This is gross libel on the Irishmen of America. We have here to-night at our board, such a thoroughly representative business Irishman who in vast enterprise, splendid achievement, industry, and dogged perseverance, crowned with the highest success, can give the best Anglo-Saxon in the states or England, in any venture from building railroads to managing them, the sharpest competition of his life; and yet Mr. John D. Crimmins of New York is but one of a splendid army of men of Irish birth or descent who are in the very forefront of the great industrial armies as captains and generals of those tremendous forces which nowhere play so important a part as in the United States, and which nowhere have competition among them more keen, nay, more deadly, nor requiring higher talents and greater courage. Why, in this very metropolis you cannot point to any great field of action—leaving out the learned professions in which the Irish race is most markedly conspicuous—in banking, manufactures, commerce, shipbuilding, and all kinds of industrial and railroad enterprises, in which Irish names do not appear in the directorates, fill the managers’ offices, plan and execute the great battles of modern finance. I say we need not speak of the learned professions, because there the keen wit, the bright, sharp intellectuality, wonderful racial adaptability, breadth and grasp of mind, and love of learning, have given them most commanding influence; the same is true of congress, in legislatures, municipal bodies, and in every court-house of the United States. The same is true of the professions of medicine and teaching, and on the press, where they used to say that Mr. Bennett’s pay-roll on the _Herald_ read like the roster of the Fenian army. At any rate, there is no newspaper office in New York where they have not conspicuous places. Politically, I claim for them that impulsively, by reason of their history and experiences, they are the very best of Americans. They oppose entangling alliances because they know better than any one else, by reason of a long, bloody, and painful history, how false are international promises, how hypocritical and treacherous even the great and seraphic Anglo-Saxon can be when he once gets the upper hand. Henry II made with them the first Anglo-Saxon alliance, and Cromwell completed it over the graves of murdered millions; over the ruins of castle, cabin, and church, until its climax was reached when the greatest orator of Ireland said that the instruments of government had been simplified to “the tax gatherer and the hangman.”