"England, you see, is used to dealing with problems of empire—with nations and great metropolises. When we bring her plans that mean life or death to just villages, the matter is too small to discuss. She is bored.

"Ireland offers opposition in the person of the 'gombeen man.' He is the local trader and money lender. And co-operative buying and selling takes away his monopoly of business.

"Paddy Gallagher up in Dungloe in the Rosses will give you an idea of the poverty of the Irish countryside, of the extent that the poverty is due to the gombeen men, 'the bosses of the Rosses,' and of the ability of the co-operative society to develop and create industry even in such a locality.

"Societies like Paddy Gallagher's are springing up all over Ireland. The rapid growth may be estimated from the fact that in 1902 their trade turnover was $7,500,000, and in 1918, $50,000,000. These little units do not merely develop industry; they also bind up the economic and social interests of the people.

"In a few years these new societies and others to be created will have dominated their districts, and political power will follow, and we will have new political ideals based on a democratic control of agriculture and industry, and states and people will move harmoniously to a given end.

"Ireland might attain, by orderly evolution, to a co-operative commonwealth in fifty to two hundred years.

"But these are dangerous times for prophecy."



PADDY GALLAGHER: GIANT KILLER.

From the dark niche under the gray boulder where the violets grow, a Donegal fairy flew to the mountain cabin to bring a birthday wish to Patrick Gallagher. The fairy designed not that great good would come to Paddy, but that great good would come to his people through him. At least when Paddy grew up, he slew the child-eating giant, Poverty, who lived in Donegal.

Paddy began to fight poverty when he could scarcely toddle. With his father, whose back was laden with a great rush basket, he used to pad in his bare feet down the mountainside to the Dungloe harbor—down where the hills give the ocean a black embrace. Father and son would wade into the ocean that was pink and lavender in the sunset. Above them, the white curlews swooped and curved and opened their pine wood beaks to squawk a prayer for dead fish. But the workers did not stop to watch. Their food also was in question. They must pluck the black seaweed to fertilize their field.

When the early sun bronzed the bog, and streaked the dark pool below with gold, Paddy and his father began to feed the dried wavy strands of kelp between the hungry brown furrow lips. They packed the long groove near the stone fence; they rounded past the big boulder that could not be budged; last of all, they filled the short far row in the strangely shaped little field. At noon, Paddy's mother appeared at the half door of the cabin and called in the general direction of the field—it was difficult to see them, for their frieze suits had been dyed in bog water and she could not at once distinguish them from the brown earth. They were glad to come in to eat their sugarless and creamless oatmeal.

In the evening Paddy ran over the road to his cousin's. Western clouds were blackening and his little cousin was pulling the pig into the cabin as a man puts other sort of treasure out of danger into a safe. Paddy listened a moment. He could hear the castanets of the tweed weaver's loom and the hum of his uncle's deep voice as he sang at his work. He ran to the rear of the cabin and up the stone steps to the little addition. A lantern filled the room he entered with black, harp-like shadows of the loom. While the uncle stopped treadling and held the blue-tailed shuttle in his hand, the breathless little boy told him that the field was finished.

"God grant," said the uncle with a solemnity that put fear into the heart of Paddy, "there may be a harvest for you."

Paddy watched his mother work ceaselessly to aid in the fight that his father and he were making against poverty. During the month her needles would click unending wool into socks, and then on Saturday she would trudge—often in a stiff Atlantic gale—sixteen miles to the market in Strabane. There she sold the socks at a penny a pair.

In spite of combined hopes, the potato plants were floppily yellow that year. Their stems felt like a dead man's fingers. No potatoes to eat. None to exchange for meal. What were they to do?

The gombeen man told them. As member of the county council, he said, he would secure money for the repair of the roads. All those who worked on the road would get paid in meal.

"Let your da' not worry," said the fat gombeen man pompously to Paddy. Paddy had brought the ticket that his father had obtained by a week's work to exchange for twenty-eight pounds of corn meal. "I'll keep famine from the parish. Charity's not dead yet."

When Paddy lugged the meal into the cabin, he found his mother lying on the bed with her face averted from the bowl of milk that some less hungry neighbor had brought in. His father's gaunt frame was hunched over the peat blocks on the flat hearth. Paddy, full of desire to banish the brooding discouragement from the room, hastened to repeat the words of the gombeen man. But he felt that he had failed when his father, regarding the two stone sack, said hollowly:

"Charity? Small pay to the men who keep the roads open for his vans."

