The McDonalds and the McAdoos are famous in the annals of Irish history. Some of the McAdoos have lived and toiled under the ground; others have existed in the open. From the humblest walk of life to the highest position, next to the chamber of the Executive, one of your officials has risen. It is like naming a member of his own household to his family to present your illustrious ex-President-General, Hon. William McAdoo. (Applause.) HON. WILLIAM MCADOO: Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, I fear that sometimes many of the elements that go to make up the very cosmopolitan population of our country think that we of the American-Irish Historical Society are too insistent upon the part which our people played in the formative period of the Republic. Now we have an affectionate feeling towards our Motherland because she much needs the help of her children. If Ireland were a great and powerful country, like Germany, rich with an army and navy of its own, with its ambassadors and representatives in every land and with its great universities spreading German ideas among the people; if Ireland had all those accessories she would have made her claims felt in the history of the United States without the need of societies like this; but Ireland, “Erin, the isle of sorrows,” is an unfortunate country, subjugated, impoverished, despoiled and misrepresented and when, therefore, the membership of this Society, these gentlemen who have given to it such unselfish labor, discovered the errors and mistakes and the indifference and sometimes the prejudices of historians of the United States in regard to Ireland in America, as so well pointed out by Mr. Dooley, they organized this Society for the purpose of doing justice to those brave Irish men and virtuous women who came here, especially prior to the Revolution, and who did so much to make this a great and free country. Now the trouble with most of us Irish Americans—I am Irish in the first degree, having been born in Ireland while most of you are probably only second-class Irish or even third or fourth—is that when we are serious and in deep earnest we are taken to be play acting, and when we are jocose or humorous and contributing to the “gaiety of nations” we are taken to be most in earnest. It is hard for an Anglo-Saxon to understand an Irish Celt. One of the greatest difficulties between England and Ireland is the fact that the mental attitude of the two races is far apart, the intellectual agility of the one and the slow, if certain, processes of the other are obvious to any one acquainted with both countries. Let me illustrate it by a little story: