The Irish standard., 1903-02-14
of American life, says the Chicago


of American life, says the Chicago
Citizen.
Now, it is a positive fact that very
large proportion of the men who won
the freedom of the American colonies
were Catholic and Protestant Irishmen
and the immediate descendants of
Irishmen. When King Georges SOL
diers got hold of an American prisoner
they never asked him whether he
had Il Bible or beads. but sent him to
perish in the cruel prison ships. if they
did not murder him beforehand. When
the British set the savage Indians up
on American villages they did not tell
them to discriminate between the
scalps of Protestant and Catholic
women. When the brave Beers made
the grandest fight of the century for
their republican freedom their robust
Professionalism did not save their wives
and little ones from the starvation
tactics of the Protestant Kitchener;
nor did the Catholicism of the Cuban
refugees save their lives from the
Catholic Weyler. AS an actual physi-
cal fact the Catholic and Protestant
farmers of Ireland are formed out of
he same mother earth, and every meal
they eat is drawn from her fruitful
breast. Are they not, then, sons of
the same mother?
What, then, is to account for this
strange hate between fellow-country-
men? 1t is due, primarily, to devilish
deception on the one hand and to the
natural resentment of aggrieved men
on the other. Wherever in Ireland the
Catholics are vastly in the majority
not only is there no ill-feeling toward
the Protestant, but there is actually
a not always prudent generosity from
national standpoint. 1t is a positive
fact that Protestants, not Of the politi-
cal party of the majority of the people,
have periodically been elected to the
office of mayor in towns almost en-
tirely Catholic, just to give the small
Protestant minority testimony of the
goodwill of the Catholic majority.
The Catholic Irishman has never
measured an Irish leaders, patriotism
by the standard of his religious faith.
Next to st. Patrick, the patron saint
of Ireland, what name is more loved;
whose anniversary is more widely eel
ebrated by Catholic Irishmen, at home
and abroad, than the name and ami
versary of Robert Emmett, the pure
souled young Protestant patriot whom
England strangled on a Dublin glib
bet? We glory in the names of the
Catholic victors of the Curlews and the
Yellow Ford and Benburb; and we
sing the praise of Sarsfield and those
who fought for the last of the Stuart
kings, but none have gone so deep in
to the heart of Catholic Ireland as the
Protestant Wolfe Tone and the Pro-
testant Lord Edward, who died, not
for kings, but for the Irish people.
The Catholic people of Ireland never
did, and do not now, possess one atom
of religious bigotry in their national
character. If it exist among the Pro-
testants Of the north, where they are
in a majority, it is not because their
hearts are less susceptible to kindly
influences than their Catholic breth-
rem, but because they have been sys-
tematically deceived and their minds
inflamed against their Catholic fellow
countrymen by those whose only OBJ
ject was the subsection and plumber
of both.
When the Protestant and Catholic
farmers of Ireland will Just remember
that they are Irishmen. that Ireland is
their country, that her prosperity is
their prosperity, then they will rlnani'
mously agree that the British empire
and the pope and differences of relig
ion are all subjects for discussion in
their proper place, but entirely out Of
order when the question before the
chair is. the best way to make old Ire
land what God intended her to be, the
home of self-governing. happy and
contented people.