It is the custom to speak of the Larkinites with scant respect, as if they were the mad, blind multitude of the "have nots" in perpetual prey upon the "haves"; but it is quite a false idea, for they have in their movement some of those who count socially and intellectually.
Thus, for example, the training of the Citizens' Army was almost entirely carried out by Captain J. R. White, D.S.O., son of the late Field-Marshal Sir George White, whose "Labour" ideas got him three months' imprisonment only a few weeks ago.
As to the attitude of the average Dublin merchant towards the new labour party that is arising, I know of no finer apology for Larkin than the brilliant letter of "Æ." to the Irish Times in the days of the great strike, when he addressed the "masters of the city."
In it he warned them—the aristocracy of industry—because like all aristocracies they tended to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that they and their class and their every action were being considered and judged day by day by those who had the power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty was making our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog. He reminded them that their assumption that they were answerable to themselves alone for their actions in the industries they controlled was becoming less and less tolerable, in a world so crowded with necessitous life; but what he chiefly held them responsible for was their incompetence as commercial men, because, with the cheapest market in the world at their command, they could never invite the confidence of investors.
What was even worse than their business incompetence, however, was, according to "Æ.," their bad citizenship, for had they not allowed the poor to be herded together so that one could only think of certain places in Dublin as of a pestilence?
"There are twenty thousand rooms in Dublin," continued the terrible indictment, "in each of which live entire families and sometimes more, where no functions of the body can be concealed, and delicacy and modesty are creatures that are stifled ere they are born." In fact, "nothing that had ever been done against them cried so much to heaven for vengeance as their own actions, such as the terrible lock-out, which threw nearly a third of the whole city on to the verge of starvation"; and he concluded:—
"You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy in industry. There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of the aristocracy of industry will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land, if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you."
It was from such roots that the spirit of the Citizens' Army drew its inspiration (and possibly not a few of the looters as well), and it is impossible to understand the rage of these men without fully comprehending the condition in which they were compelled to live and move.
True, the revolt was not with any concrete economic end in view; but, none the less, it was coloured throughout with economic grievances.
It was the very torture of the ordinary conditions of peace that made them resent the fear of any additional burdens and sacrifices such as were demanded of their patriotism.