Dora B. Montefiore 1920
Source: The Call, 17 June 1920, p. 9 (353 words)
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Our comrade, R.M. Fox, has made in the “Call” an appeal worthy of the idealist and fighter, Jim Larkin, and I want to have the privilege of adding my voice to the protest that is going up from the workers against the sentence passed on him in America, of ten years’ imprisonment for the offence of “standing by the working class.”
I got to know and to appreciate the real “fineness” of Larkin at the time of the strike of the Transport Workers in Dublin, when I went over from the “Daily Herald” on a mission, which it was hoped would help save from starvation the thousands of children of the strikers. Jim and his sister Delia were the moving spirits at Liberty Hall, where dinners for the mothers and children were being cooked in the cellars, where the young men and girls were industrially organised in the different rooms in the building, where lectures were held, complaints heard, and advice given, where Jim Connolly edited the “Irish Worker,” and where eventually rooms were set apart for the use of our mission, where we organised the transportation of the children of the strikers to working class homes in England, and clothed them in the garments sent by English Cooperators. I saw Larkin from day to day at close quarters, and I want to tell the English workers, if some there are who do not already know it, that no one has ever worked more simply, more devotedly, more intelligently for the welfare of his fellow-workers than has Jim Larkin. When I was arrested in Dublin on the got-up charge of “kidnapping children,” Jim Larkin stood by me, and sent friends to bail me out. It is up to me, it is up to the organised workers to do their best now for Larkin. Organised workers are beginning to feel what their real power is when they refuse to handle munitions that are sent to shoot down their fellow workers. Let them refuse to handle American imports till Larkin, Debs, and Haywood, are free men.