In the spring, Paddy was nine, and had to go out in the world to fight poverty alone. His father had confided to him that they were in great debt to the gombeen man. Paddy could help them get out. There was to be a hiring fair in Strabane. Paddy swung along the road to Strabane pretending he was a man—he was to be hired out just like one. But when he arrived at the hiring field he shrank back. All the farm hands, big and little, stood herded together in between the cattle pens. A man? A beast. One overseer for a big estate came up to dicker for the boy, and said he would give him fifteen dollars for six months' work. Paddy was just about to muster up courage to put the price up a bit, when a friend of the overseer came up with the prearranged remark: "A fine boy! Well worth twelve dollars the six months!"

"What do you want to know for?" asked the gombeen man, when at the end of Paddy's back-breaking six months, Paddy and his father brought him the fifteen dollars and asked how much they still owed. The gombeen man refuses accounts to everyone but the priest, magistrate, doctor and teacher. "What do you want to know how much you owe for? Unless you want to pay me all off?"

When Paddy was seventeen he made a still bigger fight against debt. With the sons of other "tied" men, he went to work in the Scottish harvests. His family was not as badly off as those of some of the boys. Some had run so far behind that the gombeen man had served writs on them, obtained judgment against their holdings, and could evict them at pleasure.

When Paddy married and settled down in Dungloe he found the reason for the unpayableness of the debt. One day he and his father shopped at the gombeen store together. They bought the same amount of meal. The father paid cash—seventeen shillings. Forty-four days later, Paddy brought his money. But the gombeen man presented him with a bill for twenty-one shillings and three pence. It did no good to say how much the father had paid for the same amount of meal. The gombeen man insisted that Paddy's father had given eighteen shillings, and Paddy was being charged just three shillings and three pence interest. Or only 144 per cent per annum!

"Why do we buy from him? Why don't we get together and do our own buying?" asked the insurgent Paddy. After much reflection he had decided on the tactics of his campaign against poverty and the recruiting for his army commenced that night as the neighbors visited about his turf fire. There was doubt on the faces of those tied to the gombeen man. But Paddy continued: "Let's try it out in a small way, say with fertilizer. That stuff he's selling us isn't as good as kelp, and he won't tell us what it's made of."

The recruits fell in. They scraped up enough money to buy a twenty-ton load of rich manure from a neighboring co-operative society. The little deal saved them $200 and brought them heavy crops. They organized. They needed a store. Up in a rocky boreen on his little farm, Paddy had an empty shed. Again the neighbors explored the toes of their money stockings, and found enough to pay for filling the shed with flour, tea, sugar and meal. Then, if they were "free" men, they came boldly to shop on the nights the store was open—moonlight or no moonlight. But if they were "tied" men, they crept fearsomely tip the rocks on dark nights only. The recruits recruited. Financial and social returns began to come in. At the end of the first year there was a clear profit of over $500. In three years the society was recognized as one of the most efficient in Ireland and presented by the Pembroke fund with a fine stucco hall. Jigs. Dances. Lectures.

But the gombeen man wasn't "taking it lying down." He called on his political and religious friends to aid. First on the magistrate. When Paddy became the political rival of the gombeen man for the county council, there was a joint debate. Paddy used reduced prices as his argument. Questions were hurled at him by the reddening trader.

"Wait till I get through," said Paddy. "Then I'll attend to you."

That, said the trader, was a physical threat! So the gombeener's friend, the magistrate, threw Paddy into jail. Paddy went to prison full of fear that dissension might be sown in the society's ranks. But on coming out he discovered not only that he had won the election but that a committee was waiting to present him with a gorgeous French gilt clock, and that fires, just as on St. John's eve, were blazing on the mountains.

But the trader took another friend of his aside. This time it was the village priest. Bad dances, he said, were going on of nights in Templecrone hall. What was Paddy's surprise on a Sunday in the windswept chapel by the sea to hear his beloved hall denounced as a place of sin. Paddy knew the people would not come any more.

Then, the great inspiration. Paddy remembered how his mother used to try to help with her knitting. He saw girls at spinning wheels or looms working full eight hours a day and earning only $1.25 to $1.50 a week. So with permission of the society, Paddy had two long tables placed in the entertainment hall, and along the edges of the tables he had the latest type of knitting machines screwed. Soon there were about 300 girls working on a seven and a half hour day. They were paid by the piece, and it was not long before they were getting wages that ran from $17.50 to $5.25 a week. Incidentally, Mr. Gallagher, as manager, gave himself only $10.00 a week.



