Daily Inspiration Quote by James Larkin

“Those who want to divide the workers have resorted to the foulest methods” is less a lament than a warning shot. Larkin isn’t describing an abstract moral failing; he’s naming a strategy. The line assumes division doesn’t happen naturally among workers - it has to be engineered, and with enough pressure that “methods” become “foul.” That adjective does heavy lifting: it frames union-busting not as tough politics but as contamination, something that spreads through rumor, intimidation, and bribery until solidarity starts to stink.

Larkin, a central figure in Irish labor organizing and the 1913 Dublin Lockout, knew exactly what “divide” looked like on the ground: employers blacklisting militants, press campaigns painting organizers as agitators, sectarian fault lines exploited, skilled workers set against unskilled, “respectable” labor separated from the poor. The sentence turns the spotlight away from workers’ supposed weakness and onto the active, deliberate labor of elites and institutions to keep wages low and power concentrated.

The intent is mobilizing and immunizing at once. By asserting that division is imposed, Larkin gives workers a way to reinterpret conflict inside the movement: not as proof the project is failing, but as evidence it matters enough to sabotage. The subtext is tactical: expect infiltration, expect smear, expect the boss’s moral language to be a weapon. If the methods are foul, then unity becomes not just practical but hygienic - an act of collective self-defense against a system that will happily weaponize fear, identity, and scarcity to keep people from realizing they share the same fight.