principle. They have lived so long in the depths: many of them have
reached the very end of all the pain which is the utmost life can bear
and have in their character that fearlessness which comes from long
endurance and familiarity with the worst hardships. I am a literary
man, a lover of ideas, and I have found few people in my life who would
sacrifice anything for a social principle; but I will never forget the
exultation with which I realized in a great labor trouble, when the
masters of industry issued a document asking men on peril of dismissal
to swear never to join a trades union, that there were thousands of men
in my own city who refused to obey, though they had no membership or
connection with the objectionable association. Nearly all the real
manhood of Dublin I found was among the obscure myriads who are paid
from twenty to thirty shillings a week. The men who will sacrifice
anything for brotherhood get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth.
These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose their
own heroes and their own ideals. Most of them had no strike funds to
fall back on. They had wives and children depending on them. Quietly
and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yet
nobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows. Beneath their
rags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit.
It is in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the
hope of Ireland lies. The poor have always helped each other, and it is
they who listen eagerly to the preachers of a social order based on
brotherhood in industry. It is these workers, always necessary but
never yet integrated into the social order, who must be educated, who
must be provided for, who must be accepted fully as comrade in any
scheme of life to be devised and which would call itself Christian.
That word, expressing the noblest and most spiritual conception of
humanity, has been so degraded by misuse in the world that we could
almost hate it with the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know