When I saw Patrick Gallagher in Dungloe, he was dressed in a blue suit and a soft gray cap, and looked not unlike the keen sort of business men one sees on an ocean liner. And indeed he gave the impression that if he had not been a co-operationist for Ireland, he might well have been a capitalist in America. He took me up the main street of Dungloe into easily the busiest of the white plastered shops. He made plain the hints of growing industry. The bacon cured in Dungloe. The egg-weighing—since weighing was introduced the farmers worked to increase the size of the eggs and the first year increased their sales $15,000 worth. The rentable farm machines.

"Come out into this old cabin and meet our baker," Paddy continued when we went out the rear of the store. "We began to get bread from Londonderry, but the old Lough Swilly road is too uncertain. See the ancient Scotch oven—the coals are placed in the oven part and when they are still hot they are scooped out and the bread is put in their place. Interesting, isn't it? But we are going to get a modern slide oven."

After viewing the orchard and the beehives beneath the trees, I remarked on the size of the plant, and its suitability for his purpose. He said:

"It used to belong to the gombeen man."



The sea wind was blowing through the open windows of the mill. Barefoot girls—it's only on Sunday that Donegal country girls wear shoes and then they put them on only when they are quite near church—silently needled khaki-worsted over the shining wire prongs. Others spindled wool for new work. As they stood or sat at their work, the shy colleens told of an extra room added to a cabin, or a plump sum to a dowry through the money earned at the mill. None of them was planning, as their older sisters had had to plan, to go to Scotland or America.

"As the parents of most of the girls are members in the society they want the best working conditions possible for them," said Mr. Gallagher as he took me out the back entrance of the knitting mill. "So we're building this new factory. See that hole where we blasted for granite; we got enough for the entire mill in one blast. That motor is for the electricity to be used in the plant.

"Northern sky lights in the new building—the evenest light comes from the north. Cement floor—good for cleaning but bad for the girls, so we are to have cork matting for them to stand on. Slide-in seats under the tables—that's so that a girl may stand or sit at her work."

"Soon the hall will be free for entertainments again," I suggested. "Won't the old cry be raised against it once more?"

"No. We're too strong for that now."



At the Gallaghers' home, a sort of store-like place on the main street, Mrs. Gallagher with a soft shawl about her shoulders was waiting to introduce me to Miss Hester. Miss Hester was brought to Dungloe by the co-operative society to care for the mothers at child-birth. She is the first nurse who ever came to work in Donegal.

But Mr. Gallagher wanted to talk more of Dungloe's attainment and ambition. He compared the trade turnover of $5,045 for the first year of the society with $375,000 for 1918. But there were more things to be done. The finest herring in the world swim the Donegal coast. Scots catch it. Irish buy it. Dungloe men wanted to fish, but the gombeen man would never lend money to promote industry. Other plans for the development of Dungloe were discussed, but the expense of the cartage of surplus products on the toy Lough Swilly road, and the impossibility of getting freight boats into the undredged harbor, were lead to rising ambition.

"Parliament is not interested in public improvements for Dungloe," smiled Mr. Gallagher. "I suppose if I were a British member of parliament I would not want to hand out funds for the projection of a harbor in a faraway place like this. Irish transportation will not be taken in hand until Ireland can control her own economic policy."

As the darkness closed in about our little fire the talk turned somehow to tales of the fairies of Donegal, and Mr. Gallagher chuckled:

"Some persons about here still believe in the good people."

Then gentle Mrs. Gallagher, conscious of a benevolent force close at hand, began simply:

"Well, don't you think perhaps—"

[Footnote 1. "To the Masters of Dublin—An Open Letter." By AE. The Irish Times, Oct. 17, 1913.]



V

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND COMMUNISM

THE LIMERICK SOVIET

A soviet supported by the Catholic Church—that was the singular spectacle I found when I broke through the military cordon about the proclaimed city of Limerick.

The city had been proclaimed for this reason: Robert Byrne, son of a Limerick business man, had been imprisoned for political reasons. He fell ill from the effects of a hunger strike,[1] and was sent to the hospital in the Limerick workhouse. A "rescue party" was formed. In the melee that followed, Robert Byrne and a constable were killed. Then according to a military order, Limerick was proclaimed because of "the attack by armed men on police constables and the brutal murder of one of them."

At Limerick Junction we were locked in our compartments. There were few on the train. Two or three school boys with their initialed school caps. Two or three women drinking tea from the wicker train baskets supplied at the junction. In the yards of the Limerick station, the train came to a dead stop. Then the conductor unlocked compartments, while a kilted Scotch officer, with three bayonet-carrying soldiers behind him, asked for permits. At last we were pulled into the station filled with empty freight trucks and its guard of soldiers. Through the dusk beyond the rain was slithering.

