The ideas of Socialism and Marxism are gaining an echo in Ireland at the present time. There's a clear reason for that: capitalism is in a severe crisis and the ideas of the bourgeois and of the “social partnership” and reformism don’t answer the problems and the worries of working people. James Connolly’s name has been used and abused by all shades of political opinion in Ireland. We make no apology for reprinting articles that are, like this one, a century old. The same old problems need the same solutions. Connolly’s ideas are as fresh today as they were in 1909.

November marks the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This book revolutionised thinking about the living world because for the first time it provided an explanation for the evolution of species, something that was long suspected by scientists. Darwin’s simple idea – change by natural selection – is arguably the single most important foundation-stone upon which all modern biology is based. The Origin of Species was a triumph of the materialist world outlook, even if Darwin himself didn’t quite put it that way, and for that reason its publication was celebrated by Marx and Engels. .