A Glorious Meeting.

The mass meeting of trades unions in Cooper Union, New York, on January 30, was the most significant and gratifying move that has been made since the so-called Irish land war began.

The Irish race, by nature of their organism, are easily ridden by superstition. The Pope has always sat in the Irish saddle with greater assurance than in any other. Blood-sucking priests have always found the Irish skin the thinnest to prey upon. With such a people — sympathetic, domestic, and deeply endeared to their traditions — the nationality craze easily finds a lodgment, and short-sighted, designing politicians are ever ready to make use of it in order to divert the attention of the people from the bottom causes of universal industrial slavery.

But this meeting stood on a thoroughly broad and de-nationalizing basis. As the splendid resolutions put it, the Irish cause was “humanity cause;” it was “Labor’s Cause.” Germans, Russians, Americans, Scotch, English, and Irish,— all clasped the brotherly hand in the grand resolve that the curse of landlordism was not local and national, but universal and human (or rather inhuman), and a part of the great scheme of usury against which Labor is everywhere called upon to wage an uncompromising war of extermination.

In asking the Irish to de-nationalize, as far as possible, their grand struggle, we would by no means look lightly upon their exceptional persecutions as a nation. But were these persecutions simply political and national, the Irish would have no especial claim to the co-operation of other nationalities. Since, however, the curse which afflicts them is one which threatens, and actually afflicts, more or less, the working masses of every other nation, they simply assert a just demand when they call upon working people everywhere to stand by them.

To attempt to argue down a superstition is the slowest process. Here and there a level-headed Irishman has sense enough to brush aside the ridiculous nonsense of expecting an “Irish republic” to do better by those who labor than does the ruling British machine. But these men are exceptions, and their voices is easily rub-a-dubbed down by the blatant nationalists.

It is useless to remind these rub-a-dub-dub, Irish republic, national flag enthusiasts that this American republic is severer on the tenant class, under its laws, than is England; but perhaps we can put it in another form with more effect. Place the Irish landlord class of America beside the Irish rent-paying class. Is the former any less merciless to its tenants than is the English landlord in Ireland? If the Irish landlord in this American republic is usurious-blood-hound, would he be anything less in an Irish republic? No, it is the system that must be crushed, and the system thrives just as audaciously under one form of government as another. The fact is that the State, without monopoly and usury as its main pillars, ceases to be the State.

It will take long to get these bottom facts into the heads of the masses, but such meetings as the one in Cooper Union are most gratifying helps in that direction. The masterly genius which moves the “Irish World” was never displayed to greater credit than on that occasion, and Liberty shouts thrice, Bravo! upon the whole affair.