"Sorry. No cab, miss," said a constable. "The whole city's on strike."

That explained my inability to get Limerick on the wire. From Kildare I had been trying all morning to reach Limerick on the telephone. All the Limerick shops I passed were blinded or shuttered. In the gray light, black lines of people moved desolately up and down, not allowed to congregate and apparently not wanting to remain in homes they were weary of. A few candles flickered in windows. After leaving my suitcase at a hotel, I left for the strike headquarters. On my way I neared Sarsfield bridge. Between it and me, there loomed a great black mass. Close to it, I found it was a tank, stenciled with the name of Scotch-and-Soda, and surrounded by massed barbed wire inside a wooden fence. On the bridge, the guards paraded up and down and called to the people:

"Step to the road!"

At the door of a river street house, I mounted gritty stone steps. A red-badged man opened the door part way. As soon as I told him I was an American journalist, the suspicious look on his face vanished. With much cordiality he invited me to come upstairs. While he knocked on a consultation door, he bade me wait. In the wavering hall light, the knots in the worn wooden floor threw blots of shadow. On an invitation to come in, I entered a badly lit room where workingmen sat at a long black scratched table. In the empty chair at the end of the table opposite the chairman, I was invited to sit down. As I asked my questions, every head was turned down towards me as if the strike committee was having its picture taken and everybody wanted to get in it.

"Yes, this is a soviet," said John Cronin, the carpenter who was father of the baby soviet. "Why did we form it? Why do we pit people's rule against military rule? Of course, as workers, we are against all military. But our particular grievance against the British military is this: when the town was unjustly proclaimed, the cordon was drawn to leave out a factory part of town that lies beyond the bridges. We had to ask the soldiers for permits to earn our daily bread.

"You have seen how we have thrown the crank into production. But some activities are permitted to continue. Bakers are working under our orders. The kept press is killed, but we have substituted our own paper." He held up a small sheet which said in large letters: The Workers' Bulletin Issued by the Limerick Proletariat.

"We've distributed food and slashed prices. The farmers send us their produce. The food committee has been able to cut down prices: eggs, for instance, are down from a dollar to sixty-six cents a dozen and milk from fourteen to six cents a quart.

"In a few days we will engrave our own money. Beside there will be an influx of money from England. About half the workers are affiliated to English unions and entitled to strike pay. We have, by the way, felt the sympathy of the union men in the army sent to guard us. A whole Scotch regiment had to be sent home because it was letting workers go back and forth without passes.

"And—we have told no one else—the national executive council of the Irish Labor party and Trade Union congress will change its headquarters from Dublin to Limerick. Then if military rule isn't abrogated, a general strike of the entire country will be called."

Just here a boy with imaginative brown eyes, who was, I discovered later, the editor of the Workers' Bulletin, said suddenly:

"There! Isn't that enough to tell the young lady? How do we know that she is not from Scotland Yard?"

In order to send my wire on the all-Ireland strike, I stumbled along dark streets till I came to the postoffice. Lantern light was streaming from a hatchway open in the big iron door in the rear. "Who comes?" challenged the guards. While I was giving a most conversational reply, a dashing officer ran up and told me the password to the night telegraph room. Streets were deserted when I attempted to find my way back to the hotel. At last I saw a cloaked figure separate itself from the column post box against which it was standing. I asked my way and discovered I was talking to a member of the Black Watch. Limerick is the only town in the British Isles that retains the ancient custom of a civilian night guard. While the strike was on, there were, during the day, 600 special Royal Irish constables on duty in Limerick. But, at night, in spite of unlit streets, the 600 constables gave place to the sixty men of the Black Watch.



"Priests preached sermons Sunday urging the people to withstand the enemy with the same spirit they did in the time of Sarsfield," said young Alphonsus O'Mara, the mayor of Limerick, whom I met at breakfast. His Sinn Fein beliefs had imprisoned him in his hotel, for his home was beyond the town and he would not ask the British military for a pass. Opposite the breakfast room we could see the drawn blue shades of Limerick's dry goods store. A woman staggered by with a burlap bag of coal on her shoulders. A donkey cart with a movie poster reading: "Working Under Order of the Strike Committee: GOD AND MAN," rolled past. A child hugging a pot of Easter lilies shuffled by. "There's no idea that the people want communism. There can't be. The people here are Catholics."

