With regard to the social position our people occupy in Liverpool, there have been many Irishmen who have come well to the front in the race of life, some of whom have occupied the foremost positions in connection with the public life of the town.  On the other hand; a large number of our fellow-countrymen in Liverpool are by no means in that enviable condition.  Many of them have set out from Ireland, intending to go to America, but, their little means failing them, have been obliged to remain in Liverpool.  Here they considered themselves fortunate if they met someone from the same part of the country as themselves to give them a helping hand, for it is a fine trait in the Irish character—­and “over here in England” the trait has not been lost—­that, however poor, they are always ready to befriend what seems to them a still poorer neighbour.  Those who have lived here some time are glad to see someone from their “own place,” and, amid the squalor of an English city, the imaginative Celt—­as he listens to the gossip about the changes, the marriages, and the deaths that have taken place since he left “home “—­for a brief moment lives once more upon “the old sod,” and sees visions of the little cabin by the wood side where dwelt those he loved, of the mountain chapel where he worshipped, of a bright-eyed Irish girl beloved in the golden days of youth.  These and a host of other associations of the past come floating back upon his memory, as he hears the tidings brought by Terence, or Michael, or Maurya, who has just “come over.”  It often so happens that, from the very goodness of the Irish heart, the newcomers are frequently drawn into the same miserable mode of life as the friends who have come to England before them may have fallen into.

Irish intellect and Irish courage have in thousands of cases brought our people to their proper place in the social scale, but it is only too often the case that adverse circumstances compel the great bulk of them to have recourse to the hardest, the most precarious, and the worst paid employments to be found in the British labour market.

In the large towns, in the poorer streets in which our people live, a stranger would be struck by the swarms of children, and of an evening, at the number of grown-up people sitting on the doorsteps of their wretched habitations.  John Barry once told me that a friend of his asked one of these how they could live in such places?  “Because,” was the reply, “we live so much out of them.”  The answer showed, at any rate, that their lot was borne cheerfully.

Nevertheless, there are Irishmen too—­men who know how to keep what they have earned—­who, by degrees, get into the higher circles of the commercial world, so that I have seen among the merchant princes “on ’Change” in Liverpool men who, themselves, or whose fathers before them, commenced life in the humblest avocations.

Liverpool has, on the whole, been a “stony-hearted stepmother” to its Irish colony, which largely built its granite sea-walls, and for many years humbly did the laborious work on which the huge commerce of the port rested.  But, perhaps, in years to come Liverpool will realise the value of the wealth of human brains and human hearts which it held for so long unregarded or despised in its midst.