The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1925-04-25

and speak In language as hard and
definite as It's life. We have no
room for Illusions in our struggle,
least Of all for Illusions about free
DOM" James Connolly, July 81, 1915.
WHATEVER it may mean else
w where and otherwise, easter
Week" In Ireland is fixed and sacred
to the memory Of James Connolly and
the men Of 1916" So much so that
there grows danger-one that Con-
molly himself would have been the
first and fercest to revolt against
the danger that he himself will be
lost in the devotions paid to his
corpse.
JAMES CONNOLLY was more than
= the commandant-general Of the
forces Of the Irish Republic. For the
firmness and thoroness Of his nation
alist faith his end speaks unanswer-
ably. His whole life testifes to the
equal force and virility Of his inter
nationalism.
y He who would explain Connolly
must be able to unriddle the paradox
How came the first and greatest
leader Of working class International
ism in Ireland to be the last and
greatest leader of an Irish nationalist
rebellion against the British crown
and empire?"
THAT the Irish common people
= should be passionateIy nationalist
was inevitable from their history.
When the Norman invaders first
passed over from England to begin
the process of "extirpatfng vice" and
establishing the supremacy of holy
mother church-with incidental pick
ings" for themselves and their over
lords the kings of Engiand-there
clashed, not two armies OF differing
speech and descent, but two distinct
and incompatible social systems.
livery step in the establishment
~ Of British rule in Ireland meant
to the conquered. not merely the tenn
porarily physical losses Of defeat,
conquest and dispossession. 1t meant
the destruction of everything tradi-
tional and sacred in Irish social ex-
istence.
The Irish clans could only survive as
clans In the teeth of perpetual war
and ravage. Inevitably to be Irish"
meant to be poor, miserable, hunted
and outcast." The Irish survived as
peasantry tolerated because they
were too poor to be worth disturbing
except SO far as their very poverty
combined with the inaccessibility of
the hills and the boys to which they
were driven, had by driving them to
live as plunderers 0f the plunderers
provoked reprisals.
ITO be born of the poorer peasantry
i in Ireland at any time between
1900 and 1916 was OF necessity to be
born into a tradition-they are Con-
nolly's own words-of stubborn phys
ical resistance to the forces of Brit
ain" And this was intensified thru
every generation from the peasants
rising of 1898, thru the 1.-THE war, the
Black famine, and the Fenian days to
eliminate in the bitterness and fury
of the land war of the SOS.
To be so born was to have added to
all the other incentives to rebellion
incidental to a workers life, q tradi-
ton. not merely of revolt, but Of the
fact that even defeat could be borne,
recovered from and avenged.
James Connolly was born in County
Monaghan, in 1870. OF peasant ances-
try.
PUT it would be folly to attempt to
- explain James Connolly-one Of
the least emotional Of men-in terms
of personal psychology and heredity
wholly.
Had he been a nationalist born and
nothing more, he would never have
returned to Ireland in 1896 with the
express and avowed object Of found