James Stephens

“ There is another class who implicate labour, and they do so because it enables them to urge that as well as being grasping and nihilistic, Irish labour is disloyal and treacherous.
The truth is that labour in Ireland has not yet succeeded in organising anything—not even discontent. It is not self-conscious to any extent, and, outside of Dublin, it scarcely appears to exist. The national imagination is not free to deal with any other subject than that of freedom, and part of the policy of our "masters" is to see that we be kept busy with politics instead of social ideas. ”

“ I have faith in man, I have very little faith in States man. But I believe that the world moves, and I believe that the weight of the rolling planet is going to bring freedom to Ireland. Indeed, I name this date as the first day of Irish freedom, and the knowledge forbids me mourn too deeply my friends who are dead. ”

“ It has become again a rider of the wind whom you may go coursing with through the fields and open places. All the morbidity is gone, and the sickness, and what remains to Death is now health and excitement. So Dublin laughed at the noise of its own bombardment, and made no moan about its dead—in the sunlight. ”

“ We might have crept into liberty like some kind of domesticated man, whereas now we may be allowed to march into freedom with the honours of war. I am still appealing to the political imagination, for if England allows Ireland to formally make peace with her that peace will be lasting, everlasting; but if the liberty you give us is all half-measures, and distrusts and stinginesses, then what is scarcely worth accepting will hardly be worth thanking you for. ”

“ It was three o'clock before I got to sleep last night, and during the hours machine guns and rifle firing had been continuous.
This morning the sun is shining brilliantly, and the movement in the streets possesses more of animation than it has done. The movement ends always in a knot of people, and folk go from group to group vainly seeking information, and quite content if the rumour they presently gather differs even a little from the one they have just communicated. ”

“ The difficulty about it is that it cannot be approached until the question of Ireland's freedom has by some means been settled, for this ideal of freedom has captured the imagination of the race. It rides Ireland like a nightmare, thwarting or preventing all civilising or cultural work in this country, and it is not too much to say that Ireland cannot even begin to live until that obsession and fever has come to an end, and her imagination has been set free to do the work which imagination alone can do—Imagination is intelligent kindness—we have sore need of it. ”

“ Rifle volleys are continuous about Merrion Square, and prolonged machine gun firing can be heard also.
During the night the firing was heavy from almost every direction; and in the direction of Sackville Street a red glare told again of fire.
It is hard to get to bed these nights. It is hard even to sit down, for the moment one does sit down one stands immediately up again resuming that ridiculous ship's march from the window to the wall and back. I am foot weary as I have never been before in my life, but I cannot say that I am excited. ”

“ George Russell was out of town or I would have gone round to his house in the evening to tell him what I thought about Shaw, and to listen to his own much finer ideas on that as on every other subject. I went to bed.
On the morning following I awoke into full insurrection and bloody war, but I did not know anything about it. It was Bank Holiday, but for employments such as mine there are not any holidays, so I went to my office at the usual hour, and after transacting what business was necessary I bent myself to the notes above and below the stave, and marvelled anew at the ingenuity of man. ”

“ At that hour I did not see one policeman, nor did I see one for many days, and men said that several of them had been shot earlier in the morning; that an officer had been shot on Portobello Bridge, that many soldiers had been killed, and that a good many civilians were dead also.
Around me as I walked the rumour of war and death was in the air. Continually and from every direction rifles were crackling and rolling; sometimes there was only one shot, again it would be a roll of firing crested with single, short explosions, and sinking again to whip-like snaps and whip-like echoes ”

“ To-day, the 8th of May, the book is finished, and, so far as Ireland is immediately concerned, the insurrection is over. Action now lies with England, and on that action depends whether the Irish Insurrection is over or only suppressed.
In their dealings with this country, English Statesmen have seldom shown political imagination; sometimes they have been just, sometimes, and often, unjust. After a certain point I dislike and despise justice. It is an attribute of God, and is adequately managed by Him alone; but between man and man no other ethics save that of kindness can give results. ”

