Part 9

But Mr. Burgess has a theory, and he does not propose to hamper it with facts. He asserts that the government—the political organization—of Spain, Italy, and Portugal are the results of Teutonic genius. This will probably be news to the world; but if the debility, decay, and general rottenness of those kingdoms are the result of Teutonic genius, the sooner they try the genius of the negro and the Chinaman the better for them. He covers whatever political good may exist in Greece, Bulgaria, and Roumania by attributing it to the impecunious German princes now adorning the rickety thrones in those lands. The idea is original, but not impressive. Why not attribute the political condition of Scandinavia to the presence on its throne for ninety years of Bernadotte, the French (Celtic) military adventurer, and his wife, the daughter of the Irish merchant Cleary, and their children? The logic is as good, or as bad, in one case as the other.

But why go on with this tissue of professional rubbish?

Nations are made what they are by climate, environment, peace, war, and economic and industrial conditions. Groups of men learn as does the individual, in the school of experience. Nations have no genius for anything; the botch work we call government to-day at its best is hardly a manifestation of genius. Nations may have temperaments, the product of experience, but only the individual has character.

Professor Burgess is merely a mental invalid, an hysterical Celtophobe. He either forgets the existence of Rome and Greece, or he fails to understand the value of civilization and human experience; he is a kind of literary phonograph, repeating the slanders and absurdities which a school of race egotists have raised to a cult. He is a decidedly unsafe man to educate a coming generation of Americans, for the writer of solemn and dogmatic nonsense is unfit to train the American youth. Certainly no self-respecting man of Irish-Celtic blood should permit his children to attend a university where they are taught that the perpetrators of ages of outrage and wrong are divinely selected beings, chosen “to assume leadership in the establishment and administration of States.”

If we desire that sort of rubbish taught, it is just as easy to secure professors at Bloomingdale as it is at Columbia.

The legendary and sentimental makers of history seem to thrive best in New England; and a fine type of the cult is the so-called “scholar in politics,” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts and Nahant. There is in China a religion whose principal tenet is the worship of ancestors, the placation of ancestral manes. This religion is called Tavism; and possibly the purest type of Tavist, outside of China, is the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. Lodge is firmly convinced that the Puritan represents the perfect type of man; that the history of the world began in 1620; that the Puritan derived most of his excellence from being of English blood; and that, while Puritans were Dutch, French, Scotch, and even Irish, the lack of English blood somehow made them incomplete. While the ordinary English Puritan was a wonderful personage, the one who landed in Massachusetts was a genuine marvel, but when he settled around Boston and Nahant, he began to ooze genius and take on wings and halo. To this legend is added, sometimes by direct statement and sometimes by implication, the intelligence that all the great and good things that make this republic different from and superior to other lands are due to the miraculous powers of the Puritan. He is the creator of human freedom, the father of religion, liberty, and tolerance, the founder and originator of free schools, and the reputed author of so many ideas totally at variance with his narrow creed that were he to rise from his bed of clay in New England into the sunlight of to-day, he wouldn’t know himself.

This is the school of historical incubation of which Mr. Lodge is the high priest. Mr. Lodge has many admirable qualities; but his mental vision is defective, strabismal, and his ancestral credulity amazing. I am satisfied that Mr. Lodge would not _knowingly_ do an unjust, intolerable, or dishonorable thing; but he is so en-webbed in tradition and so steeped in myth and legend that his rôle of historian is a decided misfit. How else can we account for the absurd theories he has exploited and the conception of historic events he has fathered in literature?

Anybody who has even read his history of the _Thirteen Colonies_ will learn that the success achieved in building them up was due to the Puritans; and one is convinced that had some wandering vagabond from Massachusetts been cast away on the coast of Spanish-America, the Latin Republics south of us would now be the model governments of the earth and probably be called “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Everything that makes for success he attributes to the Puritan; and he does it with such a solemn, awe-stricken lack of humor that the irreverent are moved to Homeric mirth.

