HISTORICAL NOTES AND PAPERS.
IRISH ABILITY IN THE UNITED STATES.[[2]]
BY JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE, LL. D., BOSTON, MASS.
[2]. This paper appeared originally in the Boston Pilot.
The Irish race, both here and in the old world, has suffered so much in the way of misrepresentation at the hands of English and pro-English writers, its merits have been so minimized and its defects so magnified, that it is almost a hopeless task to attempt the refutation of even a tithe of the falsehoods.
It is only when a writer offers an easily accessible authority for his statements that the general reader can take the time and trouble, if so disposed, to investigate the reference and verify the accuracy or honesty of the author who professes to have quoted truly.
Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge has written, and the Century Magazine has published an article on “The Distribution of Ability in the United States,” in which he exalts the English race at the expense of some others, and depreciates the Irish race, with or without malice prepense, in a manner which is, to say the least, remarkable.
Mr. Lodge deals in some general statements easily susceptible of disproof, as when he says that “there was virtually no Irish immigration during the colonial period, and indeed none of consequence until the present century was well advanced.”
He offers no authority for this absurd statement; so it may be assumed that he ignorantly believes it true. Perhaps he also honestly believes in the race called “Scotch-Irish,” whom he defines as “descendants of the Scotch and English who settled in the North of Ireland.” Let these things pass. We are concerned only with the accuracy and honesty of Mr. Lodge’s quotations when he refers to a specific authority for facts and figures and professes to be governed by that authority.
In order to classify the distribution of “ability,” Mr. Lodge says that he “took Appleton’s Encyclopedia of American Biography in six volumes, one of the largest and most recent works upon the subject, and classified the persons mentioned therein who were citizens of the United States according to occupation, birthplace and race extraction.”