The plain, straight truth about the Western Irish is more wonderful than any fanciful tale woven in the loom of Arabian imagination. Talk about _Monte Cristo_ or _Sinbad the Sailor_! They are paltry adventurers compared with men like John W. Mackay or Marcus Daly. With his three partners, also Irish—James C. Flood, James G. Fair and William S. O’Brien—John W. Mackay changed the silver markets of the world. Within a comparatively few years these four men took a treasure of $150,000,000 from one hole in the side of a Nevada mountain—the famous Comstock lode. Always ready for big enterprises, Mackay put his millions behind James Gordon Bennett’s dream to link America and Europe together by an Atlantic cable, and drove the scheme ahead to complete success. What Marcus Daly did in Montana was different only in detail. He, too, “grasped the skirts of happy chance” with a grip that landed him and his friends among the most powerful money kings of his generation. All five of these Irishmen began at the lowest rung of the ladder. They made themselves the leaders in a country of strong and daring men, by being the strongest and most daring of all. And today their children have linked their fathers’ names by marriage with some of the proudest families in the older states—the Oelrichses, Vanderbilts, Duers and Girards, as well as to the princely Colonnas of Italy. Whether it is the versatile genius of the Emmets of New York; or the fighting pluck of “Bucky” O’Neil, who was killed with the Rough Riders at Santiago; or the sagacity of John Mitchell, who is the leader of 150,000 miners—whether it is the sheer brain force and inventiveness of a Fulton, a Morse or a McCormick, or the quaint and witty wisdom of “Mr. Dooley,” there have always been qualities of the Irish head and the Irish heart that brought honor to the little home-land of the Celt. “There is nothing negative about the Irish,” said Patrick Ford—which is exactly what anyone who knows the rugged old journalist would have expected him to say. They may be on the wrong side of the quarrel, but one thing is always certain—they are never on the fence. They care little or nothing for obstacles and adverse circumstances. They are the best of friends and the best of enemies—the quickest with either the open hand or the fist—the most loyal to a cause and the most rebellious against a tyranny. They live closest to hope and farthest from despair. “Why,” said Maurice Healy, an Alaskan fur trader, “I’m only 700 miles from a bank!” You can bend and twist an Irishman, but you can seldom break him—the records of insanity and suicide prove this. He “works hard in time of peace and fights hard in time of war,” as President Roosevelt has said. Impulsive, daring, constructive, indomitable, the Irishman has done indispensable work in this land of his choice. “May his shadow never grow less!”—so say we all. REVIEW OF THE YEAR.