This man’s good judgment, however, would not suffer him to approve of German militarism, and as events moved forward he gave his support more and more to the cause of the Allies.

“But I want you to know,” he told me, striking the table with his hand and watching me carefully, “that I was dead against John Redmond for saying that Ireland must go to the aid of England.  Ireland’s call was to go to the aid of civilization.  If Germany had stood for civilization, I should have been on Germany’s side and dead against England.

“I tell you, at the beginning of this business I longed to see England defeated, humiliated, broken to the dust.  But civilization is of such enormous consequence that I put my natural hatred of England on one side.  The violation of Belgium made me an anti-German.  And with the vast majority of Irishmen in America it was the same thing.  The menace of German militarism forced us into your camp.

“I am perfectly certain that but for the violation of Belgium there would have been in this country among Irish-Americans an open movement publicly proclaimed in favor of Germany.  That is my fixed opinion.  And I happen to know what I am talking about.”

No Hatred of England.

I gathered in the course of his conversation that Irish friendliness toward England is a final manifestation of a change in the feeling of all America toward England.  It was not very long ago that President Cleveland wanted war with England.  Hatred of England was at one time as fiercely handed down from generation to generation by Americans as by Irish-Americans.  We have to thank our English stars that America has outgrown this historic hate and that Irish-Americans now show the new and happier feeling of their compatriots.

I asked this Irishman, no one better able throughout America to express a just opinion on the subject, what difference had been made in the feeling toward England by the passing of the Home Rule bill.

“It was the passing of that bill,” he replied, “which finished the work begun by German militarism.  Home rule has softened our feelings toward England, particularly among the thousands of Irish-Americans who are born over here and whose fathers have become too Americanized to remember the sufferings of their ancestors.

“There is still some hatred of England, but not very much.  It is a sentimental, a poetic hatred, not a political hatred.  One finds it among a few individuals.  What agitation is now going on is secret and underground, a sure proof that it is unrepresentative.  We ignore it.  It means nothing.  No; the passing of the Home Rule bill has given balance to the Irish mind.

“It has helped Irish-Americans to realize that the dreadful sins of England are sins of a dead and gone England, and it has helped them to see that the present England, so far as its democracy is concerned, sincerely desires to make reparation for the past.  In fact, the war and the Home Rule bill together have produced such a transformation in the Irish-American nature as I, for one, never expected and never hoped to see.”