if allowed free course, to make Ireland a land of grazing fielus and a waste of sheep walks. The history of Ireland shows the reverse of the teaching of Goldsmith to be the truth. A "bold peasantry" can, by legislation, be called into, or blotted out of existence. The Irishman in Canada can rejoice that his adopted home is free from absentees and is rich in minerals.

Home Rule has had no influence on emigration to this country, and the scope of this book does not lead me to discuss it here. Nor, again, had Fenianism any effect on this country's population. The most miserable of all attempts ever made on the peace of a people, called out the patriotic feelings of Canadians of all classes, and of every nationality. It was a Fenian bullet which, all too soon, just when his great powers were really ripening, deprived the world of D'Arcy McGee. These are the two sinister events which connect Canada in any way with Fenianism, and they call for no comment. Even Thomas Clarke Luby, when brought to Toronto last St. Patrick's day to lecture on Ireland, could not withhold the expression of his shame at the conduct of the Fenian raiders, and emphatically declared he had no sympathy whatever with them.

CHAPTER III.

WHAT Irish and English statesmanship did for the United States is scarcely sufficiently recognized. The Irish Commons refused to vote £45,000 for the war against the American colonists. Burke, Barré, and Sheridan wrote openly in defence of their transatlantic fellow-subjects. In France, McMahon, Dillon, Roche, Fermoy, General Conway, and other experienced military men, were ready to volunteer into the American service. It was the victory of

Brito-Hibernian troops which made the United States possible ;* and when the citizens of the Republic look back to the dawn of her career of wealth and freedom and greatness, they will see clear, even through the mists of centuries, the romantic figure of the lover-soldier falling at the moment his charge broke the lines of Montcalm, and near him Irishmen whose names are only less illustrious than their English commander's.

Irish historians have dwelt with too much delight on legends. I shall avoid this mistake, nor be tempted to dilate on St. Brandon's discovery of America in A.D. 545.† We are on solid ground, however, when we remind the reader that in 1518, Baron de Léry,

"The fall of Montcalm in the moment of his defeat, completed the victory; and the submission of Canada put an end to the dream of a French empire in America. In breaking through the line with which France had striven to check the westward advance of the English colonists, Pitt had unconsciously changed the history of the world. His support of Frederick and of Prussia, was to lead in our own day to the erection of a United Germany. His conquest of Canada, by removing the enemy whose dread knit the colonists to the mother-country, and by flinging open to their energies, in the days to come, the boundless plains of the West, laid the foundation of the United States." Green, p. 737.

The "Life of Saynt Brandon" in the Gold Legend, Published by Wynkyn de Worde, 1483, Fol., 357. The voyage was a favourite theme with the early romance writers. An English translation of an early French revision will be found in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. xxxix. Mr. D. F. McCarthy published, a quarter of century ago (Dublin 1850), an admirable poem on the subject. Mr. McCarthy, as will be seen from one or two stanzas, caught the music of an earlier century than the nineteenth.

At length the long-expected morning came,
When from the opening arms of that wild bay,
Beneath the hill that bears my humble name,
Over the waves we took our untracked way.
Sweetly the morn lay on tarn and rill;

Gladly the waves played in its golden light,
And the proud top of the majestic hill,

Shone on the azure air-serene and bright.

All that pathetic, half-unreasonable and wholly noble and beautiful love which an Irishman cherishes for the home of his race comes out in the following:

Over the sea we flew that sunny morn,

Not without natural tears and human sighs;
For who can leave the land where he was born,
And where, perchance, a buried mother lies,
Where all the friends of riper manhood dwell,
And where the playmates of his childhood sleep;
Who can depart, and breathe a cold farewell,

Nor let his eyes their honest tribute weep?

the blood in whose veins, like his name, was Irish, with a company of colonists landed on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia.

In the eighteenth century, Irishmen were met on all sides in America. They were successful traders, successful sailors, successful soldiers, successful as interpreters; and some of them, if this will not sound like a bull, successful Indian chiefs.* The Republic below the line should never forget what they did for that great free empire; nor should the Irishman in the second or third generation be other than proud of the rock whence he was hewn. The first naval capture made in the name of the United Colonies was made by five brothers, whose father, Maurice O'Brien, was a native of Cork. This affair," says Cooper, in his History of the United States Navy" was the Lexington of the seas. There were dozens of Irishmen in command after 1775.

The ban laid on Irish manufactures, in 1688,+ and the rackrents, sent multitudes of Protestants and Catholics across the Atlantic. According to Dobbs, writing a few years after, three thousand males left Ulster yearly for the Colonies. In 1699, James Logan, of Lurgan, accompanied William Penn to Pennsylvania, and became one of the foremost men in the colony. He was a strong Protestant, and with a firmer grasp of the large views and liberal tolerance at the base of Protestantism than were

Our little bark, kissing the dimpled smiles
On ocean's cheek, flew like a wanton bird,
And then the land, with all its hundred isles
Faded away, and yet we spoke no word.

Each silent tongue held converse with the past;

Each moistened eye looked round the circling wave;
And, save the spot where stood our trembling mast,
Saw all things hid within one mighty grave.

See D'Arcy McGee's "Irish Settlers," a book without which this chapter could not have been written in Canada.