Now, as a matter of fact, the Puritan was a hard and fast bigot, who hated and persecuted everybody who differed from him religiously, and tolerated nobody; he was as priest-ridden as a Scotch Presbyterian, and he set up a system of Church and State that amounted almost to a theocracy. The climate and soil of New England made him a hard worker; his environment and neighbors, a stout fighter; but if his laws and records tell us any story, they say his morals and practices were no better than they ought to have been.

New England in colonial days produced some shrewd and levelheaded men, but if she ever produced a great one, I have failed to catch his name. When the hour of her struggle came the same phenomenon was exhibited in New England as elsewhere in the Colonies; her natural leaders, the people of education and wealth, followed the fortunes of the oppressor, and the common people took up the cause of freedom. New England in the Revolution did her whole duty, but the other Colonies did not shirk, and furnished not only men and money, but the theater of war.

Mr. Lodge is now furnishing “The Story of the Revolution” for _Scribner’s Magazine_, and already we can see his peculiar defects of historical vision in what he has written. Here is a hint of his ideas: “He [Washington] entered on the war with an army composed wholly of New England men. He ended the Revolution with an army, after seven years’ fighting, largely made up from the same New England people.” He does not say so in so many words, but he leads us to infer that the army between those two periods was made up of New England men. This sort of writing is as absurd as it would be to say New England did nothing. Has Mr. Lodge never heard of the 40,000 men on the Revolutionary rolls of New York? Has it ever occurred to him that Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other Colonies furnished some men, money, and leaders? Have his historical researches ever led him far enough to learn that Yorktown might have been a waste of blood but for the armies and navies of France? Does he know that the soldiers of America’s ally were the regiments of a brigade immortalized on every battlefield of Europe,—the Irish Brigade?

It is very doubtful. I sometimes wonder if Mr. Lodge knew what an Irishman was before he went into politics.

In his account of Bunker Hill he hasn’t a word to say of Sullivan, whose capture of Fort William and Mary with its supplies of precious gunpowder made Bunker Hill possible; yet he has much to say of the lack of powder during the siege of Boston.

He says the American soldiers engaged at Bunker Hill were “of almost pure English blood, with a slight mingling of Scotch-Irish from Londonderry.” I note among the dead killed there the following “Scotch-Irish” names: Broderick, Collins, Dalton, Dillon, Doyle, French, Haggett, McGrath; and Washington, desirous of recognizing this “Scotch” element in his army made St. Patrick the countersign on a certain evening during the siege. I recall that it was this same class of Irishmen with the Scotch prefix, from the New Hampshire town of Londonderry, called after an Irish town of that name, and which was originally planted by English and Irish, who insisted upon double rations of whiskey to celebrate St. Patrick’s day before Ticonderoga.

Mr. Lodge should learn to call a spade a spade, an Irishman an Irishman, for we will. The desire of a certain class of people to call themselves “Scotch-Irish” may be passed by with a smile; ignorance and weakness deserve pity rather than censure; but we must insist that the dead of our race shall be neither miscalled nor misrepresented, and that their laurels shall not be filched nor their glory stolen by those who have neither pride nor scruples.

Whatever Irish came from New Hampshire—and the hills were full of them—it would be a grave mistake to imagine that Massachusetts, so English and so Puritan, did not have her share. The Puritan Alva—Cromwell—and his villainous understrappers sent many a thousand Irish victims to Massachusetts Bay as bondmen and women; and voluntary immigration brought thousands of others. The town records show this; and whole districts in western Massachusetts were settled by them; and yet we are asked to believe that when men cease to be Catholic Irishmen they become Scotch-Irishmen. I can find no other excuse for the absurd title. Here are a few of the “Scotch-Irish” names on the rolls of the minute men of the day:

