Page:Schüller - Jim Connolly and Irish Freedom (1926).djvu/20

 lowers to seize upon the carts of grain passing along the roads where the people were dying for want of food; at Mullinahone he refused to allow his followers to fell trees to build a barricade across the road until they had asked permission of the landlords who owned the trees."

As a counterpart to this Connolly writes full of appreciation of the Fenians who in their struggle for national freedom and social liberty of the workers joined with the Land League, i. e., the peasants in the struggle for the land:

This union of the workers and peasants Connolly declared to be the basis and inspiration of the modern Labor movement, and in full recognition he points out that the principles of the Land League were not only recognized as Communist, but that the organ of the Land League in America, "The Irish World," bore the sub-title of "American Industrial Liberator."

The agrarian reform was introduced. The causes therefore were the pressure brought to bear by the Land League movement and the circumstance that the investment of capital in industrial undertakings, because of the competition of American corn, had become more profitable than agriculture in Ireland. For this reason, the British Parliament, at the close of the last century and the beginning of the present, decided upon a series