“And now I think I hear you ask—what of them? What have they done, and what are they doing, in what many of you Eastern gentlemen are pleased to call the ‘wild and woolly West.’ To be frank, taking into consideration their old home conditions, and the circumstances attending their coming, they are doing and have done fairly well. They were mostly of the tenant farming class and day laborers. Manufacturing in Ireland long prior to this time ceased to be a factor, having been either abolished, or prevented by successive English Parliaments. They were of necessity very poor, they and their forebears for centuries having been plundered by heartless tyrants. No people prefer indigence and want to prosperity. It was artificially enforced poverty that compelled them to emigrate. “On arriving in the West, therefore, they were for the most part forced to occupy the hard lot of the unskilled laborer, and I may say without fear of contradiction, what they undertook to do they did well. They dug our great canals, built our great lines of railroads, erected our telegraph lines from Chicago to San Francisco and helped to operate them. They engaged in farming and stock raising and have been successful in both. There is not a public utility in the West whose physical structure at least does not owe its existence in the main to Irish hands; and let it not be forgotten, too, that gradually, as these men were able to put by a little of their hard earnings, they tried to elevate themselves and their children in the various walks of life. They did not rest content with their lot. They knew their natural capabilities and tried to and did improve them. Many of them, too, were men of initiative. Of course, the rich and the learned, as a rule, were not among them. People of that kind do not have to leave their country to seek homes in other climes. Labor, however, manual or otherwise, is no disgrace; rather is it a badge of respectability. “‘Honor and shame from no condition rise, Act well your part, there all the honor lies.’ “Of course many of them,—alas, too many,—fell by the way.