* "More than one Irishman was naturalized in the forest, like Stark and Houston, and obeyed as chiefs. Of the number was the strange character known as Tiger Rorke, at one time the friend of Chesterfield and the idol of Dublin drawing-rooms; at another, the tattooed leader of an Iroquois war party."—"The Irish Settlers in North America." By Thomas D'Arcy McGee.

+ “All the other oppressions of the Irish were of no importance compared with the destruction of their trade for the benefit of English producers." p. 399. Mahaffey's "Social History of Greece."

FOUNDERS OF THE UNITED STATES.

53

general then. Even the Quaker Penn reproves him for his liberality. "There is," writes Penn from London, in 1708, "a complaint against your government that you suffer public Mass.” Logan's example proved contagious, and so early as 1730, we find in the interior of the State, townships called Derry, Donegal, Tyrone, and Coleraine. In 1729, the Irish emigrants, who landed in Philadelphia, were ten to one of all the European nationalities, an influx which continued till the close of the century. Among the Irish emigrants, in 1729, was Charles Clinton, whose three sons were to play so prominent a part in the annals of New York. A large Irish immigration settled in Maryland, in Virginia, and in South Carolina. Among the Irish settlers in South Carolina occur the famous names of Rutledge, Jackson, and Calhoun, North Carolina also received the Irish contingent which contained a governor in James Moore, who headed the revolution in 1775. In the settlement of Kentucky Irishmen played their part. "For enterprise and daring courage," says Marshall,* "none transcended Major Hugh McGrady," and he gives a list of others deserving honourable mention. If the reader wishes to know what a noble pioneer the Irishman of those days made, let him read the early history of Kentucky, and what Simon Butler did and endured. In Delaware also, several Irish families made their homes, and in the contests between the settlers, Colonel Plunkett and Thomas Neill are prominent. The United States owe all their celebrated Butlers to the cadets of the great Ormond stock.

In the colony of Massachusetts Bay, a meeting was held in 1725, at Haverhill, for settling the town of Concord, and with the view of excluding the Irish, it was resolved "that no alienation of any lot should be made without the consent of the community." Irish families who presumed to make a settlement were warned off. But they held their ground, and nothing came of the threat. In the capital of New England, in 1737, we find a body of "Irish gentlemen of the Irish nation banding themselves together in a charitable society, for the relief of such of their poor indigent countrymen, without any design of not contributing towards the

* History of Kentucky.

provision of the town poor in general, as usual." This was in the main a Protestant Benevolent Society, and the 8th article of the Constitution declared that none but Protestants were eligible for office or committee work. The Londonderry settlement took place in the spring of 1719.* It consisted of sixteen families, who brought with them to the new world the stern fibre which would not surrender to death, armed with famine. They were all of the Presbyterian faith, and in process of time spread over Windham, Chester, Litchfield, Manchester, Bedford, Goffstown, New Boston, Arim, Peterborough, Ackworth, in New Hampshire, and Barnett, in Vermont. Their descendants were the first settlers in many towns in Massachusetts and Maine, and they are now to the number of tens of thousands scattered over all the States of the Union. Cherry Valley, New York, was in part peopled from Londonderry. A few families from Belfast, in 1723, established an

“He (the Ulster man), pushes along quietly to the proper place, not using his elbows too much, and is not hampered by traditions like the Celt. He succeeds particularly well in America and in India, not because Ulster men help one another, and go on like a corporation; for he is not clannish like the Scottish Highlanders or the Irish Celts, the last of whom unfortunately stick together like bees, and drag one another down instead of up. No foreign people succeed in America unless they mix with the native population. It is out of Ulster that her hardy sons have made the most of their talents. It was an Ulster man of Donegal, Francis Mack amie who founded American Presbyterianism in the early part of the last century, just as it was an Ulsterman of the same district, St. Columbkille, who converted the Picts of Scotland in the sixth century. Four of the Presidents of the United States and one Vice-President have been of Ulster extraction, James Monroe, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, and James Buchanan. General Andrew Jackson was the son of a poor Ulster emigrant who settled in North Carolina, towards the close of the last century: 'I was born somewhere, he said, between Carrickfergus and the United States.' Bancroft and other historians recognize the value of the Scotch-Irish element in forming the society of the Middle and Southern States. It has been the boast of Ulstermen, that the first General who fell in the American war of the Revolution, was an Ulsterman-Richard Montgomery-who fought at the siege of Quebec; that Samuel Findley, President of Princeton College, and Francis Allison, pronounced by Stiles, the President of Yale, to be the greatest classical scholar in the United States, had a conspicuous place in educating the American mind to independence; that the first publisher of a daily paper in America was a Tyrone man, named Dunlop; that the marble palace of New York, where the greatest business in the world is done by a single firm, was the property of the late Alexander T. Stewart, a native of Lisburn, County Down; that the foremost merchants, such as the Browns and Stewarts, are Ulstermen; and that the inventors of steam navigation, telegraph, and the reaping-machine-Fulton, Morse, and McCormick—are either Ulstermen or the sons of Ulstermen." "Ulster and its people.” -Frazer's Magazine, August, 1876.

+ Barstow's New Hampshire, p. 130.