[Footnote 23:  Oberholtzer, History of the United States since the Civil War, vol. 1, p. 526 ff.]

[Footnote 24:  Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825-1868), one of the leaders of the “Young Ireland” party, fled for political reasons to the United States in 1848, where he established the New York Nation and the American Celt.  When he changed his former attitude of opposition to British rule in Ireland he was attacked by the extreme Irish patriots in the United States and in consequence moved to Canada, where he founded the New Era and began to practice law.  Subsequently, with the support of the Irish Canadians, he represented Montreal in the Parliament of United Canada (1858) and was President of the Council (1862) in the John Sandfield Macdonald Administration.  When the Irish were left unrepresented in the reorganized Cabinet in the following year, McGee became an adherent of Sir John A. Macdonald, and in 1864 he was made Minister of Agriculture in the Tache-Macdonald Administration.  An ardent supporter of the progressive policies of his adopted country, he was one of the Fathers of Confederation and was a member of the first Dominion Parliament in 1867.  His denunciations, both in Ireland (1865) and in Canada, of the policies and activities of the Fenians led to his assassination at Ottawa on April 7, 1868.]

CHAPTER VI

THE TEUTONIC TIDE

As the Irish wave of immigration receded the Teutonic wave rose and brought the second great influx of foreigners to American shores.  A greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types.  The one was the opposite of the other in temperament, in habits, in personal ambitions.  The German sought the land, was content to be let alone, had no desire to command others or to mix with them, but was determined to be reliable, philosophically took things as they came, met opposition with patience, clung doggedly to a few cherished convictions, and sought passionately to possess a home and a family, to master some minute mechanical or technical detail, and to take his leisure and his amusements in his own customary way.

The reports of the Immigration Commissioner disclose the fact that well over five and a third millions of Germans migrated to America between 1823 and 1910.  If to this enormous number were added those of German blood who came from Austria and the German cantons of Switzerland, from Luxemburg and the German settlements of Russia, it would reach a grand total of well over seven million Germans who have sought an ampler life in America.  The Census of 1910 reports “that there were 8,282,618 white persons in the United States having Germany as their country of origin, comprising 2,501,181 who were born in Germany, 3,911,847 born in the United States both of whose parents were born in Germany, and 1,869,590 born in the United States and having one parent born in the United States and the other in Germany."[25]