“ All thinking is a fining down of one's ideas, and thus far we have come to the statement of Ireland's second question. It is not Catholic or Nationalist, nor have I said that it is entirely Protestant and Unionist, but it is on the extreme wing of this latter party that responsibility must be laid. It is difficult, even for an Irishman living in Ireland, to come on the real political fact which underlies Irish Protestant politics, and which fact has consistently opposed and baffled every attempt made by either England or Ireland to come to terms. ”

“ England also has grown patriotic, even by necessity. It is necessity alone makes patriots, for in times of peace a patriot is a quack when he is not a shark. Idealism pays in times of peace, it dies in time of war. Our idealists are dead and yours are dying hourly. ”

“ It is rumoured this morning that Sackville Street has been burned out and levelled to the ground. It is said that the end is in sight; and, it is said, that matters are, if anything rather worse than better. That the Volunteers have sallied from some of their strongholds and entrenched themselves, and that in one place alone (the South Lotts) they have seven machine guns. That when the houses which they held became untenable they rushed out and seized other houses, and that, pursuing these tactics, there seemed no reason to believe that the Insurrection would ever come to an end. ”

“ There can be no doubt that his powers of orderly thinking were of great service to the Volunteers, for while Mr. Larkin was the magnetic centre of the Irish labour movement, Connolly was its brains. He has been sentenced to death for his part in the insurrection, and for two days now he has been dead.
He had been severely wounded in the fighting, and was tended, one does not doubt with great care, until he regained enough strength to stand up and be shot down again.
Others are dead also. I was not acquainted with them, and with Connolly I was not more than acquainted. ”

“ But this secondary Irish question is not so terrible as it appears. It is terrible now, it would not be terrible if Ireland had national independence.
The great protection against a lie is—not to believe it; and Ireland, in this instance, has that protection. The claims made by the Unionist Wing do not rely solely on the religious base. They use all the arguments. It is, according to them, unsafe to live in Ireland. (Let us leave this insurrection of a week out of the question.) Life is not safe in Ireland. Property shivers in terror of daily or nightly appropriation. ”

“ More urgent than any political emancipation is the drawing together of men of good will in the endeavour to assist their necessitous land. Our eyes must be withdrawn from the ends of the earth and fixed on that which is around us and which we can touch. No politician will talk to us of Ireland if by any trick he can avoid the subject. His tale is still of Westminster and Chimborazo and the Mountains of the Moon. Irishmen must begin to think for themselves and of themselves, instead of expending energy on causes too distant to be assisted or hindered by them. ”

“ It is more than twenty times too spacious for our needs, and we will not have explored the last of it in our children's lifetime. We have more problems to resolve in our towns and cities than many generations of minds will get tired of striving with. Here is the world, and all that perplexes or delights the world is here also. Nothing is lost. Not even brave men. They have been used. From this day the great adventure opens for Ireland. The Volunteers are dead, and the call is now for volunteers. ”

“ It is truly there, but it pulls no more than its weight, and in Irish life the part played by labour has not yet been a weighty one; although on every view it is an important one. The labour idea in Ireland has not arrived. It is in process of "becoming," and when labour problems are mentioned in this country a party does not come to the mind, but two men only—they are Mr. Larkin and James Connolly, and they are each in their way exceptional and curious men. ”

“ You have done it so often that your guns begin to bore us, and you have now an opportunity which may never occur again to make us your friends. There is no bitterness in Ireland against you on account of this war, and the lack of ill-feeling amongst us is entirely due to the more than admirable behaviour of the soldiers whom you sent over here. A peace that will last for ever can be made with Ireland if you wish to make it, but you must take her hand at once, for in a few months' time she will not open it to you ”

