Page:Schüller - Jim Connolly and Irish Freedom (1926).djvu/7



When James Connolly, Marxian socialist and Commander-in-Chief of the Irish revolutionary army of Easter Week, 1916, was awaiting his doom at the hands of a British firing squad, his last words spoken to his daughter Nora, expressed a fear that his comrades in the socialist movement would not understand this action. And few of them did. British socialists in particular, not all of them tho, regarded Connolly's heroic act as a nationalist gesture, not having any relation whatever to the class struggle. That Connolly was a revolutionist of the new type, a man who knew all the weak spots in the imperialist structure and also knew how to mobilize all the anti-imperialist forces against the enemy, is proven by Comrade Schuller in his excellent article to which those few words are an introduction.

James Connolly was born of proletarian parents in the northern part of Ireland. He was obliged to go to work for a boss at an early age. In fact, he had to lie about his age in order to evade the law regarding child labor. Early in his life he became interested in the socialist movement and agitated in Scotland, England and Ireland, before his first visit to the United States for a speaking tour.

Tho extremely active in the American working class movement, despite the mental agony he suffered owing to the distress of his family, thru poverty, Connolly never lost interest in the Irish revolutionary movement, nationalist and proletarian. He attached considerable importance to the necessity of reaching the Irish nationalist workers in the United States with the message of socialism. He founded the Irish Socialist Federation and The Harp, as its official organ. Of this monthly sheet Connolly was editor, printer and newsboy.

The Federation, and its mission, was sneered at in a superior manner by the official socialists and it gradually