wicked crimes, there are none of our citizens from whom honest reprobation can be more confidently expected than from such as compose your respected and benevolent Society.  Those who worthily celebrate the birthday[22] of St. Patrick will not forget that he drove out of Ireland the reptiles that creep and sting.

“The Hibernian Society can contain no member who will not resent the implication that sympathy with assassins can dwell in a genuine Irish heart, which will ever be opposed to cruelty and cowardice, whatever form either may take.

    “Present to your Society my thanks for the kind remembrance, and
    assure them of the good-will and respect with which I am—­Your
    obedient servant,

    T.F.  BAYARD.”

What was the response of this Society, representing all the best elements of the Irish American population of the United States, to this letter of the Secretary of State, the highest executive officer of the American Government after the President, upon whom under an existing law the succession of the chief magistracy now devolves in the event of the death or disability of the President and the Vice-President?

The letter was not read at the banquet.

But it was given to the press by the officers of the Society, and the most influential Irish American newspaper in the United States did not hesitate to describe it as an “insulting letter,” going to show that its author was “an Englishman in spirit who will not allow any opportunity to go by, however slight, without testifying his sympathy with the British Empire and his antipathy for its foes.”

This was capped by an American political journal which used the following language:  “Lord Granville himself would hardly strike a more violent attitude against the dynamite section of the Irish people.  When Lord Wolseley, whom it is proposed to make Governor-General of the Soudan, is offering a reward for the head of Ollivier Pain, it is hardly in good taste for an American Secretary of State to condemn so bitterly a class of Irishmen which, while it includes bad men no doubt, also includes men who are moved by as worthy motives as Lord Wolseley.”

In the face of this testimony to the “solidarity” of all branches of the Irish revolutionary movement in America, how can Mr. Parnell, or any other Parliamentary Irishman who depends upon Irish American support, be expected by men of sense to condemn in earnest “the dynamite section of the Irish people”?

NOTE C.

THE AMERICAN “SUSPECTS” OF 1881. (Prologue, p. xlvii.)