“ What do they fear, and what is it they covet? What can they redoubt in a country which is practically crimeless, or covet in a land that is almost as bare as a mutton bone? They have mesmerised themselves, these men, and have imagined into our quiet air brigands and thugs and titans, with all the other notabilities of a tale for children. ”

“ It is by no means an exaggeration to say that these things were done to him, and it is true that he bore ill-will to no man, and that he accepted blows, and indignities and ridicule with the pathetic candour of a child who is disguised as a man, and whose disguise cannot come off. His tongue, his pen, his body, all that he had and hoped for were at the immediate service of whoever was bewildered or oppressed. He has been shot. Other men have been shot, but they faced the guns knowing that they faced justice, however stern and oppressive ”

“ That Dublin labour was in the Volunteer movement to the strength of, perhaps, two hundred men, may be true—it is possible there were more, but it is unlikely that a greater number, or, as many, of the Citizen Army marched when the order came. The overwhelming bulk of Volunteers were actuated by the patriotic ideal which is the heritage and the burden of almost every Irishman born out of the Unionist circle, and their connection with labour was much more manual than mental. ”

“ It was hard enough that our men in the English armies should be slain for causes which no amount of explanation will ever render less foreign to us, or even intelligible; but that our men who were left should be killed in Ireland fighting against the same England that their brothers are fighting for ties the question into such knots of contradiction as we may give up trying to unravel. ”

“ The organised labour discontent in Ireland, in Dublin, was not considerable enough to impose its aims or its colours on the Volunteers, and it is the labour ideal which merges and disappears in the national one. The reputation of all the leaders of the insurrection, not excepting Connolly, is that they were intensely patriotic Irishmen, and also, but this time with the exception of Connolly, that they were not particularly interested in the problems of labour. ”

“ A great number of our men and women and children, Volunteers and civilians confounded alike, are dead, and some fifty thousand men who have been moved with military equipment to our land are now being removed therefrom. The English nation has been disorganised no more than as they were affected by the transport of these men and material. That is what happened, and it is all that happened.
How it happened is another matter, and one which, perhaps, will not be made clear for years. All we know in Dublin is that our city burst into a kind of spontaneous war ”

“ The English mind may to-day be enabled to understand what is wrong with us, and why through centuries we have been "disthressful." Let them look at us, I do not say through the fumes that are still rising from our ruined streets, but through the smoke that is rolling from the North Sea to Switzerland, and read in their own souls the justification for all our risings, and for this rising. ”

“ She called down diseases on every human being in the world excepting only the men who were being bombarded. She demanded of the folk in the laneway that they should march at least into the roadway and prove that they were proud men and were not afraid of bullets. She had been herself into the danger zone. Had stood herself in the track of the guns, and had there cursed her fill for half an hour, and she desired that the men should do at least what she had done. ”

“ We say that the time always finds the man, and by it we mean: that when a responsibility is toward there will be found some shoulder to bend for the yoke which all others shrink from. It is not always nor often the great ones of the earth who undertake these burdens—it is usually the good folk, that gentle hierarchy who swear allegiance to mournfulness and the under dog, as others dedicate themselves to mutton chops and the easy nymph. ”

“ But outside of the North of Ireland there is no religious question, and in the North it is fundamentally more political than religious. ”

“ I believe that our human material is as good as will be found in the world. No better, perhaps, but not worse. And I believe that all but local politics are unfruitful and soul-destroying. We have an island that is called little. ”

“ There is almost a feeling of gratitude towards the Volunteers because they are holding out for a little while, for had they been beaten the first or second day the City would have been humiliated to the soul. ”

“ During this war there will be no landing of troops in either England or Ireland unless Germany in the meantime can solve the problem of submarine transport. It is a problem which will be solved some day, for every problem can be solved, but it will hardly be during the progress of this war. The men at the head of the Volunteers were not geniuses, neither were they fools, and the difficulty of acquiring military aid from Germany must have seemed as insurmountable to them as it does to the Germans themselves. ”