the limits "law and order" prescribed, either by starvation or flight to America.
Fleeing in hundreds of thousands from the rule of one who claimed to be their Sovereign, expelled in a multitude exceeding the Moors of Spain, whom a Spanish King shipped across the seas with equal pious intent, the fugitive Irish Nation found friendship, hope and homes in the bosom of the great Celtic Republic of the West. All that was denied to them in their own ancient land they here found in a new Ireland growing up across the Atlantic.
And the hate of England pursued them here and those who dared to give them help and shelter. The United States were opening wide their arms to receive the stream of Irish fugitives and were saying very harsh things of England's infamous rule in Ireland. This could not be brooked. England in those days had not invented the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and a united Germany had not then been born to vex the ineptitude of her statesmen or to profit from the shortcomings of her tradesmen.
So the greatest ministers of Queen Victoria seriously comtemplated war with America and naturally looked around for someone else to do the fighting. The Duke of Wellington hoped that France might be played on, just as in a later day a later minister seeks to play France in a similar role against a later adversary.[1] The Mexicans, too, might be induced to invade the Texan frontier. But a greater infamy than this was seriously planned. Again it is an Irishman who tells the story and shows us how dearly the English loved their trans-Atlantic "kinsmen" when there was no German menace to threaten nearer home.
Writing from Carlsruhe, on January 26th, 1846, to his friend, Alexander Spencer, in Dublin, Charles Lever said:
- ↑ Sir E. Grey and the "Entente Cordiale."
