Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly
A number of readers have complained that they know little about James Connolly or why we have started publishing instalments of “the unexpurgated James Connolly” in Solidarity. A full-length biography of Connolly by comrade Liam McNulty is due to be published in 2022 by Merlin Press. That will give a proper account of Connolly, who he was and why he is important to socialists. Here I will give a brief account.
I
James Connolly is one of the most sympathetic and admirable figures in Irish history and in the history of the international working class movement. There is much to criticise, in my opinion. And there is the hindsight of one hundred years after him.
James Connolly was in his combination of elements unique, sui generis, one of a kind. Born in Edinburgh in 1868 of Irish parents, he joined the British Army at 14 and was a soldier for seven years. He may have had contact with physical-force republicans when stationed in Ireland as a British soldier. Later, he would be military commander of the Dublin insurgents in the 1916 Rising.
There had been a number of Irish risings in the 19th century, none of them serious military efforts: 1803, 1848, 1849, 1867. The Fenians of the 1860s were a powerful movement, but the rising of 1867 was feeble. 1916 was the biggest rebellion since 1798.
After the defeat of the Rising, wounded, with a bullet-shattered ankle, which turned gangrenous, Connolly was carried to the slaughter-yard on a stretcher, propped up in a chair before a British Army firing squad and shot dead on the morning of 12 May 1916.
At that point, James Connolly entered the pantheon of Irish national heroes. W B Yeats would write:
“O words are lightly spoken,”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“Maybe a breath of politic words
Has withered our Rose Tree;
Or maybe but a wind that blows
Across the bitter sea.”
“It needs to be but watered,”
James Connolly replied,
“To make the green come out again
And spread on every side,
And shake the blossom from the bud
To be the garden’s pride.”
“But where can we draw water,”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There’s nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.”
II
Connolly was a socialist when he left the British Army, probably in 1889. His eldest brother, John, was already a socialist. James Connolly was or soon became also a “Fenian”, an Irish Republican. He identified as Irish.
Previously none too literate (he had left school at 11), he had probably availed himself of the educational facilities the British Army offered to recruits and begun to read books.
In 1896, aged 28, James Connolly went to Ireland at the invitation of a small group of Dublin Socialists to become their paid organiser. He founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party and in 1898 began to publish a weekly journal, The Workers’ Republic.
The British Marxist organisation, the SDF, called, as had Karl Marx, only for “legislative independence” for Ireland. The Irish Home Rule Party, the “official” nationalists demanded only a limited measure of local government: Home Rule. So the word Republic in the title pinned a radical nationalist green flag up alongside the revolutionary socialist red.
One of James Connolly’s central ideas for the rest of his life would be that the cause of Ireland was the cause of the working class, and the cause of the working class is the cause of Ireland. Was it so?
Peasants fighting for land against landlords had been made synonymous with Irish home rule. Connolly wanted to do something of the same with the working-class cause. In that, he failed entirely.
Connolly wrote a number of articles advocating the idea that a republic would have to be a workers’ republic and published them in small Republican magazines. He reprinted some of the writings of Fintan Lalor, a radical land reformer in the 1840s, and of John Mitchel, a revolutionary nationalist of 1848, which Connolly thought would feed the idea that consistent commitment to national independence implied socialism.
The measure of the freedom of a nation, he thought, was the place of the lowest class within it. The thought was not original to Connolly, but it became his. If Connolly had lived before 1916, as was just possible, perhaps we would would have had more of that idea. But he did not. And we did not.
Mitchel, who had preached revolution during the early period of the 1845-49 Famine, and for that was deported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), was influenced by the idea of what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had called the reactionary socialist, Thomas Carlyle. In eventual American exile, Mitchel became a positive champion of black slavery, as was Carlyle himself, and a supporter of the Southern states in the US Civil War of 1861-65.
Mitchel was far from working-class socialism, but citing him served James Connolly’s drive to find Irish support for socialism and to root socialism in the soil of Irish history and the revolutionary tradition in Ireland.
III
With James Connolly’s backing and collaboration, in 1903, a group of Scottish members of the SDF broke away and founded the Socialist Labour Party of Britain. They published a monthly paper, The Socialist, which survived until 1923 the defection of most SLP members (if not the leadership) to the new Communist Party in 1920-1.
