Would he yield it now for nationalization? I put the question up to William
O'Brien, the lame, never-smiling tailor who is secretary of the Irish Labor
party. He said that the farm hand should be taken into consideration.

The farm hand would profit by nationalization. At present he is condemned
to slavery. At a hiring fair--called a "slave market" by the labor
unions--he stands between the mooing cows and snorting pigs and offers his
services for sale for as little as $100 a year. He may wish to get more
money. But his employer is also very often his landlord. What happens? In
the spring of 1919, 35,000 farm hands went on strike. Lord Bellew of
Ballyragget and Lord Powerscourt of Enniskerry used the eviction threat to
get the men back to work, and in Rhode, evictions actually took place.

The small farmer on bad land would profit by re-distribution. Many such
live in the west and northwest of Ireland. Take a farmer of Donegal. There
there's stony, boggy land. Fires must be built about the stones so that the
soil will lose its grip upon them and they may be hauled away to help make
fences. Immovable boulders are frequent, so frequent that the soil cannot
be ploughed but must be spaded by hand. Seaweed for fertilizer must be
plucked from the rocks in the sea, carried up the mountain side and laid
black and thick in the sterile brown furrows. Near Dungloe in Donegal, one
holding of 600 acres was recently valued at $10.50, and another of 400 at
$3.70. So the Labor party is confident of bringing over the farmers to its
point of view.

On the whole, it is said, the way of the labor propagandist is easy, for
capital in Ireland is very weak. First, there is very little of it. In 1917
the total income tax of the British Isles was £300,000,000; Ireland with
one-tenth the population contributed only one-fortieth of the tax. In the
same year, the total excess profits tax was £290,000,000 and Ireland's