Probably when he wrote his last work, a pamphlet entitled "The Reconquest of Ireland," which was printed at Liberty Hall early in 1915, he had no idea that it would mean anything more than an upward economic struggle of the submerged classes.
"The Labour Movement of Ireland," he wrote, "must set itself the Reconquest of Ireland as its final aim," and by the word "reconquest" of Ireland he means "the taking possession of the entire country, all its powers of wealth, production, and its natural resources, and organizing these on a co-operative basis for the good of all."
It is significant that there is no religious or political bigotry: the movement is right outside both Carsonism and Redmondism, as indeed their new flag, with its significant colours—green, white, and orange—symbolizes; and he repeats the hope of the United Irishmen at the end of the eighteenth century, "that our animosities were buried with the bones of our ancestors and that we could unite as citizens and claim the rights of man"—the first of which is to be able to live freely, that is, with the means of life no longer the property of a class.
He had, in fact, realized "that the old lines of political demarcation no longer served to express any reality in the lives of the people." If anything, the new movement was antagonistic to them all, for in the summing-up he had observed: "In the great Dublin lock-out of 1913-14, the manner in which the Dublin employers, overwhelmingly Unionist, received the enthusiastic and unscrupulous support of the entire Home Rule Press was a foretaste of the possibilities of the new combinations with which Labour in Ireland will have to reckon."
As I read all this once again during the height of the rebellion, with the rattle of the maxims playing upon Boland's mills immediately behind me, where a couple of hundred of the men he had described were now fighting Labour's first war under the name of an Irish Republic, at once the whole aspect of the rebellion changed.
I still wondered, however, why it was that he had left the company of Wells and Webb and Booth, who were but his English counterparts after all, and the general policy of Fabianism, when I suddenly discovered the key not only to the man but to the movement as well, in his definition of prophecy: "The only true prophets are they who carve out the future which they announce."
This, then, was the key to it all. Every dreamer should also be a man of action, every soldier a volunteer to his own idealism; and at once I understood that strange combination between the "intellectuals" and the "workers" which formed such a unique feature of the rebellion, and which the prosperous citizens of Dublin—penned up in their houses for the first time hungry, and for the first time aware of the reality of life's struggle—could only blindly mass together under the name of "criminal lunatics," like the anarchists of Sidney Street in London some years before.
Much less could the pink-faced Derby boys understand—and so I suppose thought, because the crisis had synchronized with the European war and was aimed at a state of things tolerated by English rule, it was therefore only another indication of Ireland's double dose of original sin, which always drove her to disloyalty to her benefactor.
Dr. O'Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick, one of the ablest as well as the most independent thinkers in Ireland, has been mentioned as one of the forces of the rebellion—in fact, he was generally supposed to be one of the marked men of the Fein programme of suppression, being considered more dangerous to the realm than Connolly—in a word, he was looked upon as a red-hot Sinn Feiner. Yet if his famous Lenten pastoral be examined one will find it merely the broad Christian aspect of the war—nor would the cynical diplomatist, if we could get him to be candid, say he was far wrong in his facts.
Thus, for example, speaking of the only possible result of the prolongation of the war to final victory for either party, he says:—