But a little incident of the strike impressed me with the fact that there were communists among these fervent Catholics. In order to pictorialize the predicament of the Limerick workers to the world through the journalists who were gathered in Limerick waiting the hoped-for arrival of the first transatlantic plane, the national executive council devised this plan. One bright spring afternoon, the amusement committee placed poster announcements of a hurling match that was to be held just outside of Limerick at Caherdavin. About one thousand people, mostly Irish boys and girls, left town. At sunset, two by two, girls with yellow primroses at their waists, and boys with their hurling sticks in their hands, marched down the white-walled Caherdavin road towards the bridge. The bridge guard hooped his arm towards the boat house occupied by the military. Soldiers, strapping on cartridge belts, double-quicked to his aid. A machine gun sniffed the air from the upper story of the boat house. Scotch-and-Soda veered heavily bridgewards. A squad of fifty helmeted constables marched to the bridge, and marked time. But the boys and girls merely asked if they might go home, and when they were refused, turned about again and kept up a circling tramp, requesting admission. Down near the Broken Treaty Stone, in St. Munchin's Temperance hall, in a room half-filled with potatoes and eggs and milk, women who were to care for the exiles during their temporary banishment, were working. A few of the workers' red-badged guards came to herald the approach of the workers, and then sat down on a settle outside the hall.

St. Munchin's chapel bell struck the Angelus.

The red-badged guards rose and blessed themselves.



THE BISHOP ON COMMUNISM

Possibly, I thought, the clergymen of Limerick were hurried into support of red labor. What was the attitude of those who had a perspective on the situation towards communism?

Just outside Limerick, in the town of Ennis in the county of Clare—Clare as well as Kerry has the reputation of shooting down informers at sight—there dwells the most loved bishop in Ireland. The Lenten pastoral of the Right Reverend Michael Fogarty, bishop of Killaloe, was so fervently national that when it was twice mailed to the Friends of Irish Freedom in America it was twice refused carriage by the British government. There was no doubt that he was for Sinn Fein. But how did he stand towards labor?

Past an ancient Norman castle on which was whitewashed the legend "Up De Valera!" into the low-built little town of Ennis, I drove up to the modest colonial home that is called the "episcopal palace," Bishop Fogarty invited me to take off my "wet, cold, ugly coat," and to sit at a linen-covered spot at the long plush-hung library table. As he rang a bell, he told me I must be hungry after my drive. Then a maid brought in a piping-hot dinner of delicious Irish stew. I sat down quite frankly hungry, but from a rather resentful glance which the maid gave me, I have since suspicioned that I ate the bishop's dinner.

First I told the bishop that I am a Catholic. Then I said I was informed that there was a reaction against the Church in Ireland, against being what American Protestants call "priest-ridden." The first reason of the reaction, I was told, was the fact that the people felt that the hierarchy was not in favor of a republic. Indeed I had it from an Irish-American priest in Dublin that many of the Irish bishops were in a bad way, because neither the English government nor the people trusted them.

"Priest-ridden?" The bishop smiled. "Priest-ridden? England would like us to control these people for her today. We couldn't if we would. Priest-ridden? Perhaps the other way about."

The second reason, it was said, is due to the fact that the workers feel that the Church is standing with the capitalists. A Dublin Catholic, wife of an American correspondent stationed in that city, told me that socialism is so strong in the very poor parish of St. Mary's pro-cathedral in Dublin that out of 40,000 members, there were 16,000 who were not practising their religion.

"A lie!" exclaimed the bishop as his jaw shot out and his great muscular frame straightened as if to meet physical combat on the score. "It is simply not true. The loyalty of the Irish to the Catholic Church is unquestionable."

And anyway, he indicated, if the people desired a communistic government there is no essential opposition in the Catholic Church.

In the past, said the bishop, the Church in Ireland had thrived under common ownership. When in the fifth century Patrick evangelized Ireland, the ancient Irish were practising a kind of socialism. There was a common ownership of land. Each freeman had a right to use a certain acreage. But the land of every man, from the king down, might be taken away by the state. There was an elected king, and assemblies of nobles and freemen. There were arbitration courts where the lawgivers decided on penalties, and whose decisions were enforced by the assemblies. One of the reasons, the bishop said, that England had found it difficult to rule the Irish, was that she attempted to force a feudal government on a socialistic people.

