrial conditions are the product of modern industrial slavery and can be paralleled wherever capitalism flourishes. The things in which Belfast is peculiar are the skilful use by the master class of religious rallying cries which, long since forgotten elsewhere, are still potent to limit and weaken Labour here, and the pharisaical spirit of self-righteousness which enables unscrupulous sweaters of the poor, with one hand in the pocket of their workers, to raise the other hand to heaven and thank God that they are not as other men.

When, therefore, we say that Belfast is an improvement on Dublin from a municipal point of view we mean just exactly what we say, and nothing more, and would protest against more being read into our statement. The homes of the poor are better, house rent is lower, and the city is cleaner and healthier than Dublin.

Reasons for this comparatively favourable state of matters are many. Belfast, as the price of its surrender of its national soul, as the price of its hatred of national freedom, obtained every kind of legislative sanction it desired for its municipal activities; Dublin has been as consistently denied such facilities. Belfast has been enabled to spread as far beyond its original boundaries as it desired, and to include its wealthiest districts within its taxable area; Dublin is still (1913) confined to a district not much larger than it covered before the Union, and its wealthiest traders have had the aid of the law in keeping their residential districts outside of the city limits. Rathmines and Rathgar, for instance, are scandalous examples of areas inhabited by the wealthiest traders and merchants who enjoy all the facilities offered by the City of Dublin and bear none of its burdens. But the reader unfamiliar with the City of Dublin will appreciate this gross injustice better when we say that a penny tram fare will bring a traveller from Nelson’s Pillar in the heart of the city into the portions of the suburbs of Dublin occupied by the gentry of Dublin, but outside of the City limits. A penny tram ride in Belfast is much longer than a penny tram ride in Dublin, but whereas the penny tram ride in Dublin will take you out of the taxable area of the city, a two-penny tram ride in Belfast will still leave you within the city boundaries; this necessarily makes Belfast, apart altogether from its greater manufactures, a wealthier city than Dublin and leaves a much larger sum available for municipal activities and progress generally. Its taxation is more justly spread.

One other contributing cause is to be found in the circumstance that the greater part of the buildings in the heart of Belfast were built upon land originally acquired at nominal rents upon very long leases, whereas Dublin in its centre is occupied by old houses originally occupied as town mansions by the rack-renting aristocracy, and when these gentry moved to London they, in pursuance of their rack-renting instincts, let the houses at the highest rents they could squeeze out of them. Such houses have been let and re-let with an increase of rent accompanying each fresh letting, until Dublin is now confronted with the curious fact that although the tenant who hires the rooms is horribly rack-rented, yet the landlord from whom he hires may have but a small margin to live upon between the rent he receives and the rent he pays to the landlord from whom he had hired, and so ad infinitum.

One of the first things a Labour Party in Dublin Corporation should do, is to demand the publication of the names of the several owners of house property in the city. Only by such publication, and the investigation necessarily preceding it, would the tangle of house-ownership in Dublin be cleared up and the way cleared up for drastic enforcement of sanitary laws.

Our readers will see that the difference between the municipality of Dublin and that of Belfast is the difference between an old city, inheriting accumulations of abuses and obstructed at every turn by a hostile legislature, and a new city aided by a friendly legislature and unexpectedly spreading over agricultural land lightly valued and cheaply rented by its owners.

But Belfast has its own problems to deal with. In some respects these problems are more difficult than any Dublin knows; in some respects the horrors of Belfast life are such as Dublin may pray to be saved from.

With Belfast, as with Dublin, there is little need to go beyond official returns for any statements of facts. Dr. Baillie, Medical Officer of Health for Belfast, has on many occasions in his Annual Report set down in his dry official way some statistics as to the pressure of the Capitalist system upon the Belfast workers, and these statistics, well considered, might well produce a crop of revolutionists in the Northern City.

In his official report for 1909, referring to the extraordinary number of premature births, Dr. Baillie remarks:–

The premature births were found to be most prevalent among women who worked in mills and factories, engaged in such work as the following – spinning, weaving, machining, tobacco-spinning and laundry work. Many of the women appear to be utterly unable for such work owing to the want of sufficient nourishment and suitable clothing, and being through stress of circumstances compelled to work up to the date of confinement, this would be accountable for many young and delicate children found by the Health Visitors.