In 1903 also, Connolly and his large family moved to America. Early in the 1900s Connolly had become a supporter of the Socialist Labour Party of America, led by Daniel De Leon. The De Leonites criticised the socialist movement of the time, asserting that the organisations were hollow and incapable of doing the work of overthrowing capitalism. Vladimir Lenin did not see that or understand it until the Socialist International collapsed in 1914, on the outbreak of the Great War. Rosa Luxemburg understood it by 1910. De Leon understood it from the turn of the century. On that, James Connolly never ceased to be a De Leonite.
In the USA Connolly fell out with De Leon and the SLP. The issue was, all inessentials stripped away, Connolly’s limited conception of what Marxism is.
Connolly wrote an article criticising the SLP and De Leon on three counts. First, on the view that trade unions could not in the long run raise real wages, a conception found elsewhere, the so-called Iron Law of Wages. Connolly thoroughly demolished De Leon’s views, arguing for the view general in the Socialist International that trade unions could push up wages.
On the two other points, socialist concerns with family structures, and the attitude of socialists to religion, Connolly was blatantly wrong and certainly out of step with the prevalent ideas of the international Marxist and socialist movement.
Connolly was militantly and thoroughly committed to full social, civil and economic equality for women. He objected to the Marxist view that saw marriage, sex, and the family as historically formed institutions that would be radically transformed in the course of a socialist revolution and after.
The German socialist leader August Bebel had written a big book on Woman Under Socialism. De Leon had partly translated it and published excerpts. Bebel based himself on Frederick Engels’s The Family, Private Property, and the State, and on Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological studies of Amerindian society.
Connolly took the view that the existing monogamous (in theory) nuclear family, even if it had been shaped by history, was the ideal final form of the family and of sexual organisation. Socialists had no business criticising it or proposing radical change in it.
He also argued that socialists have no business criticising or opposing religion, not even when, for example, the Catholic Church forbade its members to be socialists and campaigned against socialism and socialists, or organised to break the Dublin strike, as it did in 1913-14. Connolly himself never did criticise or oppose religion. Arguing within Catholicism, he was perhaps an early advocate of what became known in the 1960s as liberation theology.
Connolly’s position on religion and the family amounted to a very narrow conception of Marxism and Marxian socialism, with its scope and concerns limited to the economic class struggle. In 1914, during the great Dublin Labour War, Connolly put it like this in a reply to a strike-breaking hooligan archbishop who had set the thugs of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (the Catholic Orange Order) onto strikers and their families.
“Let it be at once understood that the strictures upon socialism and syndicalism embodied in the Pastorals leave us unmoved. As complete systems of thought these two principles do not exist, whatever some extremists may say or imagine. As lines of action they do exist, and their influence is wholly beneficial. It is only when taken as offering a completely worked-out system of thought capable of dictating human conduct in all possible phases, and hence governing human morals accordingly, that either of them came under the strictures of theologians with any degree of justification. But in their present stage in the labour movement, viz., as indicating lines of activity in the industrial and political world — the only stage in which they are ever likely to be popular or useful in Ireland — the most consistent socialist or syndicalist may be as Catholic as the Pope if he is so minded”.
IV
Connolly himself was and remained a Catholic. In a letter he wrote to his friend, the Scottish De Leonite John Carstairs Matheson, he said of his Catholicism that it was only a “pose”. The record of Connolly’s expressed opinions, and the stances he took at different times suggests that he was not telling Matheson the truth
All the signatories of the 1916 Declaration of the Irish Republic, except for one, died avowed Catholics, priest-cleansed of sin by Confession and Extreme Unction (Catholic death rites). The exception was not James Connolly, but Thomas Clarke, an old Fenian long alienated from the Catholic Church, which had condemned and damned the Fenians. Catholicism is too pervasive at too many points in Connolly’s life and political work to have been a mere pose.
In jail just before he was shot dead, Connolly urged his wife Lillie to convert to Catholicism, or so Lillie’s friend Annie Smithson reported.
