‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ Sir George asked, ’how beautiful a contribution the Irish girl, driven to another land by starvation, has made to the development of the English-speaking race?  What a stretch of Anglo-Saxondom has been peopled by her wages, hardly earned in service, and sent home to Ireland for the emigration of her father and mother, her sisters and brothers!  She is a winning illustration of how the hard task-master necessity, has been our architect for building up new nations.  Ireland has been tortured and beaten, and her daughters and sons, in that torture, those blows, have done wondrous work for us.

Coupled with divorce between the people and the land, there arose in the British Isles, religious persecutions and tyrannies.  These were the twin forces which, with just exception enough to prove the rule, planted the Anglo-Saxon in every corner of the earth.  Two great evils working out in good; a sowing in wrong and wickedness, the garnering righteousness.

Cradling like that made men and nations.  When Spain founded colonies, she sent delegates designedly to do so.  When France colonised Canada, that was her model; and the like with other nations.  They planted all the Old World institutions, with their imperfections, on new soil, which, as time had shown, was like building on sand.

Taught by bitter experience at home, Anglo-Saxons struck out fresh lines, in the fresh lands where, thanks to the discoveries of adventurous rovers, they could find asylum.  The humanities in them got scope; they carried tolerance and liberty ever with them.  Take the Puritans who founded New England!  Was there ever such a noble band?  Again, take the Quakers or the English and Irish Roman Catholics!  In some cases, when there was persecution on the Continent of Europe, these British emigrants attracted to them what was persecuted.  South Africa was founded in oppression, independently of us as it happened, since the forefathers of the Boers were largely French Huguenots.

It was not enough, that the Anglo-Saxon should rush from starvation and persecution, to a freer home across the seas.  No sooner had he found it, than the old oppression might again be clanking its chains at his heels.  The stern Mother more than once stretched out her hand to coerce her freer children, forcing them ever to take new ground, and be, so to speak, clear of her clutches.  The instance of America occurred during this second stage in the weft and woof of tribulation which was at the root of our growth.  The same with the Boers of South Africa, who, by harsh regulations, were forced inland, thus opening up new territory.  It had all worked with the precision and force of a Nasmyth hammer.

Naturally, a time would arrive when the liberty and freedom of the Saxon, gone over sea, should react upon the Old World.  Sir George held it proven that the inspiration of the New World had, in real measure, been the emancipation of the Old.  Very many of the inventions of the nineteenth century, which were the threads of modern progress, were to have their origin in the New World.  She would heap coals of fire on the head of the Old.