Dealing with consumption and the efforts at its cure, he gives the following figures illustrating again how it is the poor who are the principal sufferers from this, as from all the other scourges of life in Ireland:–

As in the previous year, the class of persons most attacked were housewives (280), the next in order being labourers (179), mill-workers (162), children (117), warehouse workers (107), factory workers (59), and clerks (34).

Dr. Baillie further drives home the lesson of the cause of consumption when he says:–

The districts suffering most severely from this disease are Nos.3, 4 and 12, in which 136, 117 and 112 cases occurred respectively, and it is to be noted that in these districts textile industries are largely carried on.

Of the total number of cases (1,317) coming under the observation of this Department, 708 were females and 609 males, showing the number of females to be 99 in excess of that of males. This is somewhat different to that which is found in most other cities, and may be partially due to the nature of the work in which the female population is engaged.

As in previous years, it was found that consumption was most prevalent amongst the poor, owing largely to the unfavourable conditions under which necessity compels them to live – such as dark, ill-ventilated houses and insanitary habits, together with insufficient food and clothing.

This is confirmatory of the previous saying of Dr. Koch, of Berlin, that the chief cause of consumption was to be found in the unsanitary houses and workshops of the poor. The Socialist contention that most diseases could be eliminated by the establishment of a juster social order, and that the capitalist system is mainly responsible for sickness and the poverty that follows from sickness, as well as the sickness that follows from poverty, is thus strikingly verified from impartial sources.

Of Typhus Fever Dr. Baillie says, and the admission is remarkable, that:–

This disease is extremely proved to be associated with conditions of privation, poverty, and over-crowding, bad feeding and intemperance.

The disease in question does not claim many victims in Belfast, but it is interesting to notice that this medical gentleman places the responsibility for the disease upon the proper shoulders, those responsible for bad social conditions – a fact to be commended to the notice of those good souls who, when they see their children, parents, sisters or brothers murdered by disease, blasphemously attribute their deaths to the ‘Will of God’. It is not to the Will of God, but to the greed of man that most such deaths are due.

To those who are acquainted, even on hear-say, with the conditions in the mills of Belfast, it will be no surprise to learn that the poor are the chief sufferers from consumption and especially the poor mill-workers. Imagine a spinning-room so hot with a moist heat that all girls and women must work in bare feet, with dress open at breast and arms bare, hair tied up tight to prevent it irritating the skin rendered irritable and tender by sweat and heat; imagine the stifling, suffocating atmosphere that in a few months banishes the colour from the cheeks of the rosiest half-timer and reduces all to one common deadly pallor; imagine all the windows closed in such a place, or only opened for a few minutes when the advent of the Lady (Factory) Inspector is announced, and closed immediately she retires; imagine all the machinery driven at ever increasing speed in such an inferno, and imagine these poor slaves at meal hours catching up their shawls and rushing out, perhaps amid rain or frost, to snatch up a few badly-cooked mouthfuls of badly nourishing food and be back in their places inside of 45 minutes! Is it any wonder that such people, working amid such conditions, are subject to consumption? The medical authorities issue long and minute instructions to the people as to how consumption may be avoided, but the instructions are as a rule utterly valueless to the class most subject to the scourge. Of what use is it to teach people about the evil of overcrowding when their wages will not permit them to secure decent house room? Of what avail a paper telling how to cook and prepare food when they have only 45 minutes to come from the mill, cook a meal, eat it, and return to the mill – the mother being one of the bread-winners or wage-earners of the family? Of what avail instilling into the worker the necessity of choosing proper food to counteract the tendency to consumption, and so increase the resisting power of the individual, when the wages are so small that only the poorest, easiest cooked, and generally least nutritious foods can be bought?

We do not deny the benevolent motives of the good ladies and gentlemen at present crusading against consumption in Ireland, but we consider that the agitator who aroused the people to revolt against the conditions of toil and life for the workers is doing more to end the scourge than all the anti-tuberculosis societies ever dreamed of. Consider, for instance, the life of the sweated home-workers of Belfast, and imagine what poor resisting power their bodily frames must offer to the inroads of the White Plague. We quote again from Dr. Baillie:–

In the last week in December, for instance, a woman was observed embroidering small dots on cushion covers, there were 308 dots on each cushion, and for sewing these by hand she received the sum of one penny. She said that for a day's work of that kind she would have difficulty in making sixpence. Nor is this an exceptional case. Quite recently our inspector was shown handkerchiefs which were to be ornamented by a design in dots; these dots were counted and it was found that the worker had to sew 384 dots for one penny. Comment is needless; other classes of work are as badly paid. The finishing of shirts, which consists of making buttonholes, sewing on buttons and making small gussets at the wrists and sides of the shirts, may be instanced. In each, six or seven buttonholes have to be cut or hand-sewn, eight buttons have to be sewn on, and four gussets made. This work is paid at the rate of sixpence for one dozen shirts. Nor is this a cheap class of goods, permitting scamped work. The sewing has to be neat and well-finished, and the buttonholes evenly sewn, the shirts being of a fine quality for which the buying public has to give a good price.

