a man of amazing personality, who exercised a compelling influence over the workers.  He shook them out of their deadly stupor, lectured them in a manner that they were not accustomed to, brow-beat them and, though he made them suffer in body over the weary months of the strike, he infused a spirit into them they had not known before.  He made the world ring with the shame of Dublin’s slums and he did much to make men of those who were little better than dumb-driven animals.  He united the Capitalists of Ireland against him in a powerful organisation, and though they broke his strike they did not break the spirit that was behind it.  Some men will say the Rebellion of Easter Week had its beginnings in the Dublin Strike of 1913; others that Carson was the cause of it; whilst many ascribe it to the criminal folly and short-sightedness of Redmond and his followers, who allowed British politicians to bully and betray them at every point and made Parliamentarianism of their type intolerable to the young soul of Ireland.  History in due course will assign each its due meed of responsibility, but of this we are certain, that the men who came out in Easter Week and bore arms were largely the men whom Larkin had organised and whom Connolly’s doctrine had influenced.  From the point of view of mental calibre Connolly was by far the abler man.  He was not as well known outside Labour circles in Dublin as he has come to be since his death, but to anyone who has given any thought or study to his life and writings he must appear a person of single-minded purpose, great ability, ordered methods of thought and a fine Nationalism, which was rooted in the principles of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen.  Connolly preached the gospel of social democracy with a fine and almost inspired fervour.  He was an internationalist in the full Socialist sense, but seeing the harrowing sights that beset him every day in the abominable slums of Dublin City he was an Irish Reformer above all else.  Mr Robert Lynd writes of him, in his Introduction to Connolly’s Labour in Ireland: 

“To Connolly Dublin was in one respect a vast charnel-house of the poor.  He quotes figures showing that in 1908 the death-rate in Dublin City was 23 per 1000 as compared with a mean death-rate of 15.8 in the seventy-six largest English towns.  He then quotes other figures, showing that while among the professional and independent classes of Dublin children under five die at a rate of 0.9 per 1000 of the population of the class the rate among the labouring poor is 27.7.  To acquiesce in conditions such as are revealed in these figures is to be guilty of something like child murder.  We endure such things because it is the tradition of comfortable people to endure them.  But it would be impossible for any people that had its social conscience awakened to endure them for a day.  Connolly was the pioneer of the social conscience in Ireland.”

In the chapter on “Labour in Dublin” Connolly himself thus refers to the Dublin Strike and what it meant: