more violently than any other section of the population.  After trying for a little while to steer the Democratic Trade and Labour Federation clear of the shoals of disunion, and having failed, Mr Neilan and his friends gave up the task in despair.  Meanwhile, however, Mr Michael Austin of the Cork United Trades, who was joint-secretary, with Mr Neilan, of the Federation, succeeded in getting himself absorbed into the Irish Party, and, having got the magic letters of M.P. after his name, not very much was ever heard of him in the Labour movement afterwards.

In the pursuit of journalistic experience I left Ireland for a few years, and on my return I found that a new Labour movement had been founded on the ruins of the old, under the title of the Irish Land and Labour Association.  Mr James J. O’Shee, a young Carrick-on-Suir solicitor, was the secretary and moving spirit in this—­a man of advanced views, of intense sympathy with the labourer’s position, and of a most earnest desire to improve their wretched lot.  I obtained an editorial position in West Cork which left me free to devote my spare time to the Labour cause, which I again enthusiastically espoused, having as colleagues in County Cork Mr Cornelius Buckley, of Blarney, another of exactly the same name in Cork, my old friend Mr John L. O’Shea, of Kanturk, and Mr William Murphy, of Macroom—­men whose names deserve to be for ever honourably associated with the movement which did as much in its own way for the emancipation and independence of the labourers as the National organisations did for the farmers.

It is not my purpose here to recount the fierce opposition that was given to the labourer’s programme.  It had at first no friends either in the Party or in the Press.  I verily believe that there were otherwise good and honest men who thought the labourers had no citizen rights and that it was the height of conscious daring for anybody to lift either hand or voice on their behalf.  But those of us who had taken up the labourer’s cause were well aware of all the difficulties and obstacles that would confront us; and we knew that worst of all we had to battle with the deadly torpor of the labourers themselves, who were trained to shout all right for “the Land for the People” but who had possibly no conception of their own divine right to an inheritance in that selfsame land.  Furthermore, since the Land and Labour Association was an organisation entirely apart from the Trade and Labour movement of the cities and larger corporate towns we received little support or assistance from what I may term, without offence, the aristocracy of labour.  We nevertheless simply went our way, building up our branches, extending knowledge of the labourers’ claims, educating these humble folk into a sense of their civic rights and citizen responsibilities and making thinking men out of what were previously little better than soulless serfs.  It was all desperately hard, uphill work, with little to encourage and no reward beyond the