The making-up trades in general pay very poorly, among the various kinds of badly paid work noticed may be mentioned children’s pinafores, flounced and braided at 4½d. per dozen, women’s chemises at 7½ d. per dozen, women’s aprons at 2½d. per dozen, men’s drawers at 10d. per dozen, men's shirts at 10d. per dozen, blouses at 9d. per dozen, and babies’ overalls at 9d. per dozen. From these very low rates of pay must be deducted the time spent in visiting the warerooms for work, the necessary upkeep of the worker’s sewing machine, and the price of thread used in sewing, which is almost invariably provided by the worker.

One penny per hour is the ordinary rate of pay, and in many instances it falls below this.

In these industrial parts of the North of Ireland the yoke of capitalism lies heavy upon the lives of the people. The squalor and listless wretchedness of some other parts is, indeed, absent, but in its stead there exists grinding toil for old and young – toil to which the child is given up whilst its limbs and brains are still immature and undeveloped, and toil continued until, a broken and enfeebled wreck, the toiler sinks into a too early grave. In this part of Ireland the child is old before it knows what it is to be young. We have heard of a savage chief who was brought from his savage home to see and be impressed with the works of civilisation. He was taken around the big centres of modern capitalism, shown steam engines, battleships, guns, railway trains, big factories and churches, and all the mammoth achievements of our day, and then taken home to his people. Arrived there he was asked by his escort what he conceived to be the most wonderful thing he had seen, what had impressed him most, and he answered:–

“Little Children Working”.

This thing which seemed so strange to the savage, who amid his savage surroundings, handicapped by lack of knowledge, and all its industrial possibilities, yet had never thought of making children work, this thing is the great outstanding feature of life in Belfast and the industrial parts of Ireland. In their wisdom our lords and masters often leave full-grown men unemployed, but they can always find a use for the bodies and limbs of our children. A strange comment upon the absurdities of the capitalist system, illustrating its idiotic wastefulness of human possibilities; that the intellect and strength of men should be left to rot for want of work, whilst children are by premature work deprived of the possibilities of developing fully their minds or bodies.

Nor is this the only manner in which the life of the working class is sacrificed to the greed of dividends. Our shipyards offer up a daily sacrifice of life and limb on the altar of capitalism. The clang of the ambulance bell is one of the most familiar daily sounds on the streets between our shipyards and our hospitals.

It has been computed that some seventeen lives were lost on the Titanic before she left the Lagan; a list of the maimed and hurt and of those suffering from minor injuries, as a result of the accidents at any one of those big ships would read like a roster of the wounded after a battle upon the Indian frontier. The public reads and passes on, but fails to comprehend the totality of suffering involved. But it all means lives ruined, fair prospects blighted, homes devastated, crippled wrecks of manhood upon the streets, or widows and orphans to eat the bread of poverty and pauperism.

Add to this an army of insurance doctors paid, to belittle the injury, and declare the injured to be well and hearty, a host of lawyers whose practice depends upon their success in confusing honest workers when endeavouring, amid unfamiliar surroundings, to tell the truth about the mangling or killing of their workmates, and, finally, a hostile judge treating every applicant for just compensation as if they were known and habitual criminals, and you have a faint idea of one side of industrial life (and death) in the North of Ireland.

It is not so easy with accidents as it is with diseases to make the public realise that they are mostly preventable, yet that this is the case is susceptible of proof to the unbiassed mind. Even many workers will pooh-pooh the idea, accustomed as they have been to seeing accidents almost every day of their working lives, yet a little calm reflection will convince all but the most obdurate that an alteration of working conditions could be made which would go far to minimise the dangers of even the most perilous of our occupations.

Competent investigators, for instance, have found that the greatest number of accidents occur at two specific periods of the working day – viz., in the early morning and just before stopping work at evening. In the early morning when the worker is still drowsy from being aroused too early from his slumbers, and has not had time to settle down properly to his routine of watchfulness and alertness, or, as the homely saying has it, “whilst the sleep is still in his bones”, the toll of accidents is always a heavy one.

