The Sun.
London, England, 1866-03-28 00:00:00

The Times quotes a letter addressed by Thomas
D'Arcy M'Gee, Esq., to an American paper, in
which the character of the Irish race race in
America is discussed at considerable length. If
any one in this country wonders why American
citizens of Irish extraction should be thinking of a
raid upon Canada instead of minding their own
affairs, Mr. M'Gee will furnish a solution of the
enigma. These Irish in America are Americans
only in name. They are naturalised citizens, it is
true, and they owe allegiance to the American Go-
vernment, but they have taken no real root in the
country, nor amalgamated with the rest of its
people. Between them and Americans there is no
kind of affinity. The Irish are unpopular in Ame-
rica; iu fact, scarcely more popular than the Eng-
lish. They form a separate, almost an alien, class,
and have fallen either by accident or propensity into
pursuits little calculated to improve their condition.
Full 75 per cent., says Mr. M'Gee, of Irish immi-
grants remain to swell the population of great towns
and seaports, instead of settling to agricultural in-
dustry in the rural districts. " Never, in the
world's history, were a purely agricultural popula-
tion so suddenly and unpreparedly converted into
mere town labourers. They did not, indeed, ex-
change agriculture for artificers' pursuits, for you
cannot well call mere loading and unloading ships,
or porterage, or digging drains, or domestic ser-
vice, works of art. But the hundreds of thou-
sands of this class who were peasants in Ireland
in spring, and town labourers in America
the same summer, threw up to the surface by the
natural law of their numbers a small fry of dema-
gogues and overseers (or bosses') whose interest it
never was that they should look to dock and suburb
labour only as a temporary condition, but to the ac-
quisition and ownership of land as their ultimate
object. Hence this strangely contradictory result,
that a people who hungered and thirsted for land in
Ireland, who struggled for conacre and cabin even to
the shedding of blood—that this same people, when
they reached a new world, where a day's wages saved
would purchase an acre of wild land in fee, wilfully
concurred, under the lead of bad advisers, to sink
into the condition of a miserable town tenantry
to whose moral squalor even European seaports can
hardly present a parallel." Such is the picture given
of that class of American citizens from which
Feniansm obtains its recruits, and the conclusion is
obvious that these emigrants become Fenians pre-
cisely because they have not become Americans.
They have forsaken one country without adopting
another. They have landed in America without as-
similating themselves to the people of the United
States, and as they have acquired no new nationality,
they cherish vague and distempered dreams of the
old one. " This very Fenian organisation in the
United States, what," asks Mr. M'Gee, " does it
really prove but that the Irish are still an
alien population, camped, but not settled, in Ame-
rica, with foreign hopes and aspirations, neither
shared in nor respected by the people among whom
they live ? If their new country was their true
country, would they find time and money to spare
in the construction of imaginary Republics beyond
seas? If their leaders were rulers at Washington,
would they be playing at Governments, think you,
in Moffatt's pill-box ?" No doubt these questions
could be promptly answered by those to whom they
are addressed, but they give us an easy clue to the
origin of the phenomenon in prospect. In America,
the Irish of recent immigrations are a distinct and
ahnost a foreign class, imbued with revolutionary
tendencies, under no retraint from new connections
or obligations, and subjected to influences which,
with the' natural impulsiveness of their race, they
are quick to obey. The rank and file of Fenianism,
with all its follies, can be thus pretty well accounted
for.