Recently—to illustrate that the Irish still retain their instinct for common ownership—there had been, as the bishop mentioned, a successful socialistic experiment in Clare. On looking up this fact at a later time, I discovered that the experiment had points of resemblance to the ancient state.[2] In 1823 the English socialist, Robert Owen, visited Ireland. His outline of the possibilities of co-operation on socialistic lines inspired the foundation of the Hibernian Philanthropic Society. It was in 1831 that Arthur Vandeleur, one of the members of the society, decided he would establish a socialist colony on his estate in Ralahine, Clare county. A large tract of land was to be possessed and developed by a group of tenants. This property was not, incidentally, a gift, but was to be held by Mr. Vandeleur until the tenants were able to pay for it. An elected committee of nine, and a general assembly of all men and women members of the society, were the government. The committee's decision against an offending member of society could be enforced or not by the members. The success of the society is acknowledged. Through it was introduced the first reaping machine into Ireland. By it the condition of the toiler was much raised, and might have been more greatly elevated but for the fact that the community had to pay a very heavy annual rental in kind to Mr. Vandeleur. The experiment came to a premature end, however, because of the passing of the estate out of the hands of Mr. Vandeleur, and the non-recognition of the right of such a community to hold a lease or to act as tenants under the land laws of Great Britain.

"Why should there not be a modernized form of the ancient Gaelic state?" asked the bishop.

When I spoke of the Russian soviet, and stated that I heard that the Roman Catholic church had spread in eight dioceses under the new government, the bishop nodded his head. The Church, he said, had nothing to fear from the soviet.

"Certainly not from the Limerick soviet," I suggested. "It was there that I saw a red-badged guard rise to say the Angelus."

"Isn't it well," smiled the bishop, "that communism is to be Christianized?"

[Footnote 1: Notice was given by the General Prison Board of Ireland on November 24, 1919, that no prisoner on hunger strike would obtain release. It was stated that the hunger-striker alone would be responsible for the consequences of his refusal to take food.]

[Footnote 2: "Labour in Irish History." By James Connolly. Maunsel and Company. 1917. P. 122.]



VI

WHAT ABOUT BELFAST?

SICKNESS AND DEATH OF CARSONISM

The H.C. of L. has done an extraordinary thing. It is the high cost of living that has caused the sickness and death of Carsonism. Carsonism is a synonym for the division of the Ulsterites by political and religious cries—there are 690,000 Catholics and 888,000 non-Catholics.[1]

The good work began during the war. Driven by the war cost of living, Unionist and Protestant organized with Sinn Fein and Catholic workers, and together they obtained increased pay. Now they no longer want division. For they believe what the labor leaders have long preached: "Carsonism with its continuance of the ancient cries of 'No Popery!' and 'No Home Rule!' operates for the good of the rich mill owners and against the good of the workers. If the workers allow themselves to be divided on these scores, they can neither keep a union to get better wages nor elect men intent on securing industrial legislation. If the workers are really wise they will lay the Carson ghost by working with the south of Ireland towards a settlement of the political question. Why not? The workers of the north and south are bound by the tie of a common poverty."

"All my life," said Dawson Gordon, the Protestant president of the Irish Textile Federation, as we talked in the dark little union headquarters where shawled spinners and weavers were coming in with their big copper dues, "I have heard stories that were so much fuel on the prejudice pile. When I was small, I believed anything I was told about the Catholics. I remember this tale that my mother repeated to me as she said her grandmother had told it to her: 'A neighbor of grandmother's was alone in her cabin one night. There was a knock at the door. A Catholic woman begged for shelter. The neighbor could not bear to turn her back into the night. Then as there was only one bed, the two women shared it. Next morning grandmother heard a moaning in the cabin. On entering, she saw the neighbor lying alone on the bed, stabbed in the back. The neighbor's last words were: "Never trust a Catholic!"' As I grew a little older I found two other Protestant friends whose grandmothers had had the same experience. And since I have been a labor organizer, I have run across Catholics who told the same story turned about. So I began to think that there was a hell of a lot of great-grandmothers with stabbed friends—almost too many for belief.

"But hysterical as they were, such stories served their purpose of division."

From a schoolish-looking cupboard in the back of the room, Mr. Gordon extracted a much-thumbed pamphlet on the linen and jute industry, published after extended investigation by the United States in 1913. Mr. Gordon turned to a certain page, and pointed a finger at a significant line which ran:

"The wages of the linen workers in Ireland are the lowest received in any mills in the United Kingdom."

