“I find on an examination of the Report of the Devon Commission to Parliament in 1845, that in the decade from 1831 to 1841, 430,963 emigrants left Ireland. I further find from an examination of Irish Immigration Statistics, that in the following decade from 1841 to 1851, 1,508,454 left the Island, and from 1851 to 1907, 4,130,015 persons emigrated from that unfortunate country, making a total leaving the Island in seventy odd years of 6,069,432. The present population of that country is about four and a half millions—a little less. What a terrible indictment of England and her seven centuries of oppression! No language that I am capable of using could more eloquently depict her continued infamies than that contained in these statistics. “Of course, all of these people did not come to this country. Some went to other countries, especially to the Antipodes, but the great bulk of them came to the Great Republic, where many thousands of their kith and kin had preceded them. [Illustration: HON. HUGH McCAFFREY. Philadelphia, President McCaffrey File Co. Vice-President of the Society for Pennsylvania. ] “It would be interesting as well as instructive to follow up and trace the careers and fortunes of those Irish exiles and their descendants who thronged the shores and trod the soil of the Republic. It has never been done so far as I know. McGee, in the fifties, and Maguire, in the sixties, each wrote a small volume on the subject, and they are of some value to the student of history. Of this great swarm, how many crossed the Alleghanies and steered their course for the West? It is difficult to say. We have not even approximately correct data on the subject. “I think, however, I am safe in saying that half of those who came to this country within the last named period did so. In the Middle West, in the great states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa,—indeed, in all the great western states—there is not a county, city or village where they or their descendants are not to be found in goodly numbers. Thank Heaven! race suicide has not as yet overtaken them. “Maguire, in his work written in the sixties, advised his countrymen to settle in the West, especially in the state of California. His advice, no doubt, carried great weight and influenced many of them in seeking Western homes. “I remember, as a boy in Ireland, reading his lectures on the subject, and subsequently, after graduating at the University of Virginia, I determined to go to California, but straightened conditions intervening, I was compelled to remain in Illinois. Hence, I am fairly familiar with the people of that great State, and I think the history of the Irish there would be fairly typical of them in other Western States.