It may be doubted that I remember things that happened to me when I was at my mother’s breast, or when I was three years old; but I have no doubt on that matter. Prominent in my forehead is a scar. I got that scar this way: The girl whose chief duty was to mind me had me on her back one day. I was slipping off; she bounced herself, to raise me up on her shoulders, and she threw me clear over her head, on the street. My forehead came on a stone, and from the cut I got remains the scar. I could to-day point out the spot where I got that toss--between Billy O’Hea’s house and Beamish’s gate. I got it before I went to my grandfather’s. I did not come back to town till I was seven years old--the time I began my schooling. Those four years I spent in a farmhouse photographed my memory with all the pictures of Irish life, and fashioned my tongue to carry the Irish language without any strain. Some say I have a “brogue.” I have. I am proud I have, and I will never endeavor to have any other kind of tongue. I gave a lecture in Detroit one night; coming out the main doorway, there was a crowd, and behind me coming down the steps I heard one lady say to another: “What a terrible brogue he has!” Every allowance is made by English-speaking society for the man of every other nationality on earth speaking broken English, except for the Irishman. The Dutchman, the German, the Frenchman, the Russian, the Italian, can speak broken English, and it won’t be said he speaks it with a brogue, and is, consequently, illiterate; but the Irishman who speaks it--a language as foreign to his nationality as it is to the nationality of any of the others--is met immediately with ridicule and contempt. But--’tis part of the price or penalty of slavery, and until Irishmen have manhood to remove that slavery, the name of their language or their land will not have a respected place among the nations. We may bravely fight all the battles of all the peoples of the earth, but while Ireland’s battle for Ireland’s freedom remains unsuccessfully fought--while England continues to rule Ireland--all the historical bravery of our race in every land, and in every age will not save us from the slur of the unfriendly chronicler who writes that we fight well as “mercenaries,” that we fight bravely the battles of every land on earth, except the battle of our own land.