Then Mr. Gordon added:

"Another pre-war report by Dr. H. W. Bailie, chief medical officer of Belfast, commented on the low wage of the sweated home worker—the report has since been suppressed. I remember one woman he told about. She embroidered 300 dots for a penny. By working continuously all week she could just make $1.50.[2]

"Pay's not the only thing," continued Mr. Gordon. "Working condition's another. Go to the mills and see the wet spinners. The air of the room they work in is heavy with humidity. There are the women, waists open at the throat, sleeves rolled up, hair pulled back to prevent the irritation of loose ends on damp skins, bare feet on the cement floor. At noon they snatch up their shawls and rush home for a hurried lunch. It's not surprising that Dr. Bailie reported that poor working conditions were responsible for many premature births and many delicate children. Nor that the low pay of the workers made them easy prey to tuberculosis. He wrote that, as in previous years, consumption was most prevalent among the poor.[3]

"Why such pay and such working conditions?" asked Mr. Gordon. "Because before the war there were only 400 of us organized. Labor organizer after labor organizer fought for the unity of the working people. But no sooner would such a speaker rise oft a platform than there would be calls from all parts of the house: 'Are ye a Sinn Feiner?', 'What's yer religion?' or 'Do ye vote unionist?' There was no way out. He had to declare himself. Then one or the other half of his audience would rise and leave. With low wages, of course, the workers could not get a perspective on their battle. They were prisoners in Belfast. They never had money enough even for the two-hour trip to Dublin. Rail rates are high. Excursions almost unknown. Then came the war. At that time wages were:

"Spinners and preparers, $3.00 a week.

"Weavers and winders, $3.08 a week.

"General laborers, $4.00 a week.

"But how much did it cost to feed a family of five? Seven dollars a week. The workers had to get the difference. They couldn't without organization. With hunger at their heels, they forgot prejudices. Catholics began to go to meetings in Orange halls. Protestants attended similar meetings in Hibernian assembly rooms; at a small town near Belfast there was a recent labor procession in which one-half of the band was Orange and the other half Hibernian, and yet there was perfect harmony. Other unions than ours were at work. For instance, the Irish Transport and General Workers' union began to gather men under the motto chosen from one of Thomas Davis' songs:

"Then let the orange lily be a badge, my patriot brother, The orange for you, the green for me, and each for one another.'

"What happened? Take our union for example. From 400 in 1914, the membership mounted to 40,000 in 1919—that is the number represented today in the Irish Textile Federation. With the growth in strength the federation made out its cost-of-living budget, and presented its case to the Linen Trade Employers. At last the federation succeeded in obtaining this rate:

"Spinners and preparers, $7.50 a week.

"Weavers and winders, $7.50 a week.

"General laborers, $10.00 a week."

But, say the leaders, there will always be chance of disunion until the political question is settled. Ulster labor decided to assist in that settlement. So it killed Carsonism. And now it is trying to lay the Carsonistic ghost.

This is the way labor killed Carsonism. I saw it done. I was in at the death. There was a parliamentary seat vacant in East Antrim. Carson, whose choice had hitherto been law, backed a Canadian named Major Moore. But labor put up a sort of Bull Moose candidate named Hanna. The Carsonists realized the issue. During the campaign they reiterated that Carsonism was to live or die by that vote. The dodgers for Major Moore ran:

East Antrim Election WHAT The Enemies of Unionism WANT The Return of Hanna WHY? Because as The Freeman's Journal of May 10, 1919, states: "IF HANNA WINS, HIS VICTORY WILL BE THE DEATH KNELL OF CARSONISM." Are YOU going to be the one to bring this about? VOTE SOLID FOR MOORE and show our enemies EAST ANTRIM STANDS BY CARSON

At the meetings the Carsonists continually stressed the point that this election meant more than the election or defeat of Moore. It meant the election or defeat of Carson and his ally, God.

"God in His goodness," declared a woman advocate at a meeting held for Moore at Carrickfergus, "has spared Sir Edward Carson to us, but the day may come when we will see ourselves without him, and I want to be sure that no one in Ulster will have caused him one pain or sorrow."[4]

"It is owing to Sir Edward Carson under Almighty God," stated D.M. Wilson, K.C., M.P., at a meeting at Whitehead, "that we have been saved from Home Rule, and the man that knows these things would rather that his right arm were paralyzed than be guilty of any act that would tend to weaken the work of Sir Edward Carson."[5]

"I am fully persuaded," added William Coote, M.P., at the same meeting, "that the great country of the gun running will never be false to its great leader."[6]

One evening near a stuccoed golf club at a cross roads in Upper Green Isle, with the v of the Belfast Lough shining in the distance, I waited to hear Major Moore address a crowd of workers. As the buzzing little audience gathered, boys climbed up telegraph poles with the stickers "We Want Hanna," and a small, pale-faced man with a protruding jaw was the center of a political argument for Hanna. At last the brake arrived. The major, a tall, personable man, stood up in the cart. But all the good old Ulster rallying cries he used, seemed to miss fire.

