“Perhaps,” said AE to me after a few meditative puffs of his pipe, “you feel like the American who was with us on a similar occasion a few weeks ago.  At last he burst out with:  ’It’s no conception which Americans have of their president that he should take the place and the duties of God Omnipotent in the world,’”

One day I went to discuss Irish labor with AE.  I climbed up to that most curious of all magazine offices—­the Irish Homestead office up under the roof of Plunkett House.  It is a semi-circular room whose walls are covered with the lavender and purple people of AE’s brush.  AE was ambushed behind piles of newspapers, and behind him in a grate filled with smouldering peat blocks sat the black tea kettle.  As a reporter, one of the few things for which I am allowed to retain respect is the editorial dead line.  So I assured AE that I would be glad to return when he had finished writing.  But with a courtesy that is evidently founded on an inversion of the American rule that business should always come before people, he assured me that he could sit down at the fire with me at once.

Now I knew that he had great sympathy with laborers.  I recalled his terrible letter against Dublin employers in the great strike of 1913 when he foretold that the success of the employers in starving the Dublin poor would necessarily lead to “red ruin and the breaking up of laws....  The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and seeking to strike a new blow.  The children will be taught to curse you.  The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate.  It is not they—­it is you who are pulling down the pillars of the social order."[1] But I knew, too, that he was opposed to violence, so I wondered what he would say to this: 

“A labor leader just told me that it was his belief that industrial revolution would take place in Ireland in two or three years.  Labor waits only till it has secured greater unity between the north and south.  Then it will take over industry and government by force.”

“I had hoped—­I am trying to convince the labor leaders here,” he said finally, “of the value of the Italian plan for the taking over of industry.  The Italian seaman’s union co-operatively purchased and ran boats on which they formerly had been merely workers.”

Russia he spoke of for a moment.  People shortly over from Russia told him, as he had felt, that the soviet was not the dreadful thing it was made out to be.  But a dictatorship of the workers he would not like.  He wanted, he said with an upward movement of his big arms, he wanted to be free.

“Now I am for the building of a co-operative commonwealth on co-operative societies.  Ireland can and is developing her own industries through co-operation.  She is developing them without aid from England and in the face of opposition in Ireland.

“England, you see, is used to dealing with problems of empire—­with nations and great metropolises.  When we bring her plans that mean life or death to just villages, the matter is too small to discuss.  She is bored.