Other weighty business men, scattered here and there, are John Flannery, the Savannah cotton king; Thomas F. Walsh, of Washington, who is the president of the Irrigation Congress; John D. Crimmins, the contractor who has added 400 buildings to New York; Patrick F. Murphy, president of the Mark Cross Company and well known in New York as an after-dinner speaker; Edward Malley, who began with a pack on his back and has now a department store in New Haven; Ephraim Dempsie, merchant and public man of Spokane; P. B. Magrane, a well-known merchant in the shoe city of Lynn; and William P. Rend, the coal magnate of Chicago. Among the great Irish merchants of former days, the most notable was A. T. Stewart, whose New York store was the largest of its kind, either in America or elsewhere. His capital was $3,000 when he began to sell his Belfast laces, and more than forty millions when he died. In the United States, as well as in Great Britain, many of the most distinguished judges have been of Irish blood. Among the nine justices who sit supreme over all American courts, two are Irish by descent—Judge Edward D. White and Judge Joseph McKenna. As yet, no one has compiled a list of the Irish judges in the various state Supreme Courts; but to take New York as an instance, we find five who are of unusual prominence—Martin J. Keogh, Morgan J. O’Brien, James Fitzgerald, George C. Barrett and Victor J. Dowling. It should also be mentioned that the chief judge in the Philippine Islands—John T. McDonough, formerly of Albany—is Irish born. William J. Hynes, too, a lawyer of whom Chicago is justly proud, began life in County Clare. To answer fully the question “What have the Irish done for American education?” would need a small book in itself. Was not the late Pres. William Rainey Harper, the father of Chicago University, of Irish descent? This extraordinary man crowded the work of several centuries into less than fifty years, sacrificed his preferences as a student that he might carry the heaviest financial responsibilities, and died poor after having gathered a dozen millions for his university. Of our Irish born educators, no one outranks William H. Maxwell, who has been for eight years the superintendent of New York’s public schools. Under him are 16,000 teachers and more than half a million children, the most lively and cosmopolitan army of youngsters in the world. Superintendent Maxwell has had to fight for every inch of progress in his development of the New York school system; but like the dogged Ulsterman that he is, he has driven ahead with his far-reaching projects, no matter whether the hue and cry was with him or against him. “Nothing is too good,” he says, “for the taxpayer’s child.” Speaking of public schools, it would be a sin of omission at this point not to mention the thousands of young women of Irish birth or parentage who are doing faithful work as schoolteachers in all parts of the United States.