ge when
possible in the public service, or, failing that, to enter the domestic
service of a private employer.

It should not be necessary to say (except that Irish-American
susceptibilities are sometimes extraordinarily sensitive) that I share
to the full that admiration which all people feel for the best traits in
the Irish character; but, in spite of individual exceptions, I urge that
it is not in the nature of the race to become good and helpful citizens
according to Anglo-Saxon ideals, and that, as far as those qualities are
concerned which have made the greatness of the United States, the
contribution from the Irish element has been inconsiderable. The
deftness of the Irishman in political organisation and his lack of
desire for individual independence, as a result of which he turns either
to the organising of a governing machine or to some form of personal
service (in either case merging his own individuality) is as much
foreign to the American spirit as is the docility of the less
intelligent class of Germans under their political leaders--a docility
which, until very recently has caused the German voters in America to be
used in masses almost without protest.

It is the Anglo-Saxon, or English, spirit which has played the dominant
part in moulding the government of the United States, which has made the
nation what it is, which to-day controls its social usages. The Irish
invasion of the political field may fairly be said to be in its essence
an alien invasion; and, while it may be to the discredit of the American
people that they have allowed themselves in the past to be so engrossed
in other matters that they have permitted that invasion to attain the
success which it has attained, I do not fear that in the long run the
masterful Anglo-Saxon spirit will suffer itself to be permanently
over-ridden (any more than it has allowed itself to be kept in permanent
subjection in England), even in the large cities where the Anglo-Saxon
voter is in a small minority. Ultimately it will throw off the incubus.
In the meanwhile it is unjust that Englishmen or other Europeans should
accept as evidence of native American frailty instances of municipal
abuses and of corrupt methods in a city like New York, where it has not
been by native Americans that those abuses and those methods were
originated or that their perpetuation is made possible. On the contrary
the American minority fights strenuously against them, and I am not s