The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-05-14

1T is now eleven years since James Connolly, mill
tary leader of the Easter Week rebellion of 1916
was taken out on a stretcher from prison hos
pital, propped up against wall and pumped full
of lead from the guns of British firing squad
James Connolly commander of the Irish Citizen
Army, the military of the Dublin trade union
movement, the dynamic force behind the revolt
that shook the mighty empire to her base at time
when her mercenaries were scurryng in retreat be-
fore the gray hosts of the Kaiser in Belgium and
Flanders.
James Connolly could see no distinction between
the two brands Of democracy puryeyed by the Bri-
fish and German governments and when the mill
tarists sounded the bugles in 1914, instead Of
burying his principles and deserving his socialist
program as was done by the renegades in England
and on the continent, he called on the workers to
fight neither for British king German Kaiser
but to fight-if they must fight-to save their own
firesides from their historical enemy, to keep the
food they produced for the of their own people
and to prevent the flower of their manhood from
being turned into dust the batlefelds of Europe
so that putrid empire, boated with the blood of
millions of subject peoples might survive the
gruelling strain of war.
James Connolly, the son Of proletarian father
born in the County Monaghan, Ireland. He
obliged to work at such an early age that he
had to lie his way past the authorities charged with
the enforcement of a child labor law He was
rebel by inheritance and by nature From the time
he was old enough to make public speech he was
active rebel and took active part in the class
Struggle in Scotland, England, Wales and in the
United States But his heart was always drawn
towards Ireland, the land of his birth and to the
people whose moods he best understood. During
the years of his exile in the United States he
lost touch with the revolutionary Nationalist and
labor movements in Ireland Always practical
revoutionst in the truest sense of the word he did
not permit his knowledge of Marxist economics to
excuse him from participating in the Nationalist
struggle against the British Empire, done
by others, who looked on the great rebel founder
of modern socialism as a dried-up research worker
interested only in facts, figures and theories and
not the untirng warrior who never let slip OPP
portunity to put in blow for the workers to
find some way of rousng them to struggle against
the capitalist enemy
Connolly labored effectively in the socialist
ment in the United States. He in at the found
ing of the /. w. w. and served that organization in
the capacity of organizer tireless propaganda,
he was constantly the platform. His pen
always at the service of the cause. The extreme
poverty in which his family lived did not swerve him
from the only purpose in life that he considered
worth wrinkle of his brow
Connolly was invited to return to Ireland by
of his old comrades shortly after the Irish Trans
port and General Workers Union organized
under the leadership of Jim Larlin. When Larkin
left for his speaking tour in the United States,
which was prolonged beyond his expectations-he
was eight and half years here, part of the time
as a guest of Governor Alfred E. Smith in the Sing
Sing penitentary for his association with the Com
munst movement-Connolly took active charge Of
the affairs of the Transport Union and from then
on the headquarters of that organization became
also the headquarters of the revolutionary prepara
tons against British rule in Ireland.
In 1916 the Nationalist movement, split by the
traitor John Redmond, who played the role in
Ireland that Chang Kai Shek is playing in
China, deplorably weak for the task that con-
fronted it. Outside of Connolly and his associates
in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the petty
bourgeois Nationalist leaders who spouted about
Home Rule in the British House Of Commons never
had any intention of resorting to physical force.
The armng and drilling that went on from the