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Updated: May 1, 2025
They aren't miracle-mongers, thank God, like John Marsh and Galway and Mineely. They aren't up in the sky to-day and down in the mud to-morrow. They keep to the level. "Then there's the Plunkett House lot. You remember, I told you about Sir Horace Plunkett and the Co-operative Movement.
If the employers hadn't behaved so brutally over the strike, Mineely might have become the solvent of a lot of ill-will in Ireland; but they made a bitter man out of him then, and I suppose it's too late now. He'll go on, getting more and more bitter until.... Do you remember that story by H. G. Wells, Gilbert, called 'In the Days of the Comet'?" "Is that the green vapour story?" "Yes.
Marsh and Galway have had a better education than Mineely, but they haven't had his experience or his knowledge of men, and so they can't check their enthusiasm. He was in America for a long while, and he's lived in England, too. He wrote a quite good book on the Irish Labour Movement that would have been better if he'd made more allowance for the nature of the times.
Mebbe they'll listen to us then! He's like John ... he doesn't care what happens to himself. All those people, John and Galway and Mineely, have a contempt for death that I can't understand. I loathe the thought of dying ... but they don't seem to mind. It's their religion partly, I suppose, but it's something more than religion.
It sickened him to see the generosity and the youth walking in the company of the hopelessness of Ireland, training themselves in the means of killing. "If they'd put all that energy and enthusiasm into something that will preserve life and make it deeper and finer, nothing could prevail against them. If only John had more intellect and less emotion ... if Mineely and Connolly were less bitter!"
But it isn't all religious fervour or the apathy of people who're too poor to mind whether they live or die. Marsh and Galway and Mineely are moved by a sort of nationalistic ecstasy ... Marsh and Galway more than Mineely, I think, because there's a bitterness in him that isn't in them. They think of Ireland first, and he thinks of starving workmen first. They're Ireland mad.
"Is that the Labour man?" "Yes. I liked him when I met him, but he's frightfully bitter since the strike. He's got more brains than all the others put together, and he influences John tremendously. I don't wonder at his bitterness. The employers were brutal in that strike, Gilbert, and Mineely will never forget it. He'll make trouble for them yet, and they'll deserve all they get.
If John Marsh had been about the world more, had had to manage things, and if Mineely and Connolly and the Dublin Labour people had not been embittered beyond all sanity of judgment by that haberdasher I mentioned earlier in this letter, they'd have been useful in the way that I want Crews and Jordan and Saxon and all those patient people to be useful.
We won't win a military success ... we all know that ... McDonagh and Pearse and Connolly and Mineely and all of us ... we know that ... but well win a spiritual success!" "A spiritual success?" "Yes. Well remind the people that Ireland is not yet a nation and that there are Irishmen who are still willing to die for their country.
"The tit-for-tat style of politics seems a fairly foolish one.... I think I shall go back to Ireland to-morrow, Gilbert. I feel as if I ought to be there. This business won't end where it is now. I know what John Marsh and Galway and Mineely are like. Whatever bitterness was in them before will be increased enormously by this. Mineely's an Ulsterman, and he'll make somebody pay for this.
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