Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 1 | Page 7

three of the coolest
and most judicious Irish citizens of New York, that I was right in
believing that his appearance in the arena as the champion of Ireland,
would lift an inevitable controversy high above the atmosphere of
unworthy passion, and put it beyond the reach of political
mischief-makers.
How nobly he did his work when he had become convinced that he
ought to do 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