“‘ It is my last request to you, Lillie - I want you to go under instruction in the Catholic Faith, and then, if you can feel you can do so, be received into the Catholic Church’. He added that he knew he had not always been an exemplary Catholic, but he wanted very much now, that she should do this for him. She promised”. Lillie converted in August 1916.
The De Leonites, with whom he parted company in 1907-8, denounced him as an “agent of the Vatican” in the socialist movement.
V
Separating from the SLP, Connolly became a New York organiser for the Socialist Party, the big militant party of Eugene Victor Debs, and then for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the great advocates and organisers of industrial unionism. Connolly was committed to industrial unionism for the rest of his life, though in an article of 1914, Old Wine in New Bottles, he discussed what was deficient in it. He there also suggested a partial remedy which militants later used - “wildcat” unofficial strikes.
In 1910, Connolly returned from the USA to a changing Ireland. He was Ulster organiser of the Irish Transport Workers’ Union, and in 1913-14, he became central, as James Larkin’s deputy, in the leadership of an epochal working class battle, the Dublin Labour War.
VI
For two decades before 1912, the Irish Home Rule Party had become a tail of the Liberals in the House of Commons. The only way Home Rule could be legally achieved was with the support of one of the two “great” British parties. The Irish MPs, numbering a little over 80, could never achieve it on their own.
Both factions of the Irish were clients, the Home Rulers of the Liberal Party, the Irish Unionists of the Tories, and both were corrupted by being clients. The solution to division in Ireland was not sought within Ireland, but from English allies. Many decades later the Provisional IRA would echo this, with its calls for Britain to act as “persuader” to push Protestants into a united Ireland. By “persuasion” they meant not alone words, but economic and other coercions.
Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886 was defeated in the House of Commons. A second Home Rule Bill in 1892 passed in the Commons, but was vetoed in the House of Lords. At that point the Lords veto on the elected House of Commons was absolute.
VII
The Liberals won an absolute majority in 1906. They did not bring in a Home Rule Bill. They did, however, carry through a profound political revolution that made Britain for the first time a parliamentary democracy.
Britain had made a number of incremental steps to broaden the franchise. The Reform Act of 1832 gave the middle class the vote and important cities like Manchester and Birmingham parliamentary representation. Disraeli’s Tories gave the vote to some urban workers. The Liberal Act of 1884 greatly extended the rural vote.
A convention had it that the Lords would not veto “money” bills. In 1909 they broke the convention when Lloyd George’s Budget began to lay the foundation of a welfare state. The Liberals, backed by the Irish Home Rule party, launched a vigorous campaign to abolish the power of the House of Lords over the House of Commons. It was a fierce battle, polarising the country profoundly.
VIII
In the two elections in 1910, the Liberals lost their House of Commons majority and after the second one could only go on governing with the support of the Irish Home Rule Party. The Liberals paid the price by bringing in the third Home Rule Bill in 1912.
Karl Marx in the 1860s and 70s had thought that a Home Rule Ireland would rise against the landlords and that the revolt would spread to Britain, triggering a radical revolution there, too. In fact, what would happen was a party conflict in England on the “constitution” creating and helping foster an immense bitterness that spread to the already embittered “Irish question” and made it worse.
Protestant Unionist Ireland (29% of the Irish electorate in December 1910) said no to Home Rule. They had always said no, and the local government corruption and sectarianism of the Catholic Orange Order, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, then very powerful in Catholic Ireland, did not help change minds. The Protestants backed Edward Carson and the English Tories in opposing Home Rule for any part of Ireland. With the help of the British Unionists, they mobilised, marched, held meetings, brought in rifles from Germany, published papers and pamphlets.
Their attitude wasn’t just hostility to Catholic Ireland, though that was an enormous part of it. Religion in England and Ireland had helped create both British and (more so) Irish nationalism. The Protestant resistance was essentially also a question of their positive identity, their sense of British national selfhood. Their bitter anti-Catholicism directed immediately against their working-class Catholic neighbours and fellow workers, their flaunting of the symbols and regalia of British oppression and British imperialism, their master-race pretensions and proclamations - all of that was and is repulsive to liberals and socialists.
