So early as the winter of 1884–1885 it was estimated that in New York city alone eighty-five thousand would-be industrious workmen lay idle, in addition to other thousands never estimated, because outside the pale of any possible census-taking, who would not have worked had the opportunity been offered them. A little more than a year later it was freely asserted among the socialists of the country that twice this number were enrolled in their organizations within a radius of ten miles from the New York city hall. In the outbreaks which occurred at other places the officers to whom was committed the task of restoring order generally found themselves opposed most vindictively by men who, a few years before, would have been regarded as the “bone and sinew” of the land. It was noted, too, that these men were always the last to yield to force; that they were always the most sullen and revengeful when finally compelled to do so; and that, even when convicted and undergoing imprisonment, they never showed repentance or sorrow except for failure, constantly boasted of their determination to “try it over again,” and steadily adhered to the belief they would ultimately triumph.
IV.
THE RULE OF IRELAND IN AMERICA.
But neither in the importation of exotic socialistic germs nor in the fungus-like growth of indigenous disaffection and corruption lay the only dangers of the Republic. The heterogeneous elements which made up the population of the United States had suffered a great and wholly unfortunate race-change since the foundation of the Government. At the close of the Revolution which separated the colonies from England the country was populated with a sparse but homogeneous people, possessing in an eminent degree the sterling virtues and the robust common-sense which characterize the Anglo-Saxon race. The freedom which these men won and had no capacity for abusing they felt would be safe forever in the hands of descendants sprung from their loins. The government they formed was exactly fitted for themselves and for a succeeding nation possessing their sense of order and their intelligence. But they saw a vast unexplored continent opening its wealth before them. Their numbers were but few for its conquest and reclamation. They felt the need of more men. Relying upon the freedom of the institutions they bequeathed and upon the virtue and vigor with which they endowed their heirs, they invited immigration from Europe. They took it for granted that the immigrants would be few in comparison with the native population, and that they would be absorbed and assimilated by the majority as snow-flakes falling in the ocean are absorbed by the great waters and made a part of them.
At first the stream of immigration which flowed westward was no larger than they had anticipated, and gave cause for little fear, either by reason of its size or of the classes and races which composed it. But before the first fifty years of the Republic had passed, it became clear that the asylum which it offered was being taken advantage of chiefly by the Irish, and by the very worst portion of the Irish at that. They found their own little island too narrow for them, and flocked to the United States by the hundred thousand. Coming, the most of them, from the lowest ranks of a degraded and ignorant peasantry, they found themselves, in the United States as at home, in a position of inferiority in everything save citizenship. Clannish by race and religious prejudice, they brought with them all their insular and ethnic narrowness and exclusiveness, and remained up to the end of the chapter a class by themselves. Other nationalities sent immigrants who threw off their old allegiances upon touching American soil, became in fact as well as in name Americans, intermarried with Americans, and brought up their children to become wholly American in deed and aspiration. But the Irish seldom married outside their own race; they brought up their children to be first Catholic and then Irish as themselves; they remained, and their descendants after them to the third and fourth generation, as much Irishmen as their cousins who continued to inhabit Leinster and Munster.
But they seized with greater eagerness than was exhibited by any other immigrants every political privilege which was within their reach. In politics as in all other interests, their clannishness kept them mainly confined to one party; but even in that they stood as far as possible aloof from the real and patriotic Americans serving in the same organization. Coarse of feature and coarser of mind; servile in their devotion to religious forms, which were never any better than forms to them; superstitious to the last degree; blunted in moral sense so as to be amenable to fear alone as a restraining sentiment; utterly illogical and the slaves of ignorant prejudice,—it would be difficult to conceive of immigrants from any modern race less fitted than they for self-government or for exercising a share in the government of others. There were occasional brilliant and noble exceptions; but of the majority this picture is not over-colored. Wherever they touched the political garment they defiled it. In the cities, where their increase by steady immigration and by their own amazing procreative fertility gave them the majority, their power was invariably signalized by a corruption and local tyranny greater than that against which Adams and Jefferson and Washington revolted. As their numbers increased and they became more assured of their political power, their arrogance and reckless abuse of public trust became daily more and more exasperating.
Through all the political changes to which other voters were subject, they remained in practical effect an organization by themselves. As has been said, they grasped with insatiate greed every political right and privilege which the laws afforded them, but refused to become any the less Irishmen. They stubbornly persisted in putting loyalty to the land they had abandoned above loyalty to the land they had adopted and which had opened its hospitality to them. Instead of becoming in reality as well as name American citizens, they remained Irish citizens, an imperium in imperio, and spoke of their life in the United States, even while they were exercising the franchise or sharing in the emoluments of office there, as an “exile.” They boldly proclaimed themselves “patriots,” because, having fled to the United States and accepted its protection and its asylum, they still professed greater devotion and a heartier loyalty to the fatherland they had forsworn than to the country to which they had solemnly pledged, by becoming citizens of it, their voluntary and complete allegiance.
In immense numbers these “exiles” united in more or less secret and criminal associations for the “freeing of Ireland.” At first their schemes were comparatively peaceful and their meetings open; but as time passed on, and little visible progress was made in the task of abrogating English supremacy in Ireland, the plots of the wilder zealots grew in acceptance, and the machinations of the plotters took on deadlier aspects. Not only did nine tenths of the later immigrants hasten into these various societies, but fully as great a proportion of the American-born sons of Irish refugees went with them. Whatever may have been their original intentions, such societies as the “Ancient Order of Hibernians,” the “Clan-na-Gael,” the “Emmet Clubs,” the “National Leagues,” and the like became in the end a series of widely ramifying conspiracies. In their meetings the wildest schemes of vengeance against England were planned, and bloody plots deliberately woven, not only for the commission of the most fiendish and inhuman crimes against English men and English women and children, but also aiming at the embroilment of the United States in actual war with the other great Anglo-Saxon Power. A large proportion of the most brutal crimes committed in England and Ireland during the long agitation were planned in the United States by these organizations. By far the larger part of the money with which the agitation was fomented and the crimes paid for came from contributions made in the United States, openly and without any attempt to conceal the purposes for which they were made.