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Numerous lives fell the sacrifice, whilst upwards of one hundred houses were burnt to the ground : including also several of the Catholic churches or houses of public worship; the convent of the Sisters of Charity; the residences and libraries of the Catholic priesthood, as well as the schools of the Catholic emigrant population. Yet, will every

American, in the full recollection of these proceedings, tell you, of the happy condition of this favoured land of universal benevolence and freedom - this home of the exile-this refuge of the politically oppressed, and persecuted, of other nations, to whom its thousand welcomes are addressed on reaching their shores. He will speak to you in the milder accents of confiding truth, of this retreat and sanctuary from all religious strife and persecution; and endeavour to impress upon your belief, the happy and universal toleration that is extended at all times, and throughout every part of his vast country, to every variety of sect and religionist.

But the spirit of hostility that called forth these excesses was not of the day or of the hour. It possessed none of the characteristics of the suddenly excited feeling of an intolerant and unrestrained population; but had been of gradual and stealthy progress of fixed and certain aim; to which the emigrant has himself, in too many instances, given encouragement. For we have no wish to extenuate the conduct of our fellow-countrymen, who constitute the great bulk of the British emigrants to the United States, in this respect-their too frequent

POSITION OF THE IRISH EMIGRANTS.

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and busy interference in all matters of internal or domestic government, in which the circumstance of their early naturalization has permitted them to take part-the violent partisanship of their general proceedings in all municipal and other contests; and to which we have often and painfully borne witness ; which they attempt to justify, not from its necessity, not from any real advantage or positive good it may secure to them in their new position, but from the terms of their assumed compact-the recent allegiance to which they had sworn-the newly discovered sacrifices they had made, in their severance from friends and early home, to identify themselves in all its reality with this, the country of their adoption. They carry with them, in too many instances, to the New World, the prejudices and dislikes, engendered by early associations in the Old. The sectarian animosity; the unsettled and peculiar notions, which the absence of all liberal and enlightened instruction, together with the sickly influence of a morbid political excitement, to which they are ever subject in their own country, cannot fail to produce. While acting under their varied influences, they become obnoxious to the native citizen; who cannot forget, that the emigrant is the product of another soil; has been reared and schooled in the principles of European monarchies, and that the laws, constitution, and machinery of American government, are unknown to his experience, and very probably to his comprehension; in which he can reasonably feel but very little interest, or anxiety, either as to its

welfare or future preservation. That neither is it in one short-lived day that he can forget his own or father-land-dissever every natural tie of kindred and former home-obliterate the recollection of every early association, and become identified in spirit and feeling with this, his newly-adopted country. Nevertheless, he is generally found amongst the most busy, and, we regret to add, the most uproarious in his interference at every election; classing himself as of the ultra-democracy of the country, and frequently carrying his notions of liberty, in the exercise of his newly acquired right, to the verge of licentiousness.

These excesses were also much increased by the religious feeling and embittered acrimony evolved in them; for the distinctiveness of the Irish emigrant population; their unity and combination has unwisely formed them into a diverse and separate community, apparently of separate interests and feelings from the native citizen, of which one or other of the great political parties that divide the country are always ready to take advantage; and by the means to which they invariably resort, to incite, and indirectly encourage a state of things, that they are generally themselves the first and loudest to condemn; and for which it would be unreasonable, indeed unjust, to charge the emigrant as the sole, and undivided cause. Whenever the balanced state of parties, in any intersection of the republic, may have heretofore rendered the ascendancy of either in the least doubtful, the co-operation

DISLIKED BY THE NATIVE AMERICANS. 61

of the Irish Catholic has always been eagerly sought for; their religious and national prejudices for the while encouraged; their very faults lauded as the explication of every known virtue, by the party who may hope to profit by their support, that seldom fails to draw forth, as a countervailing medium, the virulent and intemperate denunciations of their opponents, by whom every fault is bared, and in intelligible form laid before the world. Their national peculiarities, their most trifling digressions, under an exaggerated interpretation, are amplified into crimes of the most repulsive and dangerous kind, destructive of all social order and peace, and totally subversive of that rational liberty which they are permitted to enjoy in common with every citizen. Their religious creed is assailed with the ascerbity and bitterness of individual and sectarian dislike, and represented in its principle, and general influence as antagonistic of the political freedom; the republicanism of which every American is alike jealous, and ready to defend with his life. Prejudices and animosities are thus engendered, and crowd around the emigrant on every side; even those, who, for sordid or party purposes, make use of him for the while as a political weapon in their hands, become tainted with the national dislike; and only wait the opportunity, as in the late instance in Philadelphia, to make common cause with every native citizen, under the common banner of American nationality, to curtail him in his privileges,

or to uproot him from the soil, the expatriated home of his recent adoption.

A strong prejudice is also very unfortunately created against the emigrant, from a supposition in the minds of the industrial, or working classes of American citizens, who erroneously attribute the occasional dearness of provisions, and of all other necessaries of life, in the Eastern or Atlantic States, to the great annual influx of a foreign population. This fallacy is nevertheless very general, contrary to the evidence of their other senses and the numerous and manifest truths within their experience; proclaiming to them the fact, that to the emigrant's exertions, their labour and industry, is the nation in great part indebted for its extended national improvements, its public works that bear daily and irrefragable evidence of their usefulness, with very many other advantages derivable from their sojourn in the country.

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