THE FOREIGNER IN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION 397 



delinquent classes is derived from the Celtic element. The Irish- 

 man is practically a man without a country; he owes an ill-rendered 

 fealty to the British crown until he leaves his native island and 

 swears allegiance to the American Government, but the oath rests 

 lightly upon him ; all the patriotism which he possesses is centered in 

 that ill-starred rebellious dependency of Great Britain on her west. 

 "While on the surface more easily assimilable than the Teuton be- 

 cause he speaks the language of his adopted country, he is first an 

 Irishman,* then an American, and such only so far as it is an Amer- 

 ica of the green flag. A distinction must, however, as already ob- 

 served, be drawn between the natives of the north and those of the 

 south of Ireland — the Saxon Ulsterites and the Celts. From the 

 latter is derived the large proportion of our delinquent classes; the 

 Molly Maguires were Irishmen, and it is the Irish who have had the 

 largest share in the corruption of our governmental institutions. 

 The Ulsterites, on the contrary, being principally of Scotch and 

 English stock, partake of the characteristics which mark the British 

 alien in America. 



It is unfortunate that a few unassimilable Englishmen, who 

 never had any intention of becoming assimilated, and who are at all 

 times aggressively British, should have conveyed the impression that 

 the British immigrant does not make a good citizen. On the con- 

 trary, there are to-day over a million people in all parts of this coun- 

 try born in Britain, honest, frugal, hard-working, and industrious, 

 fulfilling by reason of their close affiliations with the people of the 

 United States all the requirements of the best American citizen. 



There are, as we know, other races, Latin and Slavonic, wretched 

 and ignorant, the superlatively low, the refuse of civilization, unac- 

 customed to freedom, unacquainted with equality; they have the 

 privilege after a brief period of residence of exercising all the rights 

 of native-born citizens, but only value the franchise at the pecuniary 

 worth, or vote blindly under the direction of some corrupt dema- 

 gogue. Coming from a condition bordering upon serfdom, it will 

 be found that they are almost unassimilable, in the first generations 

 at least; incapable of distinguishing liberty from anarchy, these 

 people — principally Russians, Poles, Hungarians, and Italians — are 

 landed on these shores in numbers probably in excess of fifty thou- 

 sand a year. 



The anarchist and ultra-socialist parties do not, as is commonly 

 supposed, derive their chief support from the Teutonic element; their 

 ranks are rather recruited from among these members of the Semitic 



* The great pilgrimage which will be made to Ireland during the coming summer by 

 thousands of American citizens of Celtic extraction to celebrate the centenary of 1798 

 furnishes us with one demonstration of this proposition. 



