872, 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 of