The Connecticut labor press., 1919-07-12
INTERESTING LABOR LEADERS
 SEEN BY WALSH IN IRELAND
Writes Nation Impression of the Trip Made With Ex Governor Dunne and M J. Ryan-Talked in Ireland With
 Three Most Interesting Labor Leaders He Ever Met

matter of the highest importance to estimate the quantity, of the national leadership l would not like to exag- gerate, but it seemed to me that MT. De Valera revealed during my intercourse with him the possession of the attrl- butes of leadership in as high degree as 1 have found them in any public man of my time. Of his associates-and those whom l had the best opportunity to study were MT. Griffith and MT. Brugh Burgess he was before he went back to the Irish forn)-1 cannot inn agine better or more efficient support command from them. There are others, now numbered by hundreds, of such amazing activity and such keen intelli- gence that 1 do not see how anyone seeking to impose upon Ireland gov- ernment from outside can hope to sue Ceed while they are there. And back of these are the people.
 Everywhere it was manifest that the confidence of MT. De Valera was of an order which men yield only to genuine leadership. The foreign government know with what they have to count The police often are not bad fellows, and they are always good judges of the situation they have to confront. Not once but many times we learned that realizing their helplessness, they ap- pealed to the local Irish leaders not to let anything untoward happen. for which the police, of course, would be punished. They were always accom- modated. A still more striking manl- festation was given at the end of the Mansion House episode. When things looked threatening. and it was decided to remove the troops that had been sent there to bar our way, MT. De to keep order. He did so, and actually cleared a passage through which the troops could march quietly off the scene. Among what might De called his remoter lieutenants there is a spirit of daring that strikes one as amazing. Half an hour after the soldiers were gone, the three men for whom they had been looking for hours were moving about in front of the Mansion House. shaking hands with their friends. Such things can happen only where one peo- pie try to govern another and find the task inherently impossible.
 There was a surprise for me in an- other quarter. thought 1 knew some thing about the labor movement, and l am still rather bewildered over having talked in Ireland with the three most interesting men in this field that J have ever met We derived great satisfac- ton, also, from our interviews with Cardinal Logue, Archbishops Walsh, Harvey, and Gilmartin, Bishops Fogar- ty, Mac Roy, and others of the episco- pal and clerical leaders of Ireland. Ex- altation there may be and is among the youth of Ire1and in the presence of the accomplishment of their country's des- tiny But let it not be thought-at least we can never think so, after what we have seen with our eyes-that the qualities of mature judgment and sober vision will be lacking so long as the Church produces such spiritual leader ship.
 One day there was handed lis at Cast1ebar a souvenir of the coming of the French. There was priest there who had tried to calm the young people. The French came, and went, and after wards the priest was hanged from a tree. Wood from that tree was given us by charming old lady. Another old lady gave us all bound in woolen strains of orange and white and green, a nose gay in which were a bit of shamrock with roots still in the turf, a sprig of forgetmenot, and some blooms of prin- rose-primrose, 1 believe, for nope.