After 9 a.m. they become less frequent and continue so until an hour after dinner. Then they commence again and go on increasing in frequency as the workers get tired and exhausted, until they rise to the highest number in the hour or half-hour immediately before ceasing work. How often do we hear the exclamation apropos of some accident involving the death of a worker: “He had only just started”, or “he had only ten minutes to go before stopping for the day”? And yet the significance of the fact is lost on most.

Were these industries owned in common by the community and conducted for the benefit of all instead of for the private profit of a few capitalists, care would be taken that the working hours were not at any time so prolonged as to weary the worker and thus destroy his vigour and alertness; and, when an accident did occur, the persons in charge would be placed upon trial and compelled to prove their innocence of responsibility, instead of, as at present, when the friends of the victim are compelled to establish the responsibility of the employer, and can only establish it by the evidence of workers whose daily bread is at the mercy of the employer in question. But pending that desirable outcome of the Labour Movement, the efforts of the workers upon the industrial and political field should seek amongst other things:–

• The abolition of the early morning start.
• The abolition of all task or piecework or ‘rushing’ systems – red with the blood of the workers.
• Reduction of the working day to the limit of eight hours or less, forbidding the physical and mental exhaustion of the workers.
• Compensation for accidents to equal full pay of the worker injured.
• Pensions to all widows of workers killed at work, such pensions to be a charge upon the firm employing the worker; onus of collecting and disbursing said pension to lie upon the State.

The majority of the poor slaves who work under such conditions and for such pay, as also the majority of the mill and factory workers amongst whom consumption claims its most numerous victims are, in Belfast, descendants of the men who “fought for civil and religious liberty at Derry, Aughrim and the Boyne”.

If those poor sweated descendants of Protestant rebels against a king had to-day one-hundredth part of the spirit of their ancestors in question, the re-conquest of Ireland by the working class would be a much easier task than it is likely to prove.

But into the minds of the wisest of both sections there is gradually percolating the great truth that our common sufferings provide a common basis of action – an amalgam to fuse us all together, and that, as we suffer together we should fight together, that we may be free together. Thus out of our toil and moil there arises a new Party – the Party of Labour – to

Tell of the cause of the poor who shrink Crushed grapes in the wine press, While rich men drink And barter the trodden wine, And pray.

Chapter VI
Woman

In our chapter dealing with the industrial conditions of Belfast, it was noted that the extremely high rate of sickness in the textile industry, the prevalence of tuberculosis and cognate diseases, affected principally the female workers, as does also the prevalence of a comparative illiteracy amongst the lower-paid grades of Labour in that city.

The recent dispute in Dublin also brought out in a very striking manner the terrible nature of the conditions under which women and girls labour in the capital city, the shocking insanitary conditions of the workshops, the grinding tyranny of those in charge, and the alarmingly low vitality which resulted from the inability to procure proper food and clothes with the meagre wages paid. Consideration of such facts inevitably leads to reflection on the whole position of women in modern Ireland, and their probable attitude towards any such change as that we are forecasting.

It will be observed by the thoughtful reader, that the development in Ireland of what is known as the women’s movement has synchronised with the appearance of women upon the industrial field, and that the acuteness and fierceness of the women’s war has kept even pace with the spread amongst educated women of a knowledge of the sordid and cruel nature of the lot of their suffering sisters of the wage-earning class.

We might say that the development of what, for want of a better name, is known as sex-consciousness, has waited for the spread amongst the more favoured women, of a deep feeling of social consciousness, what we have elsewhere in this work described as a civic conscience. The awakening amongst women of a realisation of the fact that modern society was founded upon force and injustice, that the highest honours of society have no relation to the merits of the recipients, and that acute human sympathies were rather hindrances than helps in the world, was a phenomenon due to the spread of industrialism and to the merciless struggle for existence which it imposes.

Upon woman, as the weaker physical vessel, and as the most untrained recruit, that struggle was inevitably the most cruel; it is a matter for deep thankfulness that the more intellectual women broke out into revolt against the anomaly of being compelled to bear all the worst burdens of the struggle, and yet be denied even the few political rights enjoyed by the male portion of their fellow-sufferers.

