35 



IMPRESSIONS OF THE UNITED STATES BY A 



SCOTCH-IRISHMAN. 



By E. J. Elliott. 



(Abstract) 



Mr. Elliott began by referring in very complimentary terms 

 to Mr. Knabenshue's paper. He then alluded to the fact that 

 the people of the United States had many qualities in common 

 with the Scotch-Irish. Their civilisation, for example, was largely 

 indivividualistic, and as a people they had no love for collectivism. 

 Both races were intensely practical, and their aims and aspirations, 

 as a rule, excluded the visionary. Neither produced many great 

 artists or poets, but they excelled in producing men of affairs. 

 Many words and phrases found in such authors as Hawthorne, 

 Emerson, Whitman, and Churchill were familiar to North Irish 

 people, while not fully understood by English people. There 

 was the same stern view of life to be found among the country 

 people of New England and Ulster, no doubt owing to their 

 Puritan ancestry It was largely a matter of heredity and atavistic 

 tendency. There was, further, the same democratic view among 

 both people — not the same reverence for ancient things that one 

 found among the English as a rule. He also pointed out that in 

 the " States " at present the men at the head of the large com- 

 mercial and manufacturing concerns were mostly self-made men, 

 or men of the first generation, and that in Ulster and Belfast this 

 was largely the case also ; unlike England, where the captains of 

 industry as a class were those who inherited their position from 

 grandfathers or great-grandfathers. The result was that the 

 manufacturers of the " States " and of Ulster corresponded to the 

 men who founded the great industries in England in the early part 

 of last century, and were therefore more devoted to business and 

 more serious in application than the English manufacturers of the 

 second and third generation, who very often were sportsmen first 



