for the anti-English feeling with which so many of the Irish
land in America is carefully kept alive by the 'boss,' whose sedulous
fostering of the instinctive clannishness and inherited leader-following
habits of the Irish saps their independence of thought and prevents them
from ceasing to be mere political agents and developing a citizenship
which would furnish its due quota of statesmen to the service of the
Republic. They lack in the United States just what they lack at home,
the capacity, or at any rate the inclination, to use their undoubted
abilities in a large and foreseeing manner, and so are becoming less and
less powerful as a force in American politics.

The fallacious views about the nature and sphere of politics, which the
Irish bring with them from Ireland, and which are perpetuated in
America, have the effect not only of debarring the Irish from real
political progress, but also, as at home, from gaining success in
industrial pursuits which their talents would otherwise win for them.
They succeed as journalists owing to their quick intelligence and
versatility, and as contractors mainly owing to their capacity for
organising gangs of workmen--a faculty which seems to be the only good
thing resulting from their political education. They are as brilliant
soldiers in the service of the United States as they are in that of
Britain--more it would be impossible to say--and they have produced
types of daring, endurance, and shrewdness like the 'Silver Kings' of
Nevada which testify to the exceptional powers always developed by the
Irish in exceptional circumstances. But in the humdrum business of
everyday life in the United States they suffer from defects which are
the outcome of their devotion to mistaken political ideals and of their
subordination of industry to politics, which are not always purely
American, but are often influenced by considerations of the country of
their birth. On the whole, a quarter of a century of not unsympathetic
observation of the Irish in the United States has convinced me that the
position they occupy there is not one which either they or the American
people can look on with entire satisfaction. The Irish immigrants are
felt to belong to a kind of _imperium in imperio_, and to carry into
American politics ideas which are not American, and which might easily
become an embarrassment if not a danger to America. Hence the powerful
interest which America shares with England, though of