Now I knew that he had great sympathy with laborers. I recalled his terrible letter against Dublin employers in the great strike of 1913 when he foretold that the success of the employers in starving the Dublin poor would necessarily lead to "red ruin and the breaking up of laws…. The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and seeking to strike a new blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they—it is you who are pulling down the pillars of the social order."[1] But I knew, too, that he was opposed to violence, so I wondered what he would say to this:
"A labor leader just told me that it was his belief that industrial revolution would take place in Ireland in two or three years. Labor waits only till it has secured greater unity between the north and south. Then it will take over industry and government by force."
"I had hoped—I am trying to convince the labor leaders here," he said finally, "of the value of the Italian plan for the taking over of industry. The Italian seaman's union co-operatively purchased and ran boats on which they formerly had been merely workers."
Russia he spoke of for a moment. People shortly over from Russia told him, as he had felt, that the soviet was not the dreadful thing it was made out to be. But a dictatorship of the workers he would not like. He wanted, he said with an upward movement of his big arms, he wanted to be free.
"Now I am for the building of a co-operative commonwealth on co-operative societies. Ireland can and is developing her own industries through co-operation. She is developing them without aid from England and in the face of opposition in Ireland.
"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.