Were it not for the fear of making this essay too long, I might show how fifteen to twenty names of Illinois counties have Irish associations; what prominent parts Irishmen and the sons of Irishmen of Illinois took in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, the Mexican War, and the War of the Rebellion; how they filled gubernatorial chairs, prominent positions in state and nation, as the representatives of the people; how they have been foremost in the professions of law, medicine, and divinity. On the muster roll of famous men they have three Logans, the two Reynolds, Carlin, Kinney, Ford, Kane, Shields, Ewing, McLaughlin, Mulligan, Medill, Ryan, and many others too numerous to mention. Not as public and professional men alone has the Irish contingent been valuable to the state of Illinois, but also as tillers of the soil, as miners and manufacturers; for in the infantile condition of our commonwealth the men of hardest muscle and most exacting toil were our Irish immigrants. They did the excavating on our canals, and the grading on our first railroads, and wherever hard work was to be performed, there you were sure to find Paddy with his spade and pipe. May I not claim that that herculean form representing “the Digger,” in the statue of Mulligan, standing at the entrance of the Drainage Canal, near Chicago, answers for the Irish canaler of former as well as of later days? Nearly fifty years ago Thomas D’Arcy McGee, an Irish-American poet, and at the time of his death a leading statesman of Canada, of wide fame and renowned memory, wrote of the Irish prairie farmer in Illinois as follows: “’Tis ten long years since Eileen bawn Adventured with her Irish boy Across the seas and settled on A prairie farm in Illinois. “Sweet waves the sea of summer flowers Around our wayside cot so coy, Where Eileen sings away the hours That light my task in Illinois. CHORUS— “The Irish homes of Illinois, The happy homes of Illinois, No landlord there Can cause despair, Nor blight our fields in Illinois!” THE IRISH VANGUARD OF RHODE ISLAND. BY THOMAS HAMILTON MURRAY, BOSTON, MASS. Irish settlers are found in Rhode Island at a very early period. They were contemporaneous with Roger Williams, John Clark, William Coddington, and other leading men and proved sturdy, energetic members of the community.