Joseph Burke, Richard Burke, Daniel Carey, Joseph Carey, Peter Carey, Patrick Carroll, Joseph Carroll, Cornelius Cockran, Daniel Connors, William Connors, James Dempsey, Philip Donahue, Joseph Donnell, John Donnelly, Andrew Dunnigan, John Farley, Michael Farley, John Flood, William Flood, John Foley, Matthew Gilligen, Richard Gilpatrick, James Gleason, Daniel Griffin, Joseph Griffin, John Hacket, Joseph Hacket, John Haley, John Kelly, Patrick Kelly, Peter Kelly, Richard Kelly, Stephen Kelly, Daniel Lary, Michael McDonnell, Henry McGonegal, John McGrah, Daniel McGuire, Patrick McKeen, John McMullen, John Mullin, John Madden, Daniel Mahon, James Mallone, John Mahoney, John Murphy, Patrick Newjent, Patrick O’Brien, Richard O’Brien, Daniel Shay, John Shea, John Walsh, Joseph Walsh.

It is well to note that the English parliament of that day was looking keenly at the causes that cost England her mighty empire on this continent; and apparently they underrated the influence of Mr. Lodge’s Puritan in that struggle, and bitterly blamed the plain Irish without any Scotchery.

Mr. Lodge means well; but folklore and history are two distinct affairs.

The imaginative school of history finds its best exemplar in a gentleman from Tennessee, the home of the Cardiff giant, the Giascutus, and the Scotch-Irishman. He is known as Judge Temple, and has written a volume called _Covenanter, Cavalier, Puritan_,—a work which has shaken the earth and spoiled the apple crop. The Judge is original; he honors the Scotch-Irishman as he does all ghost dancers, but he has discovered that all the might of the republic sprang from the Covenanter. I know what a Covenanter used to be, but I can’t solve this covenanter of Judge Temple. I can explain him as he appears in this literary offspring of this intellectual Cardiff giant. If an Irishman a few years ago did anything extraordinary, wonderful, or notorious, he would have been a Scotch-Irishman; in the Temple history he is a Covenanter; if he breaks a bank, or a man’s head, or the Decalogue, he is merely an Irishman. Apply that rule to all men and you have history as it is hatched out in Tennessee. The Covenanter germ was born in Scotland and spread over America, creating miracles. As the natives of North Britain are not remarkable for national modesty and self-effacement, I am puzzled to learn how this conversion of the world to freedom and civilization has escaped the shrinking writers of Scotland. If Judge Temple is not restrained by an injunction at an early date, Professor Burgess and Senator Lodge will be compelled sorrowfully to march on Washington, there to deposit in the National Museum the Teutonic Genius and the Puritan Marvel; or they might be turned over to some of the Yellow Sundays which specialize the exploitation of freaks.

Meantime we should keep our eye on Judge Temple, the young Lochinvar of history, who has come out of the South.

In _Old Virginia and her Neighbors_, Vol. II, p. 391, Prof. John Fiske says: “Until recent years little has been written of the coming of the so-called Scotch-Irish to America, and yet it is an event of scarcely less importance than the exodus of English Puritans to New England and that of English Cavaliers to Virginia. It is impossible to understand the drift which American history, social and political, has taken since the time of Andrew Jackson, without studying the early life of the Scotch-Irish population of the Alleghany region, the pioneers of the American backwoods. I do not mean to be understood as saying that the whole of that population at the time of the Revolution was Scotch-Irish, for there was a considerable German element in it, besides an infusion of English moving inward from the coast. But the Scotch-Irish element was more numerous and far more important than all the rest.

“Who were the people called by this rather awkward compound name Scotch-Irish? The answer carries us back to the year 1611, when James First began peopling Ulster with Colonists from Scotland and the North of England. The plan was to put into Ireland a Protestant population that might ultimately outnumber the Catholics and become the controlling element in the country. _The settlers were picked men and women of the most excellent sort._ By the middle of the seventeenth century there were 300,000 of them in Ulster.