As indeed, with the AOH equivalents (it was divided into two factions, the AOH and the AOH Board of Erin). The AOH existed, with Catholic members only, to promote Catholics and perceived Catholic interest.
Religion in England and Ireland had helped create both British and (more so) Irish nationalism. The Protestant resistance was essentially also a question of their positive identity, their sense of British national selfhood.
The Protestant minority in all Ireland was a majority in North East Ulster. Belatedly, the home rulers offered them special arrangements within a Home Rule Ireland. It was much too late for that.
As the Liberals and the Home Rule Party pushed through Home Rule, now without the fail-safe of a House of Lords veto on the Commons (the Lords now had only a two year delaying power), the Unionist revolt, backed by the Conservative and Unionist Party, got wider and deeper.
Led by Edward Carson, a Dublin lawyer, MP for Trinity College Dublin, the Unionists said they would not obey an Irish Home Rule government established by London. They set up a Provisional Government in “Ulster”, ready to contest power with a Westminster-backed Dublin government. They organised, drilled and armed (with specially imported German guns) an Ulster Volunteer Force.
The Liberal government was faced with civil war if it kept to its set Home Rule course. The Unionist slogan or demand was “No Home Rule without a general election”. They believed that the Liberals would lose such an election, and so it seems did the Liberals, who wanted to avoid a general election at all costs. Partition of Ireland was the Liberals’ alternative to a risky general election.
IX
The Irish labour movement was helpless in this crisis. The working class was split, Orange and Green. Most of the Irish industrial working class was Orange and backed the Tory unionist revolt against Home Rule. The only force that could coerce Protestant Ireland (if coercion was advisable) was the force of the Liberal government. The labour movement too, in effect, looked to the British government to force Home Rule on the Northeast.
Assuming Home Rule was a certainty, the labour movement had prepared for life in a Home Rule Ireland dominated by the Home Rule party and the AOH, for example by creating an Irish Labour Party to fight the Irish gombeen bourgeoisie, and pressing the British Labour Party to insist on such things as payment for MPs in a Home Rule Ireland so that workers could be MPs. James Connolly’s famous debate with William Walker in 1911 was part of that.
When it came to serious moves to partition Ireland, the labour movement was also helpless. James Connolly dismissed the capacities of the Irish movement to resist Home Rule as bluff, speaking of “the wooden guns of Ulster”. Plainly they were not bluffing.
He wrote: “I am not speaking without due knowledge of the sentiments of the organised Labour movement in Ireland when I say that we would much rather see the Home Rule Bill defeated than see it carried with Ulster or any part of Ulster left out”. The 1916 Proclamation would say nothing about partition, which by then the British government was already committed to as the Home Rule Act was passed into law and then suspended at the start of World War 1.
X
The outbreak of the Great War at the beginning of August 1914 changed everything in James Connolly’s political world.
The vote on 4 August 1914 by the German Socialists for the Kaiser’s war credits threw many socialists into a crisis. It set the tone for the Socialist International in the war. French, Belgian, British and other socialists soon followed in supporting their own governments. The Basle resolution of 1912 had committed the International to oppose war. This collapse destroyed it.
Vladimir Lenin and his companion Nadezhda Krupskaya at first refused to believe the news from Germany. When shown an issue of the German party paper Vorwärts reporting the vote, he said it had to be a forgery put out by the general staff of the German army. When he could no longer deny the fact, he at first decided to abandon politics and emigrate to Argentina. He soon adjusted and took up the working-class socialist struggle against the war and for a new International.
All his public life Connolly had been a radical working-class socialist. His first response was to oppose the war. Hearing (mistakenly) that Karl Liebknecht had been shot for opposition to the war, Connolly wrote: “The war of nation against nation in the interest of royal freebooters and cosmopolitan thieves is a thing accursed. All hail, then, to our continental comrade, who, in a world of imperial and financial brigands and cowardly trimmers and and compromisers, showed mankind that men still know how to die for the holiest of all causes — the sanctity of the human soul, the practical brotherhood of the human race!”