Had the boon of political equality been granted as readily as political wisdom should have dictated, much of the revolutionary value of woman’s enfranchisement would probably have been lost. But the delay, the politicians’ breach of faith with the women, a breach of which all parties were equally culpable, the long-continued struggle, the ever-spreading wave of martyrdom of the militant women of Great Britain and Ireland, and the spread amongst the active spirits of the Labour movement of an appreciation of the genuineness of the women’s longings for freedom, as of their courage in fighting for it, produced an almost incalculable effect for good upon the relations between the two movements.

In Ireland the women’s cause is felt by all Labour men and women as their cause; the Labour cause has no more earnest and whole-hearted supporters than the militant women. Rebellion, even in thought, produces a mental atmosphere of its own; the mental atmosphere the women’s rebellion produced, opened their eyes and trained their minds to an understanding of the effects upon their sex of a social system in which the weakest must inevitably go to the wall, and when a further study of the capitalist system taught them that the term ‘the weakest’ means in practice the most scrupulous, the gentlest, the most humane, the most loving and compassionate, the most honourable, and the most sympathetic, then the militant women could not fail to see, that capitalism penalised in human beings just those characteristics of which women supposed themselves to be the most complete embodiment. Thus the spread of industrialism makes for the awakening of a social consciousness, awakes in women a feeling of self-pity as the greatest sufferers under social and political injustice; the divine wrath aroused when that self-pity is met with a sneer, and justice is denied, leads women to revolt, and revolt places women in comradeship and equality with all the finer souls whose life is given to warfare against established iniquities.

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave. In Ireland that female worker has hitherto exhibited, in her martyrdom, an almost damnable patience. She has toiled on the farms from her earliest childhood, attaining usually to the age of ripe womanhood without ever being vouchsafed the right to claim as her own a single penny of the money earned by her labour, and knowing that all her toil and privation would not earn her that right to the farm which would go without question to the most worthless member of the family, if that member chanced to be the eldest son.

The daughters of the Irish peasantry have been the cheapest slaves in existence – slaves to their own family, who were, in turn, slaves to all social parasites of a landlord and gombeen-ridden community. The peasant, in whom centuries of servitude and hunger had bred a fierce craving for money, usually regarded his daughters as beings sent by God to lighten his burden through life, and too often the same point of view was as fiercely insisted upon by the clergymen of all denominations. Never did the idea seem to enter the Irish peasant’s mind, or be taught by his religious teachers, that each generation should pay to its successors the debt it owes to its forerunners; that thus, by spending itself for the benefit of its children, the human race ensures the progressive development of all. The Irish peasant, in too many cases, treated his daughters in much the same manner as he regarded a plough or a spade – as tools with which to work the farm. The whole mental outlook, the entire moral atmosphere of the countryside, enforced this point of view. In every chapel, church or meeting-house the insistence was ever upon duties – duties to those in superior stations, duties to the Church, duties to the parents. Never were the ears of the young polluted (?) by any reference to ‘rights’, and, growing up in this atmosphere, the women of Ireland accepted their position of social inferiority. That, in spite of this, they have ever proven valuable assets in every progressive movement in Ireland, is evidence of the great value their co-operation will be, when to their self-sacrificing acceptance of duty they begin to unite its necessary counterpoise, a high-minded assertion of rights.

We are not speaking here of rights, in the thin and attenuated meaning of the term to which we have been accustomed by the Liberal or other spokesmen of the capitalist class, that class to whom the assertion of rights has ever been the last word of human wisdom. We are rather using it in the sense in which it is used by, and is familiar to, the Labour movement.

We believe, with that movement, that the serene performance of duty, combined with and inseparable from the fearless assertion of rights, unite to make the highest expression of the human soul. That soul is the grandest which most unquestionably acquiesces in the performance of duty, and most unflinchingly claims its rights, even against a world in arms. In Ireland the soul of womanhood has been trained for centuries to surrender its rights, and as a consequence the race has lost its chief capacity to withstand assaults from without, and demoralisation from within. Those who preached to Irish womankind fidelity to duty as the only ideal to be striven after, were, consciously or unconsciously, fashioning a slave mentality, which the Irish mothers had perforce to transmit to the Irish child.

The militant women who, without abandoning their fidelity to duty, are yet teaching their sisters to assert their rights, are re-establishing a sane and perfect balance that makes more possible a well-ordered Irish nation.

