COLLINS, Michael. The Path to Freedom (Rare first edition)

Dublin: The Talbot Press Limited, 1922. First edition. pp. 153. Portrait frontispiece of Michael Collins. Original olive-green cloth, upper cover ruled and lettered in black with portrait of Collins, spine lettered in black. Some light foxing. Contemporary institutional stamp to preface leaf and in green ink to rear endpaper. Otherwise a very good copy.

Published shortly after Collins’s death in August 1922, The Path to Freedom collects his political writings together with notes drafted early that month and apparently intended for public delivery before Dáil Éireann. The volume includes essays on the Treaty, the Easter Rising, partition, Irish culture and economic development, concluding with ‘Freedom Within Grasp’. The prefatory note records that Collins had no opportunity to revise his final notes before his death.

An important contemporary statement of Collins’s political thought at the foundation of the Irish Free State, setting out his views on independence, national reconstruction and the practical meaning of freedom following the revolutionary period. The circumstances of its publication, within months of his death, give the work particular historical significance.

[L4 10A]