Yet the workers in the modern world have great qualities. This class in great masses will continually make sacrifices for the sake of a principle. They have lived so long in the depths: many of them have reached the very end of all the pain which is the utmost life can bear and have in their character that fearlessness which comes from long endurance and familiarity with the worst hardships. I am a literary man, a lover of ideas, and I have found few people in my life who would sacrifice anything for a social principle; but I will never forget the exultation with which I realized in a great labor trouble, when the masters of industry issued a document asking men on peril of dismissal to swear never to join a trades union, that there were thousands of men in my own city who refused to obey, though they had no membership or connection with the objectionable association. Nearly all the real manhood of Dublin I found was among the obscure myriads who are paid from twenty to thirty shillings a week. The men who will sacrifice anything for brotherhood get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth. These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose their own heroes and their own ideals. Most of them had no strike funds to fall back on. They had wives and children depending on them. Quietly and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yet nobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows. Beneath their rags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit. It is in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the hope of Ireland lies. The poor have always helped each other, and it is they who listen eagerly to the preachers of a social order based on brotherhood in industry. It is these workers, always necessary but never yet integrated into the social order, who must be educated, who must be provided for, who must be accepted fully as comrade in any scheme of life to be devised and which would call itself Christian. That word, expressing the noblest and most spiritual conception of humanity, has been so degraded by misuse in the world that we could almost hate it with the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know that Hell can as disguise put on the outward garments of Heaven. Yet what is eternally true remains pure and uncorrupted, and those who turn to it find it there—as all finally must turn to it to fulfill their destiny of inevitable beauty.
IX.
Often with sadness I hear people speak of industrial development in Ireland, for I feel they contemplate no different system than that which fills workers with despair in countries where it is more successfully applied. All these energetic people are conspiring to build factories and mills and to fill them with human labor, and they believe the more they do this the better it will be for Ireland. They talk of Ireland as if it was only admirable as a quantity rather than a quality. They express delight at swelling statistics and increased trade, but where do we hear any reflection on the quality of life engendered by this industrial development? Our civilization is to differ in no way from any other. No new ideal of life is suggested to differentiate us. We are to go on exploiting human labor. Our working classes are to increase and multiply and earn profits for an employing class, as labor has one from time immemorial in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Rome, and in London today. But a choice yet remains to us, because the character of our civilization is not yet fixed. It is mainly germinal. It fills the spirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path, without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and more beautiful life. Every now and then, when the world was still vast and full of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor, and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities and over unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer and ampler than that they had known. Is the old daring gone? Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures—the building up of a civilization—so that the human might reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will it is most united with all other life. Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motion about the heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as its adorers. But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has the dividing quality of the prism, which resolves pure light into distinct rays; and so on earth we get the principle of freedom and the virtue of solidarity as separated ideals continually at warfare with each other, and the reconcilement on earth of these principles in man is the conquest of matter by the spirit. This dramatic sundering on earth of virtues in unison in the heavens explains the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism, between nationality and imperialism, between individualist and socialist, between dynamic and static in philosophy. Indeed in the last analysis all human conflicts are the balancing on earth of the manifestation of divine principles which are one in the unmanifest spirit.
The civilization we create, the social order we build up, must provide for essential freedom for the individual and for solidarity of the nation. Now essential freedom is denied to men if they are in their condition servile. Can we contemplate the permanent existence of a servile class in Ireland? For, disguise it how we will, our present industrial system is practically a form of slavery for the workers, differing in externals only from the ages when the serf had a collar round his neck. He has now freedom to change from master to master, and can even seek for a master in other countries; but he must, in any case, accept the relation of servant to master. The old slave could be whipped. In the new order the wage slave can be starved, and the fact that many of the rulers of industry use their power benevolently does not make the existing relation between employer and employed right, or the social order one whose permanence can be justified. Men will gladly labor if they feel that their labor conspires with that of all other workers for the general good; but there is something loathsome to the spirit in the condition of the labor market, where labor is regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold like soap or candles. For that truly describes how it is with labor in our industrial system: we can buy labor, which means we can buy human life and thought, a portion of God's being, and make a profit out of it. By so selling himself the worker is enslaved and limited in a thousand ways. The power of dismissal of one person by another at whim acts against independence of character, or the free expression or opinion in thought, in politics, and in religion. The soul is stunted in its growth, and spiritual life made subordinate to material interests. To deny essential freedom to the soul is the greatest of all crimes, and such denial has in all ages evoked the deepest anger among men. When freedom has been threatened nations have risen up maddened and exultant, and the clang of martial arms has been heard and the stony kings of the past have been encountered in battle. In Ireland we shall have our greatest fight of all to gain this freedom: not alone material independence for man, but the freedom of the soul, its right to choose its own heroes and its own ideals without let or hindrance by other men.
