It is almost as hopeless a task to define an Irishman as it is to give the dimensions of a perfume; for the Irishman is as evasive and delusive, as pervasive and variable in type and character as the sweetness rising from the glowing bed of flowers.
If this society is to have a logical and reasonable plea for existence, if its title of American-Irish is to mean anything, we must reach some solid basis upon which to build our fabric; we must agree upon an acceptable definition of what is an Irishman.
This is what I shall try to do rather than attempt to show the ethnical components that enter into the Irishman. I have gone past the point in my speculations and theories on the Irishman where I place much stress upon the racial elements that go to make the Irish nation. We must start with these facts—the race and the nation are two distinctly different things; the terms Celtic and Irish are not synonymous.
I will state, so as to avoid the polemics of ethnology, just a few facts upon which all people are agreed, to explain why I attach so little importance to the merely racial elements that go to make up a nation. The islands of Ireland and Great Britain were at one time peopled by the one race which was known variously as the Celtic, Cymric, and Gaelic. By emigration, conquest, settlement, slavery, and intermarriage, and all those causes that mix races, Dane, Norse, German, Norman-French, Dutch, French, Walloon, and Flemish were mingled and intermingled with the original race, the constituent elements varying with time, place, and circumstances. So we have to-day in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England four distinct peoples different in characteristics, temperaments, thought, and methods, peoples made up practically from the very same elements. As the different sections of Great Britain are separated by purely artificial frontiers, they do not differ as profoundly as do the people of Ireland from those of the neighboring island. We observe in this republic people who claim a direct descent from English and other stocks producing a people as widely separated in thought, ideals, and physical appearance, and other distinctive features from the stock of the old countries as the Russian is from the Spaniard.
It is clear to me that there are other and more potent elements that make and differentiate peoples than mere racial admixtures.
The Irish, though speaking the English tongue and living under laws foreign to the instincts of the people, are a nation apart from the English, hating intensely the tie that binds them, out of sympathy with English ideas, ambitions, religions, and methods; and yet they are both the product of the same racial elements, the alleged preponderance of the Celt in the Irish being largely a matter of doubt and speculation.
What is it, then, that makes this tremendous difference in the two nations? What were the forces that were at work to produce from the same ingredients such profoundly different results? That is the question we must answer; and in answering it we will reach the basic idea of this society. Let me try and answer it in my way, and endeavor to show as simply as possible what an Irishman is.
There are in England as well as in America, among that class that for lack of a better term we must call Celtophobes, those who have an original if unsatisfactory and unscientific way of answering this question which adds to the accumulation of their stolen laurels and seems to afford them much satisfaction. If an Irishman break the record in science, art, literature, or any department of human activity, he is at once classed as an Englishman in England, an American in America; if, however, he merely break the Decalogue, the law, a bank, or his mother’s heart, he must perforce be an Irishman. This differentiation will not do for us, however.
There are some things we must remember, for our work has to bear the closest scrutiny and the most searching criticism.
The characteristics which we deem essentially Irish are not distinctly Irish; they are merely more widely distributed among the Irish. Wit, humor, poesy, melancholy, loyalty to faith and fatherland, patience under trial and hardship, daring in adventure, valor in battle,—these are found in all lands, among all peoples, though the Irish have displayed them so conspicuously in all the centuries that some, aye, many of our own people have come to regard them as exclusively theirs. While good blood will tell and bad, we must look to other things, we must consider other causes than race and blood, if we are to understand the workings of a mysterious Deity and learn how he makes nations and differentiates peoples.