But on 29 August 1914, in an article The War Against the German Nation, he came out as an Irish nationalist in support of the German Empire. If the British Navy’s control of the seas could be broken, it would be tremendous progress. Following Roger Casement, a former British colonial administrator who wrote a pamphlet on the control of the seas and sided with Germany (and the Irish rebels), Connolly became a propagandist for Germany and the German war. Implicitly he supported the majority of the German Social-Democratic party.
“But seeing that the socialist movement did not so put the faith of its adherents to the test, seeing that the nations are now locked in this death grapple, and the issue is knit, I do not wish to disguise from anyone my belief that there is no hope of peaceful development for the industrial nations of continental Europe whilst Britain holds the dominance of the sea. The British fleet is a knife held permanently at the throat of Europe; should any nation evince an ability to emerge from the position of a mere customer for British products, and to become a successful competitor of Britain in the markets of the world, that knife is set in operation to cut that throat” (International Socialist Review, March 1915)
XI
The idea that Connolly was against the war is entirely wrong. He actively supported Germany in the war, except in the earlier part of August 1914.
At the same time as the war broke out, the Home Rule crisis was temporarily resolved. The British parliament passed a Home Rule Bill while stipulating that it would not be implemented until after an Amending Bill to rule out “coercion of Ulster”, and after the end of the war.
Simultaneously with James Connolly’s turn to Germany, he turned to the organising of an Irish national insurrection. The two were connected. England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, the old adage said. Britain’s enemy was Ireland’s friend. The best hope for a rising was that it should have German support and military help.
For Connolly and his friends, hope for Ireland was totally entwined with the fortunes of Germany in the war. They wanted Germany to land soldiers in Ireland to fight alongside them against England.
In the moves towards an uprising, Connolly set the pace for the Republican idealists around Clarke and Pearse. The fierce militancy he had wanted in the working-class cause against all the war powers was now directed against Britain in the war.
Roger Casement was in Germany for the future insurgents. He came back to Ireland on Good Friday 1916 to stop the Rising because there would be no German soldiers sent to Ireland. He was captured.
XII
A rising was planned by the Irish Republican Brotherhood to break out all over Ireland on Easter Sunday 1916. The conspiratorial secret society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, of which James Connolly was now a leading member, engaged in manipulation of the broad Irish Volunteers movement, intending to rise under cover of a national mobilisation of the legal Volunteers.
Central leaders of the Volunteers who were not in the confidence of the secret IRB, most importantly Eoin MacNeill, national head of the Volunteers, discovered the plan and put advertisements in the Sunday papers cancelling the mobilisation of volunteers on Easter Sunday and wrecking the IRB plans for the Rising.
The IRB in Dublin turned out on Easter Monday against impossible odds because the alternative was to let their movement collapse in a fiasco of poltroonery and irresolution. They saw the choice as letting the enterprise fizzle out in fiasco, or rising in Dublin in the hope that it would thereby belatedly trigger and support the national rising they had planned.
There is a question. There were sparks of insurrection struck in Galway and Wexford, but with Dublin “out” there was no general rising. British censorship alone does not account for that. Yet none of the leaders, not even the two, Patrick Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett, who had written poems which after the event could be construed as advocating mystical self-sacrifice, had planned the Rising to be their own funeral pyre.
Connolly died before a British Army firing squad, as did 14 others. A 16th, Roger Casement, was hanged in Pentonville Jail on 3 August. Connolly’s hopes for a new Socialist Ireland were mocked in the new Ireland that arose in the independent 26 Counties.
XIII
Everything Connolly said and did in his last 20 months was nationalist, not socialist. The Irish Citizen Army was merged into the Irish Volunteers for the duration of the 1916 Rising. (The 1930s “Irish Citizen Army” was an entirely different organisation).
Michael Collins said that the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic was too socialistic for him. The only thing socialistic in that proclamation are the assertions that “We declare the right of the people to the ownership of Ireland” and that the Republic will “cherish all the children of the nation equally”.
That is Pearse’s nationalist concept, not James Connolly’s old concept of working-class socialism established by the workers themselves; and it is a concept held by many people, including people far to the right: for example, José Antonio Primo de Rivera of the Spanish Falange of the 1930s.
