HYPHENATED AMERICANS
conciliation of America will never be complete until we have achieved the conciliation of Ireland. It is evident, indeed, from many symptoms, that Irish-American hostility to England is declining, if not in rancour, at any rate in influence. Still, a popular New York paper, on St. Patrick's Day, thinks it worth while to propitiate "The Powerful Race of Ireland" by a leader under that heading, and to this effect:
"The Irish race is famous as producing the best fighters and poets among men, and the most beautiful and most virtuous of women.
"Such a reputation should suffice for any nation.
"And note that Ireland still is and always will be a Nation. There is no Anglomania in that fair land, no yearning for reciprocity for the sake of a few dollars, no drinking of the Queen's health first. . . .
great bulk of the descendants of the immigrants of non-English origin become absolutely indistinguishable from other Americans, and share their feelings. This is markedly so with the Scandinavians, and most of the Germans of the second, and all the Germans of the third, generation, who practically all, during 1898, felt toward Germany and England just exactly as other Americans did. . . . Twice recently I have addressed huge meetings of eight or ten thousand people, each drawn, as regards the enormous majority, from exactly that class which you pointed out as standing between the two extremes. In each case the men who introduced me dwelt upon the increased good feeling between the English-speaking peoples, and every complimentary allusion to England was received with great applause." At the same time my correspondent adds: "Your division of the American sentiment into three classes is exactly right; also your sense of the relative importance of these three classes."
145