“That province had been the most neglected part of the island, a wilderness of bogs and fens; they transformed it into a garden. They also established manufactures of woolen and linens which have since been famous throughout the world. By the beginning of the eighteenth century their numbers had risen to nearly a million. Their social condition was not that of peasants; they were intelligent yeomanry and artisans. In a document, signed in 1718 by a miscellaneous group of 319 men, only thirteen made their mark, while 306 wrote their names in full. Nothing like that could have happened at that time in any other part of the British empire, hardly even in New England.

“When these people began coming to America, those families that had been longest in Ireland had dwelt there but for three generations, and confusion of mind seems to lurk in any nomenclature which couples them with the true Irish. The antipathy between the Scotch-Irish as a group and the true Irish as a group is, perhaps, unsurpassed for bitterness and intensity. On the other hand, since love laughs at feuds and schisms, intermarriages between the Colonists of Ulster and the native Irish were by no means unusual, and instances occur of Murphys and McManuses of the Presbyterian faith. It was common in Ulster to allude to Presbyterians as ‘Scotch,’ to Roman Catholics as ‘Irish,’ and to members of the English Church as ‘Protestants,’ without much reference to pedigree. From this point of view the term ‘Scotch’ may be defensible, provided we do not let it conceal the fact that the people to whom it applied are for the most part Lowland-Scotch Presbyterians, very slightly hibernicized in blood.”

Again, “By 1719 this hope was torn away, and from that year until the passage of the Toleration Act for Ireland in 1782, the people of Ulster kept flocking to America. Of all the migrations to America previous to the days of steamships this was far the largest in volume. One week of 1727 landed six ship loads at Philadelphia. In the two years 1773 and 1774 more than 30,000 came. In 1770 one-third of the population of Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish. Altogether between 1730 and 1770, I think it probable that at least half a million of souls were transferred from Ulster to the American Colonies, making not less than one-sixth of our population at the time of the Revolution.”

The merest examination of this will show that the writer is on uncertain ground; he is begging the question; his own training and education convince him that there is a false ring to the term “Scotch-Irish”; the statements he makes, or quotes, show the earmarks of that organized humbug the Scotch-Irish Society; and he is reluctant to face the question squarely, and, by reversing the conventional concealments, evasions, and falsifications which have marked the writing of American history in the interest of the English element, acknowledge the splendid work done by the Irish in America.

Let us examine his statements in detail.

Relative to Ulster settlement he says: “The settlers were picked men and women of the most excellent sort. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were 300,000 of them in Ulster. The province was a wilderness of bogs and fens; they transformed it into a garden. They also established manufactures of woolens and linens; ... they were intelligent yeomanry and artisans.”

These extracts are the amusing myths of the Scotch-Irish Society. We have an emigration from Scotland by, say 1650, of 300,000, with no account of the English, French, Walloon, and German emigrants who were introduced, and nothing said about the original settlers of Ulster, the Irish. In 1659 Sir W. Petty, a government official in Ulster, estimated the population as follows: Irish, 63,350; English, Scotch, and other aliens, 40,571; a total of 103,921. It is very possible that Sir W. Petty’s estimate was correct; that he would find it very difficult to arrive at a correct estimate of the Irish; and much more easy to get at the numbers of those who were naturally the English supporters. It is well to recall that at the date of this estimate Ireland had gone through the horrors of twelve years of Civil War, marked by cruelty of the most ferocious kind; that the Cromwellians had added deportation and slavery in the Americas to their other crimes and abominations; that Cromwell had settled his own soldiers on confiscated lands; and that he was not particularly

## partial to the Scotch, whom he had fought and defeated, and whose

immigration he was not likely to encourage at a time when they were parleying with the exiled Charles and plotting the downfall of the Commonwealth.

Professor Fiske’s 300,000 seem to vanish in smoke.