We have many of the vices of a slave race, and we treat others as we have been treated. Our national aspirations were overborne by material power, and we in turn use cudgel and curse on our countrymen when they differ from us in opinion and policy. Men, when they cannot match their intellect against another's, suppress him and howl him down, putting faith in their own brainlessness. I would make the most passionate plea for freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel or know. What right have we to ask for ourselves what we deny to another? The bludgeon at meetings is a blow struck against heaven. Those who will not argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are prowling back again on all fours in their minds to the brute. It matters not in what holy name men war with violence on freedom of thought, whether in the name of God or nation they are enemies of both. We are only right in controversy when we overcome by a superior beauty or truth. The first fundamental idea inspiring an Irish polity should be this idea of freedom in all spheres of thought, and it is most necessary to fight for this because the devil and hell have organized their forces in this unfortunate land in sectarian and secret societies, of which it might be written they love darkness rather than light for the old God-given reasons.
X.
Whenever in Ireland there has been a revolt of labor it too often finds arrayed against it the press, the law, and the police. All the great powers are in entente. The press, without inquiry, begins a detestable cant about labor agitators misleading ignorant men. Every wild phrase uttered by an exasperated worker is quoted against the cause of labor, and its grievances are suppressed. We are told nothing about how the worker lives: what homes, what food, his wage will provide. The journalist holds up a moral umbrella, protecting society from the fiery hail of conscience. The baser sort of clergyman will take up the parable and begin advocating a servile peace, glibly misinterpreting the divine teaching of love to prove that the lamb should lie down inside the lion, and only so can it be saved soul and body, forgetful that the peace which was Christ's gift to humanity was the peace of God which passes all understanding, and that it was a spiritual quietude, and that on earth—the underworld—the gospel in realization was to bring not peace but a sword.
The law, assured of public opinion, then deals sternly with whatever unfortunate life is driven into its pens. I am putting very mildly the devilish reality, for society is so constituted that the public, kept in ignorance of the real facts, believes that it is acting rightly, and so the devil has conscience on his side and that divine power is turned to infernal uses. What can labor oppose to this federation of State and Church, of press and law, of capital and physical force to back capital, when it sets about its own liberation and to institute a new social order to replace autocracy in industry? Its allies are few. A rare thinker, scientist, literary man, artist or clergyman, impelled by hatred of what is ugly in life, will speak on its behalf, and may render some aid and help to tear holes in that moral shield held up by the press, and may here and there give to that blinded public a vision of the Hosts of the Lord arrayed against it. But the only real power the workers can truly rely on is their own. Nothing but a spiritual revolution or an economic revolution will bring other classes into comradeship with them. The ideal labor should set before itself is not a transitory improvement in its wage, because a wage war never truly or permanently improves the position of labor. This section or that may, relatively to its own past or the position of other workers, improve itself; but capital is like a ship which, however the tide rises or falls, floats upon it, and is not sunken more deeply in the water at high tide than at low tide. Whenever any burden is placed upon capital it immediately sets about unloading that burden on the public. Wages might be doubled by Act of Parliament, and the net result would be to double prices, if not to increase them still more. The more the autocrats of industry are federated the more easily can they unload on others any burden placed on them.