THE IRISH IN AMERICA

New Zealand Tablet, 2 June 1910, Page 850

THE IRISH IN AMERICA

PRESIDENT TAFTS’ TRIBUTE The thoughts of the world-scattered Irish race, gathered in thousands of communities in a score of countries, on ah continents, were focussed on the city of Chicago on the National Festival, where the President of the United States, William H. Taft, was celebrating the day as the.guest of the Chicago Irish Fellowship Club, at the La Salle Hotel. Before thirteen hundred men juid women, leaders in business and professional life, high officials of the city, State, and Nation, the chief executive paid his tribute to the Irish race and St. Patrick. After dealing with the life of St. Patrick and his mission in Ireland, the President went on to say: St. Patrick laid the foundation of the'culture and the spread of education which put Ireland in the forefront of civilisation for a thousand years. Her history thereafter is a sad one, a tale of sorrow, of injustice, outrage, poverty, and suffering that fill the pages of Irish history from soon after the Norman conquest of England to the early days of the last century. Had the Romans conquered her as "they did Britain had the Saxons followed, and then the Normans, so as to make a homogeneous people covering the three islands with the same history and the same interests, the same race, we should not have had the tale of sorrow, of injustice, of outrage, of poverty, suffering, and neglect that fill the pages of Irish history from soon after the Norman Conquest of England to the early days of the last century. Certainly not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have governmental measures been adopted in Ireland with any view to bettering the conditions of the Irish people. "During the centuries preceding the nineteenth, and clear back to the times of the Tudors, they have been subjects to legislation the whole purpose of which was the selfish exploitation of the Irish people by the dominant country. The result has been that Irishmen have gone to other countries. From 1820 until 1907, 18,000,000 foreigners settled in the United States, and of these 8,800,000 were from Ireland. When the immigration from Ireland was at its height and for years thereafter many of -the Irish immigrants were the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. These immigrants, many of them ignorant and uneducated, but sturdy laborers, gave to their children the benefits of public education and the equality of opportunity which has been so characteristic of life in the United States since the begin-, ning of its history, and to-day it is not too much to say that the Irish citizens of this country and their immediate descendants occupy a distinctly higher place in society and in the community than they did a generation ago.

The Irish in American Life.

The proportion of their number that have been successful and are well to do has greatly increased in the last two generations. The amalgamation between the Irishmen and Americans has gone on, and the Irish are rapidly being absorbed and are rapidly contributing their/share to the new and distinct type of. American. The Irishman has contributed in this common type to its chivalry, its courage, its courtesy, its resiliency, its capacity for enjoyment of life, its imagination, and last but not of least importance, its sense-and its enjoyment of humor. In all our wars the Irishmen have been to/the front in tho Revolution, in the war of 1812, in the Mexican War, and in the Civil War. They are naturally a warlike people, and their patriotic love for their adopted country made them soldiers in the army of the Union than whom there were none more daring, none more effective. ".-.-,- The fondness with which they cherish the memories of the beautiful island of their origin does not in the slightest

lessen their loyalty to the country in which they have made themselves so prominent and successful a part. Loving personal and religious liberty, insisting upon broad tolerance and equality before the law, they are a most valuable element in our body politic. Relieved from the sadness of the surroundings in their island home, they do not, like some of the rest of us, take their pleasures sadly. Broad, open-hearted, full of that spirit of - good fellowship and love of human kind, they create an atmosphere by their presence in the community that it is healthful and delightful to breathe. . .

The Beauty and Fascinating "Wit

of the daughters of Ireland have ever been wreathed in story and poem. No greater proof of the irresistible glances of the Irish lassies can be found than the bloody Statute which an English king felt it necessary to pass, providing that English settlers in, Ireland, marrying Irish women should be condemned to death and hanged after having been previously disembowelled. It would seem as if the death penalty might- have been enough, but it was necessary to add horrors to the.preliminaries of death to overcome the temptations of Irish beauty. I well remember visiting the Emerald Isle now a quarter of a century ago. We landed on her shores early in the morning of a July day, and it seemed to me that nothing was ever greener, nothing was ever ,sweeter, nothing was ever more attractive than Queenstown Harbor at that hour. What struck me most in our progress through Ireland was the lightning flash of repartee from every son and daughter of the soil whom we addressed. Whether it was the waiter or maid at the hotel, the newsboy upon the street, the driver of the jaunting car, the old woman at the door of her cabin, the farmer boy trudging on the road, or the boatman on the Lakes of Killarney, one never engaged him or her in a conversation that it did not end with a flash of friendly wit at the expense of the interrogator. .There is something about the landscape of the island that reminds one of -

Irish Character and History;

it is soft and sad with the overhanging clouds, and then dark with the sudden storm, and then bright again with the brilliant flashes of the sun. As we toiled through the Gap of Dunlow and met those pretty barefooted Irish lasses that tempted us with milk, it seemed a fair land and one that should have prospered. It was a land full of suggestions of poetry and song, and giving out on every side the reason for the sweet but sad attachment that the sons of Erin bear to. the old sod.

As I have said, the history of Ireland is such that until recent years her great sons were cut off either as the martyrs of a rebellion, like Robert Emmet or Wolfe Tone, or were driven to manifest their brilliant intellectual powers and great traits of character in other lands than that of their birth.

English history and English literature are full of the achievements of native sons of Ireland. The greatest of English political philosophers, statesmen, and orators, Edmund Burke, was born in Dublin of parents who came from Cork, and a family long settled in the South of Ireland. So, too, an and only less noted political writer and literary genius, Dean Swift, was born in Dublin. The literary men of England—Sheridan, Goldsmith, and Sterne—were Irishmen. - Of British military geniuses many were Irishmen,. So, too, at the bar. The greatest equity lawyer that England has ever known, Hugh Cairns, made Lord Chancellor and EarL of the English peerage, was born in County Down, Ireland, and the same county produced the first Catholic Chief Justice of England, Lord Russell of Killowen. Nor should we omit mention of the Parliamentary orators, Flood and Grattan, and the greatest of all, O'Connell. / In other countries, in France, in Spain, in Austria, are many Irishmen and families of prominence and position won by able, loyal, and courageous service under a foreign flag. The MacMahons of France, the O'Donnells of Spain, the Taaffes of Austria, are but a few of the illustrious names. In this country it is worthy of note that Andrew Jackson and his great political opponent, John C. Calhoun, both boasted of their Irish stock. Richard Montgomery, who fell at Quebec, the Sullivans of New Hampshire, and Knox, Washington's devoted assistant during the Revolutionary War and the first Secretary of War, were Irishmen. And then as we come to the Civil War, in all the long list of Irish stock we find the greatest purely military genius of the war —Philip H. Sheridan. Never in the history of the world has there been for the making of a new citizenship such a commingling and mixture of races as we have had in this country to make a typical American. But in all this commingling of the races, in all this babel of tongues that are gradually changing into English, in all the different ways of looking at life that such a variety in races must present, it would be a distinct loss if "we were to lose .in any degree whatever the fine social quality of the Irishman, his wit and humor, and his love of his human kind. For this club you could have no more suitable name than the Irish: Fellowship Club, for if you called it the Irish Club it would be necessarily a Fellowship club. If you called it a Fellowship .-'. club it would be ; : a reasonable presumption that it must be an Irish club. ; I am glad to be here. lam glad to feel the inspiration of

the love of one's kind that permeates this entire company, and I shall long carry in grateful remembrance your cordial greeting. - '-•■"-. -.--vc. , ; -