It is very fashionable now to be an Anglo-Saxon, even if you had an Irish father and a Russian mother. If by some divine miracle and phenomenal transformation, all men and women with Celtic blood in their veins could wake up in the morning with some startling demonstration of the fact, such as green hair and yellow eyes, there would be frightful consternation in the ranks of Anglo-Saxondom, even in the great city of New York, and in some of the back settlements into which the first immigrants from Ireland wandered, and where even their names have been transformed. If one could run all races other than the “Anglo-Saxon” out of the United States it would not be worth England’s while to form an alliance with what remained, and she would treat them in that kindly, patronizing, contemptuous way that she does the ultra-loyal Canadians. It needs no learned historian to show us the splendid record of the Irish in America, nor how enduringly they have stamped their highest and noblest racial impulses on every page of American history. Some of their critics sneeringly point to the apparent fact that they have been almost altogether too conspicuous on the field of military action, and more or less lacking in the more patient and plodding ways of commerce and business. They assert that they have attained more in the intellectual diversions and pleasing arts of speech and hand, or in the mere drudgery of unintelligent labor, rather than in those achievements in agriculture and manufactures, which is said to be a marked characteristic of the heavenly Anglo-Saxon.