"Sir Edward Carson's for me—"

"Stand on your own feet, Major Muir," interrupted a worker.

"Heart and soul, I'll fight Home Rule—"

"What aboot Canada, Major Muir?" The major did not reply as he had at a previous meeting at Carrickfergus that he hoped that the time would come when there would be a "truly imperial parliament in London—one that would represent not only the three kingdoms but the whole empire."[7] Instead he went on:

"The Unionist party stands for improved social legislation."

"What aboot old age pensions?" and "Why didn't the Unionist party vote for working-men's compensation, Major Muir?"

As he was preparing to drive away from the booing crowd, one of his supporters began to distribute dodgers. I had two in my hand when the small, pale-faced man with the jaw applied a match to them, and cried out as they flared in my hand:

"That's what we do with trash."

Who won? When the election returns were made public in June, they read: Major Moore, 7,549; Hanna, 8,714.

Laying the ghost of Carsonism by the permanent settlement of the Irish political question was attempted last spring. It was then that Ulster labor backed the rest of the Irish Labor party at Berne when it asked for the "free and absolute self-determination of each and every people in choosing the sovereignty under which they shall live."



THE SINN FEIN BABY IN BELFAST

The pacific endeavors of the high cost of living are greatly aided by the natural kindliness of the people. I think I have never met simpler charity to strangers. For instance, in the little matter of appealing for street directions, I found the shawled women and the pale men would go far out of their ways to put me on the right path. Even when I inquired for the home of Dennis McCullough, they looked at me quickly, said: "Oh, you mean the big Sinn Feiner"? and readily directed me to his home.

In the red brick home in the red brick row on the outskirts of the red brick town of Belfast, Mrs. Dennis McCullough, daughter of the south of Ireland, gave testimony that the goodheartedness of her neighbors prevails over their prejudice even in time of crisis. Her husband, a piano merchant, has been in some seven prisons for his political activities. He had told of plank beds, of food he could not eat, of the quelling of prison outbreaks by hosing the prisoners and then letting them lie in their wet clothes on cold floors. He had spoken of evading prison at one time by availing himself of the ancient privilege of "taking sanctuary": he went to the famous pilgrimage center of Lough Derg, and though no sanctuary law prevails, the military did not care or dare to violate the religious feelings of the inhabitants by seizing him there. And then he had told of the last time: before his last arrest he had taken great care not to provoke the authorities because Mrs. McCullough was about to give birth to her first child; but one evening when the couple and friends were seated about a quiet Sunday evening tea table, six constables entered and hurried him off to jail without even presenting a warrant. It was at this point that Mrs. McCullough gave her testimony:

"Our house is just a little island of Sinn Fein in this district. The neighbors knew my husband had been arrested. The papers told them that the arrests had been made in connection with that Jules Verne German submarine plot. But when my baby was born, my neighbors forgot everything but the fact that I was a human being who needed help. One neighbor came in to bake my bread; another to sweep my house; another to cook my meals. They were very good.

"Often at five o'clock, I watch the girls coming home from the mills. At six o'clock they eat supper. At seven the boys and girls walk out together, two by two." Mrs. McCullough laughed. "You know, I think that's all I have against the Ulsterites—there's nothing queer about them."

By the grate, Dennis McCullough held the baby in his arms with all the care one uses towards a treasure long withheld. His drawn white face was close to the dimpled cheeks.

The rank and file of the Belfastians, then, are joining the priests, co-operationists, labor unionists and Sinn Feiners in their fight for self-determination. For it is believed that as long as the Irish people, Irish or Scotch-Irish, remain under the domination of England, they will continue to suffer under exploitation by her capitalists. And the people of the north and the south are unanimous that English exploitation is what's the matter with Ireland.

[Footnote 1: Census of 1911.]

[Footnote 2: England passed an order in 1919 regulating the wages of sweated women workers so that the minimum wage of a girl 18 working a 48-hour week amounts to $6.72. But the order concludes: "This order shall have effect in all districts of Great Britain but not in Ireland." (Ministry of Labor. Statutory Rules and Orders. 1919. No. 357.)]

[Footnote 3: "Report Chief Medical Inspector, Belfast, 1909."]

[Footnote 4: Belfast Telegraph, May 15, 1919.]

[Footnote 5: Northern Whig, Belfast, May 17, 1919.]

[Footnote 6: Ibid.]

[Footnote 7: Belfast Telegraph, May 15, 1919.]

THE END