Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
Labour in Irish History (Author: James Connolly)
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Chapter 1
Labour In Irish History
Chapter I
The Lessons Of History
What is History but a fable agreed upon.Napoleon I.
It is in itself a significant commentary upon the subordinate place
allotted to labour in Irish politics that a writer should think it
necessary to explain his purpose before setting out to detail for the
benefit of his readers the position of the Irish workers in the past,
and the lessons to be derived from a study of that position in guiding
the movement of the working class today. Were history what it ought to
be, an accurate literary reflex of the times with which it professes
to deal, the pages of history would be almost entirely engrossed with
a recital of the wrongs and struggles of the labouring people,
constituting, as they have ever done, the vast mass of mankind. But
history, in general treats the working class as the manipulator of
politics treats the working manthat is to say, with contempt
when he remained passive, and with derision, hatred and
misrepresentation whenever he dares evince a desire to throw off the
yoke of political or social servitude. Ireland is no exception to the
rule. Irish history has ever been written by the master classin
the interests of the master class.
Whenever the social question cropped up in modern Irish history,
whenever the question of labour and its wrongs figured in the writings
or speeches of our modern Irish politicians, it was simply that they
might be used as weapons in the warfare against a political adversary,
and not at all because the person so using them was personally
convinced that the subjection of labour was in itself a wrong.
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This book is intended primarily to prove that
contention. To prove it by a reference to the
evidencedocumentary and otherwiseadduced, illustrating
the state of the Irish working class in the past, the almost total
indifference of our Irish politicians to the sufferings of the mass of
the people, and the true inwardness of many of the political
agitations which have occupied the field in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Special attention is given to the period
preceding the Union and evidence brought forward relative to the state
of Ireland before and during the continuance of Grattan's Parliament;
to the condition of the working people in the town and country, and
the attitude towards labour taken up by politicians of all sides,
whether patriot or ministerialist. In other words, we propose to do
what in us lies to repair the deliberate neglect of the social
question by our historians; and to prepare the way in order that other
and abler pens than our own may demonstrate to the reading public the
manner in which economic conditions have controlled and dominated our
Irish history.
But as a preliminary to this essay on our part it becomes necessary
to recapitulate her some of the salient facts of history we have
elsewhere insisted upon as essential to a thorough grasp of the Irish Question.
Politically, Ireland has been under the control of England for the
past 700 years, during the greater part of which time the country has
been the scene of constant wars against her rule upon the part of the
native Irish. Until the year 1649, these wars were complicated by the
fact the fact that they were directed against both the political and
social order recognised by the English invader.
It may surprise many readers to learn that up to the date above-mentioned the basis of society in Ireland except within the Pale (a
small strip of territory around the Capital city, Dublin), rested upon
communal or tribal ownership of land. The Irish chief, although
recognised in the courts of France, Spain, and Rome, as the peer of
the reigning princes
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of Europe, in reality held his position upon the sufferance
of his people, and as an administrator of the tribal affairs of his
people, while the land or territory of the clan was entirely removed
from his private jurisdiction. In the parts of Ireland where for 400
years after the first conquest (so-called) the English governors could
not penetrate except at the head of a powerful army, the social order
which prevailed in Englandfeudalismwas unknown, and as
this comprised the greater portion of the country, it gradually came
to be understood that the war against the foreign oppressor was also a
war against private property in land. But with the forcible break up
of the clan system in 1649, the social aspect of the Irish struggle
sank out of sight, its place being usurped by the mere political
expressions of the fight for freedom. Such an event was, of course,
inevitable in any case. Communal ownership of land would undoubtedly
have given way to the privately owned system of capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland had remained an independent country, but
coming as it did in obedience to the pressure of armed force from
without, instead of by the operation of economic forces within, the
change has been bitterly and justly resented by the vast mass of the
Irish people, many of whom still mix with their dreams of liberty
longings for a return to the ancient system of land tenurenow
organically impossible. The dispersion of the clans, of course, put an
end to the leadership of the chiefs, and in consequence, the Irish
aristocracy being all of foreign or traitor
origin, Irish patriotic movements fell entirely into the hands of
the middle class, and became, for the most part, simply idealised
expressions of middle-class interest.
