fice 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 servant of
the Republic.

I must ask my readers, therefore, to bear it constantly in mind that all
my observations and comments have been made from an American, not from a
British or an Irish point of view. How or by whom Ireland shall be
governed c