The system of private capitalist property in Ireland, as in other countries, has given birth to the law of primogeniture under which the eldest son usurps the ownership of all property to the exclusion of the females of the family. Rooted in a property system founded upon force, this iniquitous law was unknown to the older social system of ancient Erin, and, in its actual workings out in modern Erin, it has been and is responsible for the moral murder of countless virtuous Irish maidens. It has meant that, in the continual dispersion of Irish families, the first to go was not the eldest son, as most capable of bearing the burden and heat of a struggle in a foreign country, but was rather the younger and least capable sons, or the gentler and softer daughters. Gentle Charles Kickham sang:–

O brave, brave Irish girls, We well might call you brave; Sure the least of all your perils 4] Is the stormy ocean wave.

Everyone acquainted with the lot encountered by Irish emigrant girls in the great cities of England or America, the hardships they had to undergo, the temptations to which they were subject, and the extraordinary proportion of them that succumbed to these temptations, must acknowledge that the poetic insight of Kickham correctly appreciated the gravity of the perils that awaited them. It is humiliating to have to record that the overwhelming majority of those girls were sent out upon a conscienceless world, absolutely destitute of training and preparation, and relying solely upon their physical strength and intelligence to carry them safely through. Laws made by men shut them out of all hope of inheritance in their native land; their male relatives exploited their labour and returned them never a penny as reward, and finally, when at last their labour could not wring sufficient from the meagre soil to satisfy the exactions of all, these girls were incontinently packed off across the ocean with, as a parting blessing, the adjuration to be sure and send some money home. Those who prate glibly about the ‘sacredness of the home’ and the ‘sanctity of the family circle’ would do well to consider what home in Ireland to-day is sacred from the influence of the greedy mercenary spirit, born of the system of capitalist property; what family circle is unbroken by the emigration of its most gentle and loving ones.

Just as the present system in Ireland has made cheap slaves or untrained emigrants of the flower of our peasant women, so it has darkened the lives and starved the intellect of the female operatives in mills, shops and factories. Wherever there is a great demand for female labour, as in Belfast, we find that the woman tends to become the chief support of the house. Driven out to work at the earliest possible age, she remains fettered to her wage-earning – a slave for life. Marriage does not mean for her a rest from outside labour, it usually means that, to the outside labour, she has added the duty of a double domestic toil. Throughout her life she remains a wage-earner; completing each day’s work, she becomes the slave of the domestic needs of her family; and when at night she drops wearied upon her bed, it is with the knowledge that at the earliest morn she must find her way again into the service of the capitalist, and at the end of that coming day’s service for him hasten homeward again for another round of domestic drudgery. So her whole life runs – a dreary pilgrimage from one drudgery to another; the coming of children but serving as milestones in her journey to signalise fresh increases to her burdens. Overworked, underpaid, and scantily nourished because underpaid, she falls easy prey to all the diseases that infect the badly-constructed ‘warrens of the poor’. Her life is darkened from the outset by poverty, and the drudgery to which poverty is born, and the starvation of the intellect follows as an inevitable result upon the too early drudgery of the body.

Of what use to such sufferers can be the re-establishment of any form of Irish State if it does not embody the emancipation of womanhood. As we have shown, the whole spirit and practice of modern Ireland, as it expresses itself through its pastors and masters, bear socially and politically, hardly upon women. That spirit and that practice had their origins in the establishment in this country of a social and political order based upon the private ownership of property, as against the older order based upon the common ownership of a related community.

Whatever class rules industrially will rule politically, and impose upon the community in general the beliefs, customs and ideas most suitable to the perpetuation of its rule. These beliefs, customs, ideas become then the highest expression of morality and so remain until the ascent to power of another ruling industrial class establishes a new morality. In Ireland since the Conquest, the landlord-capitalist class has ruled; the beliefs, customs, ideas of Ireland are the embodiment of the slave morality we inherited from those who accepted that rule in one or other of its forms; the subjection of women was an integral part of that rule.

Unless women were kept in subjection, and their rights denied, there was no guarantee that field would be added unto field in the patrimony of the family, or that wealth would accumulate even although men should decay. So, down from the landlord to the tenant or peasant proprietor, from the monopolist to the small business man eager to be a monopolist, and from all above to all below, filtered the beliefs, customs, ideas establishing a slave morality which enforces the subjection of women as the standard morality of the country.

None so fitted to break the chains as they who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what is a fetter. In its march towards freedom, the working class of Ireland must cheer on the efforts of those women who, feeling on their souls and bodies the fetters of the ages, have arisen to strike them off, and cheer all the louder if in its hatred of thraldom and passion for freedom the women’s army forges ahead of the militant army of Labour.

But whosoever carries the outworks of the citadel of oppression, the working class alone can raze it to the ground.