romission in the affairs of Ireland, it is proper for me to
say at the outset, that the condition of Ireland interests me not
because I believe, with Cardinal Manning, that upon the future of
Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire, but because I know that
America is largely responsible for the actual condition of Ireland, and
because the future condition of Ireland, and of the British Empire,
must gravely influence the future of my own country.

In common with the vast majority of my countrymen, who come with me of
what may now not improperly be called the old American stock--by which I
mean the three millions of English-speaking dwellers in the New World,
who righteously resented, and successfully resisted, a hundred years
ago, the attempt--not of the Crown under which the Colonies held their
lands, but of the British Parliament in which they were
unrepresented--to take their property without their consent, and apply
it to purposes not passed upon by them, I have always felt that the
claim of the Irish people to a proper control of matters exclusively
Irish was essentially just and reasonable. The measure of that proper
control is now, as it always has been, a question not for Americans, but
for the people of Great Britain and of Ireland. If Lord Edward
Fitzgerald and his associates had succeeded in expelling British
authority from Ireland, and in founding an Irish Republic, we should
probably have recognised that Republic. Yet an American minister at the
Court of St. James's saw no impropriety in advising our Government to
refuse a refuge in the United States to the defeated Irish exiles of
'98.

It is undoubtedly the opinion of every Irish American who possesses any
real influence with the people of his own race in my country, that the
rights and liberties of Ireland can only be effectually secured by a
complete political separation from Great Britain. Nor can the right of
Irish American citizens, holding this opinion, to express their sympathy
with Irishmen striving in Ireland to bring about such a result, and with
Englishmen or Scotchmen contributing to it in Great Britain, be
questioned, any more than the right of Polish citizens of the French
Republic to express their sympathy with Poles labouring in Poland for
the restoration of Polish nationality. It is perhaps even less open to
question than the right of Americans not of Irish race, and of Frenchmen
not of Polish race, to express such sympathies; and