Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 1 | Page 7

it, is now matter of history. But it is a hundredfold more needful now than it was in 1871 and 1872, that the spirit in which he did it should be known and published abroad. In the interval between the delivery of two of his replies to Mr. Froude, Mr. Froude went to Boston. A letter from Boston informed me that upon Mr. Froude's arrival there, all the Irish servants of the friend with whom he was to stay had suddenly left the house, refusing to their employer the right to invite under his roof a guest not agreeable to them. I handed this letter, without a word, to Father Burke a few hours before he was to speak in the Academy of Music. He read it with a kind of humorous wrath; and when the evening came, he prefaced his lecture with a few strong and stirring words, in which he castigated with equal sense and severity the misconduct of his country-people, anticipating thus by many a year the spirit in which the supreme authority of his Church has just now dealt with the social plague of "boycotting," whereof the strike of the servant girls at Boston sixteen years ago was a precursory symptom.
Father Burke understood that American citizenship imposes duties where it confers rights. Nobody expects the European emigrant who abjures his foreign allegiance to divest himself of his native sympathies or antipathies. But American law, and the conditions of American liberty, require him to divest himself of the notion that he retains any right actively to interfere in the domestic affairs of the country of his birth. For public and political purposes, the Irishman who becomes an American ceases to be an Irishman. When Mr. Gladstone's Government in 1881 seized and locked up indefinitely, on "suspicion" of what they might be about to do, American citizens of Irish birth, these "suspects" clamoured, and had a right to clamour, for the intervention of the American Government to protect them against being dealt with as if they were Irishmen and British subjects. But by the abjuration of British allegiance which gave them this right to clamour for American protection, they had voluntarily made themselves absolute foreigners to Ireland, with no more legal or moral right to interfere in the affairs of that country than so many Chinamen or Peruvians.
Having said this, I ought, in justice to my fellow-citizens of Irish birth, to say that these elementary truths have too often been obscured for them by the conduct of public bodies in America, and of American public men.
No American public man of reputation, holding an executive office in the Federal Government, has ever thrust himself, it is true, so inexcusably into the domestic affairs of Great Britain and Ireland as did Mr. Gladstone into the domestic affairs of the United States when, speaking at Newcastle in the very crisis of our great civil war, he gave all the weight of his position as a Cabinet Minister to the assertion that Mr. Jefferson Davis had created not only an army and a navy, but a nation, and thereby compelled the Prime Minister of Great Britain to break the effect of this declaration by insisting that another Cabinet Minister, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, should instantly make a speech countering it, and covering the neutrality of the British Government.[4]
Nor has either House of the Congress of the United States ever been guilty of the impertinence of adopting resolutions of sympathy with the Home Rule, or any other movement affecting directly the domestic affairs of the British Empire, though, within my own knowledge, very strong pressure has been more than once put upon the Foreign Affairs Committees of both Houses to bring this about.
But such resolutions have been repeatedly adopted by State Legislatures, and individual members, both of the Federal Senate and of the Federal Lower House, have discredited themselves, and brought such discredit as they could upon the Congress, by effusions of the same sort. The bad citizenship of Irish-American citizens, however, is not the less bad citizenship because they may have been led into it by the recklessness of State Legislatures--which have no responsibility for our foreign relations--or the sycophancy of public men. If it were proved to demonstration that Home Rule would be the salvation of Ireland, no American citizen would have any more right to take an active part in furthering it than to take an active part in dethroning the Czar of all the Russias. The lesson which Washington administered to Citizen Genet, when that meddlesome minister of the French Republic undertook to "boom" the rights of men by issuing letters of marque at Charleston, has governed the foreign relations of the United States ever since, and it is as binding upon every private citizen as upon every public