Year by year the towns grow more and more intensely Irish. Already of every four births in Boston, one only is American. There are 120,000 foreign to 70,000 native voters in New York and Brooklyn. Montreal and Richmond are fast becoming Celtic; Philadelphia--shades of Penn!--can only be saved by the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is departing with the Saxons: the revenues of the Empire State are spent upon Catholic asylums; plots of city land are sold at nominal rates for the sites of Catholic cathedrals, by the “city _step_-fathers,” as they are called. Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain ground more rapidly than in New York City: there are 80,000 professing Catholics in Boston. When is this drama, of which the first scene is played in Castle Garden, to have its close? The matter is grave enough already. Ten years ago, the third and fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia, were as English as our London: the one is Irish now; the other all but German. Not that the Quaker City will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too, are going out upon the land; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues English: a fierce and easily-roused people will throng the cities, while the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our relations with America are matters of small moment by the side of the one great question: Who are the Americans to be? Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers that hang over them. The “Know-Nothing” movement failed, but Protection speaks the same voice in its opposition to commercial centers. If you ask a Western man why he, whose interest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection, he fires out: “Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but it‘s death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won‘t touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water despotism, and the ascendency of New York and Boston. Which is better for the country--one New York, or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells?” The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the republic. In January, 1862, the mayor, Fernando Wood, the elect of the “Mozart” Democracy, deliberately proposed the secession from the Union of New York City. Of all the Northern States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people during the war of the rebellion. The constituents of Wood were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call “American.” It is America that Fenianism invades from Ireland--not England from America.