The character of the population introduced into a country where the natives are treated as outlaws and wild beasts by the government, is not hard to guess. It is not at all likely that it is going to consist of model farmers, expert artisans, pious, educated, peaceful men and women; that kind of people usually remain at home. The adventurer, the ne’er-do-well, the poor, the desperate, the homeless; those are the kind willing to face the hazards of war and fortune in a land where the natives are hard fighters and haters of the government, even though exhausted by war.

The Rev. Andrew Stewart, Presbyterian pastor of Donaghadee from 1645 to 1671, who was born and raised in Ulster, leaves this record of Professor Fiske’s selected yeomanry and artisans:

“From Scotland came many, and from England not a few; yet all of them generally the scum of both nations, who for debt, or breaking, or fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came hither, hoping to be without fear of man’s justice in a land where there was nothing, or but little as yet, of the fear of God.”

Such were the selected yeomanry; selected evidently by the king’s writ, by the beggarly planters who received the stolen lands from a beggarly king, and by the London guides whose gold went into the king’s pocket.

The reverend gentleman gives us a further hint of the people who came thus running from the sheriff and the heavy hand of the law. He says: “In a few years there flocked such a multitude of people from Scotland that the Counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry, etc., were in a good measure planted; yet most of the people made up a body—and it is strange—of different names, nations, dialects, tempers, and breeding, all void of Godliness, who seemed rather to flee God in this enterprise, than to follow their mercy; albeit at first it must be remembered that they cared little for any church.”

People of many nations and dialects coming out of Scotland needs an explanation. Mr. Motley, in his history of the Dutch Republic, throws a great light on this subject. He says in effect that the religious wars of Protestant and Catholic, and the persecutions growing out of them of the ever-increasing sectaries, drove shoals of artisans from Germany, Holland, and France to England. Elizabeth of England had troubles of her own; and while she quarreled with the Pope and disputed his headship, she was jealously insistent of her own leadership of her state church and had no use for the pugnacious sectaries from across the Channel. In time, owing to the English jealousy of foreigners and rival manufacturers and the Queen’s abhorrence of rebels against divinely selected kings, Elizabeth shut down on the refugees and refused them asylum. In those days it was a much graver offense to insult the majesty of earth than heaven. Scotland, then in the throes of religious squabbles and the game of church plundering and under the practical guidance of the amiable John Knox, gave them a welcome as kindred spirits. When other days came, when Mary’s head had rolled from the block at Fotheringay, when her wretched son was enthroned, the foreign element found Scotland a poor land to live in. The settlement of Ulster gave them their chance, and they flocked there with Scotchmen and Englishmen, to settle down and intermarry and become—as all before them had become at that Irish crucible—Irish.

The forms of religious dissent driven out of Europe to Great Britain, like Presbyterianism, had a common basis of agreement in their common Calvinism, and the foreigners naturally drifted into that form of ecclesiastical organization. Few went into the Anglican State Church, and many of that faith drifted away from it to Catholicity and Presbyterianism; and it was a special subject of reproach later that the state-beneficed clergy caused such a state of affairs by their indifference and greed.

But it remains for American historians to find the terms race and religion synonymous, and to advise an astonished world that when an Irishman, Frenchman, Englishman, Dutchman, or Walloon, adopts Presbyterianism as his religious faith, he is at once transformed into that hyphenated hybrid, a Scotch-Irishman.

This is one of the marvels of this inventive age.

Before Professor Fiske—for whose talent and industry I have a very great respect—gives us his promised views on the Scotch-Irishman in his forthcoming work, _The Dutch and Quaker Settlements in America_, let me propound a question or two to him.

If, as is pretended, a certain number of Lowland Scotchmen of the Presbyterian religion accomplished so much in Ulster and America, why have not the great majority of the same people accomplished as much in their own land and elsewhere, when all the conditions were in their favor? And again, if so much was accomplished by an Irish environment and an Irish racial admixture, and so little achieved by the pure Scot under more favorable circumstances, is it not a reasonable deduction that the Irish element was the responsible factor in the achievement? If not, why not?

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