The Irish Labour Party had need, in truth, to be independent of all existing political parties in Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Party was definitely and irrevocably committed to the Conservative and capitalist programme. It would as soon have admitted to its ranks a professed dynamitard as a professed socialist (whatever his views might have been on the subject of the Legislative Union). On Socialism the Church could not be expected to smile (and did not smile) and its attitude determined that of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Party was in a delicate position: it could not say a word against Socialism for fear of offending the English Labour Party, whose votes were required in the parliamentary struggle: it could not say a word in favour of it for fear of offending the Church. It was sitting upon a razor's edge and a word too much in either direction might easily disturb its balance. So it voted steadily, manfully and silently for Labour measures in England and left its action to the country. In the frame-work of the Sinn Fein programme there was no place for Labour. Among all its plans for the relief of Ireland from the evils of the English connection there was none for the relief of the evils of which the workers complained. Its official organ was against strikes, and even considered that the connection of Irish with English Labour was an act of treachery to the country. Some of the most pungent criticism to which the party was subjected came from the paper founded in 1911 by James Larkin, _The Irish Worker and People's Advocate_. In its first number, the editor defined his attitude to the O'Brienites, the Irish Parliamentary Party and Sinn Fein. He described the last as a "party or rump which, while pretending to be Irish of the Irish, insults the nation by trying to foist on it not only imported economics based on false principles, but which had the temerity to advocate the introduction of foreign capitalists into this sorely exploited country." "Their chief appeal" (he goes on) "to the foreign capitalists was that they (the imported capitalists) would have freedom to employ cheap Irish labour.... For eleven years these self-appointed prophets and seers have led their army up the hill and led them down again, and would continue to so lead them, if allowed, until the leader was appointed King of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782."