Hence the spokesmen of the middle class, in the Press and on the
platform, have consistently sought the emasculation of the Irish
National movement, the distortion of Irish history, and, above all,
the denial of all relation between the social rights of the Irish
toilers and the political rights of the Irish nation. It
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was hoped and intended by this means to create what is
termed a real National movementi.e. a movement in which each class would recognise
the rights of other classes and laying aside their contentions, would
unite in a national struggle against the common enemyEngland.
Needless to say, the only class deceived by such phrases was the
workingclass. When questions of class
interests are eliminated from public controversy a victory is thereby
gained for the possessing, conservative class, whose only hope of
security lies in such elimination. Like a fraudulent trustee, the
bourgeois dreads nothing so much as an impartial and rigid inquiry
into the validity of his title deeds. Hence the bourgeois press and
politicians incessantly strive to inflame the working-class mind to
fever heat upon questions outside the range of their own class
interests. War, religion, race, language, political reform,
patriotismapart from whatever intrinsic merits they may
possessall serve in the hands of the possessing class as
counter-irritants, whose function it is to avert the catastrophe of
social revolution by engendering heat in such parts of the body
politic as are the farthest removed from the seat of economic enquiry,
and consequently of class consciousness on the part of the
proletariat. The bourgeois Irishman has long been an adept at such
manoeuvring, and has, it must be confessed, found in his working-class
countrymen exceedingly pliable material. During the last hundred years
every generation in Ireland has witnessed an attempted rebellion
against English rule. Every such conspiracy or rebellion has drawn the
majority of its adherents from the lower orders in town and country;
yet, under the inspiration of a few middle class doctrinaires, the
social question has been rigorously excluded from the field of action
to be covered by the rebellion if successful; in hopes that by such
exclusion it would be possible to conciliate the upper classes and
enlist them in the struggle for freedom. The result has in nearly
every case been the same. The workers,
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though furnishing the greatest proportion of recruits to
the ranks of the revolutionists, and consequently of victims to the
prison and the scaffold, could not be imbued
en masse with the revolutionary fire necessary to seriously imperil a dominion rooted for 700 years in the heart of their country. They were all anxious enough for freedom, but realising the enormous odds against them, and being explicitly told by their leaders that they must not expect any change in their condition of social
subjection, even if successful, they as a body shrank from the
contest, and left only the purest-minded and most chivalrous of their
class to face the odds and glut the vengeance of the tyranta
warning to those in all countries who neglect the vital truth that
successful revolutions are not the product of our brains, but of ripe
material conditions.
The upper class also turned a contemptuously deaf ear to the
charming of the bourgeois patriot. They (the upper class) naturally
clung to their property, landed and otherwise; under the protecting
power of England they felt themselves secure in the possession
thereof, but were by no means assured as to the fate which might
befall it in a successful revolutionary uprising. The landlord class,
therefore remained resolutely loyal to England, and while the middle-class poets and romanticists were enthusing on the hope of a union
of class and creeds, the aristocracy were pursuing their private
interests against their tenants with a relentlessness which threatened
to depopulate the country, and led even an English Conservative
newspaper, the London Times, to
declare that the name of an Irish landlord stinks in the nostrils
of Christendom.
It is well to remember, as a warning against similar foolishness in
future, that the generation of Irish landlords which had listened to
the eloquent pleadings of Thomas Davis was the same as that which in
the Famine years exercised its rights with a rod of iron and
renounced its duties with a front of brass.
The lower middle class gave to the National cause in the past
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many unselfish patriots, but, on the whole, while willing
and ready enough to please their humble fellow country-men, and to
compound with their own conscience by shouting louder than all others
their untiring devotion to the cause of freedom, they, as a class,
unceasingly strove to divert the public mind upon the lines of
constitutional agitation for such reforms as might remove irritating
and unnecessary officialism, while leaving untouched the basis of
national and economic subjection. This policy enabled them to
masquerade as patriots before the unthinking multitude, and at the
same time lent greater force to their words when as patriot leaders they cried down any serious
revolutionary movement that might demand from them greater proofs of
sincerity than could be furnished by the strength of their lungs, or
greater sacrifices than would be suitable to their exchequer. '48 and
'67, the Young Ireland and the Fenian Movements, furnish the classic
illustrations of this policy on the part of the Irish middle
class.
Such, then, is our view of Irish politics and Irish history.
Subsequent chapters will place before our readers the facts upon which
such a view is based.
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