has never swerved, although it has become more sober, as the material condition of Ireland has improved, and the interests of Irish-Americans themselves have become more closely identified with those of their adopted country.  Fenianism is altogether extinct.  The extreme claim for the total separation of Ireland from Great Britain is now no more than a sentimental survival among a handful of the older men, of the fierce hatreds provoked by the miseries and horrors of an era which has passed away.[41] Even Mr. Patrick Ford and the Irish World have moderated their tone, and where that tone is still inflammatory it is not representative of Irish-American opinion.  I have studied with a good deal of care the columns of that journal for some months back, smiling over the imaginary terrors of the nervous people on this side of the Atlantic who are taught by their party Press to believe that Mr. Patrick Ford is going to dynamite them in their beds.  Any liberal-minded student of history and human nature would pronounce the whole propaganda perfectly harmless.  But the sane instinct that Ireland should have a local autonomy of her own, an instinct common to the whole brotherhood of nations which have sprung from these shores, lasts undiminished and takes shape, quite rightly and naturally, as it takes shape in the Colonies, in financial support of the Nationalist party in Ireland.  Anti-British sentiment in the United States, once a grave international danger, is that no longer; but it does still represent an obstacle to the complete realization of an ideal which all patriotic men should aim at:  the formation of indestructible bonds of friendship between Great Britain and the United States.  Nor must it be forgotten that the calm and reasonable character of Irish-American opinion is due in a large degree to confidence in the ultimate success of the constitutional movement here for Home Rule.  Every successive defeat of that policy tends to embitter feeling in America.

Oh, for an hour of intelligent politics!  The old choice is before us—­to make the best or the worst of the state of opinion in America; to disinter from ancient files of the Irish World sentences calculated to inflame an ignorant British audience; or to say in sensible and manly terms:  “The situation is more favourable than it has been for a century past for the settlement of just Irish claims.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[39] At Woodford, May 27, 1911.

[40] This is a very general statement.  No figures exist for an accurate computation.  The Census of 1910 gives the total population of the United States, white and coloured, as 91,272,266, of whom nearly 9,000,000 are negroes.  The figures about countries of origin are not yet available.  The statistical abstract of the United States (1908) gives the total number of immigrants from Ireland from 1821 to 1908 as 4,168,747 (the large majority of whom must have been of marriageable