Most of those who took part in the rising were not socialists, and many were far from socialism. Yet many people and organisations have asserted that Irish nationalism at a certain level of intensity flows into socialism or can be made to flow into socialism. Eamonn McCann writes that the militant Republicans will realise that they can realise their Republican goals only by joining the fight for a Workers’ Republic. That’s what we used to say in the 1960s and 1970s. It is all nonsense.
Many socialists have become nationalists. Many active as Republicans or Republic militarists are privately socialist. Yet the socialist republicans of the Irish Republican Socialist Party sometimes functioned as Catholic sectarians, for instance, killing people as Protestants at the small Protestant church at Darkley in 1983.
The idea of nationalism flowing into socialism is nonsense because though the existing partition is artificial, imprisoning the nationalist majority of Tyrone, Fermanagh, Derry City and other areas, there is a distinct Protestant majority in north-east Ulster. Only a power capable and willing to occupy and hold down that population by force, only the UK government in fact, could have unified Ireland in 1912 and in all the years since.
The Provisionals in the 1980s and 90s pressing the British government to “persuade” the Protestants into United Ireland were true to the reality, however, fantastic their idea that by their war they could compel the British to act for them.
The Six County entity created an artificial minority of Catholics in Northern Ireland. Crying injustice? Yes. But neither that fact nor the Provo war made the idea of a united Ireland any more acceptable to northern Protestants.
The reasoning is common that James Connolly, a socialist, could function as a nationalist, without ceasing to be a socialist. It is natural for socialists to claim James Connolly, a great nationalist icon, as our own. But Connolly did not serve socialism in 1916. He died nationalist and, in fact, a proselytising Catholic.
Connolly’s response to the idea of partition before 1914 was that the Home Rule Bill should be dropped. The war and the collapse of the Second International changed Connolly’s view and changed his mind on nationalism and national rebellion. The view of Sean O’Casey, one time secretary of the Irish Citizen Army, was right: James Connolly joined Irish nationalism in 1914 and fought the 1916 Rising as an Irish nationalist.
James Connolly was quoted by William O’Brien, the trade unionist, as saying before the Easter Rising that they were going out to be slaughtered, but: “In the event of victory, hold on to your rifles, as those with whom we are fighting may stop before our goal is reached. We are out for economic as well as political liberty”.
I believe O’Brien that Connolly did say that. He never said it or anything like it in public. Given those who were to rise with Connolly, it was also an enormous crass understatement of the issue then.
Close to the idea of nationalism flowing into socialism is the idea common amongst Trotskyists (I think of myself as a Trotskyist) which implied that the Provo War, could magically transform the Protestants into nationalists. That never made sense.
People such as the writer (living in England) who would never have agreed to the Provo war felt in the early 1970s that we had to give them “critical support” against our own government. From the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we openly called on them to stop the war, it was more critical than it was support.
In practice, the idea of magical transformation paved the way for Trotskyists to align with the existing Republicans, who were far from ideas of permanent revolution.
The idea of the permanent revolution in Ireland was always complete nonsense, serving only to mask a nationalism, parasitic on republicanism, of nominal Trotskyists, such as Socialist Democracy and the League for a Workers’ Republic of the 1970s and 80s.
XIV
It is possible to imagine “alternative histories” of the 1916 Rising and after. What if the Germans had done as the Irish insurgents wanted them to, and landed an expeditionary force in Ireland? Ireland would have become a theatre in the Great War of Germany against Britain, with different sorts of Irish on each side, and with a civil war subsumed into the world war.
The actual Easter Rising, though it was an event in the history of a very small nation, was a major event in world history. A revolt against imperialism whose example helped inspire peoples all over the world held in the maws of empires run by predatory brigands.
And so far, as the divisions within Ireland allowed, the Rising was successful. The 26 Counties state became effectively independent six years after the Rising was crushed.
Vladimir Lenin said of the Rising that the Irish rose too soon. Of Connolly, Liam McNulty’s forthcoming book will tell more. For now, let James Larkin’s be his epitaph tto:
“He talked to the workers... not for an assignation with peace, dark obedience, or placid resignation, but trumpet-tongued of resistance to wrong, discontent with leering poverty, and defiance of any power strutting out to stand in the way of their march onward” (Sean O’Casey).
And Yeats’s words:
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
