E-text prepared by hekula03, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/losttribesofiris00cobb THE LOST TRIBES OF THE IRISH IN THE SOUTH An Address by IRVIN S. COBB At the Annual Dinner of the American Irish Historical Society, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, January 6, 1917. Office of Edward H. Daly, Secretary-General, 52 Wall Street. New York 1917 THE LOST TRIBES OF THE IRISH IN THE SOUTH. The after-dinner address of Mr. Irvin S. Cobb of Kentucky--so well known throughout the length and breadth of the land as an American of Americans and writer of vivid stories of American life, throbbing with pathos, alive with infectious humor, keen observation and dramatic force; as a war correspondent and picturer of the naked horrors of war; as a lecturer and general publicist--will be hailed with interest and pleasure everywhere. The American Irish Historical Society does itself the honor of issuing the address in this form in advance of its appearance in the Quarterly Review of the Society, that it may be more widely known and the facts it sets forth more widely grasped. It treats its subject--the Irish share in the early upbuilding of the Southern States-in a masterly way, in direct line with the Society’s motto, “To make better known the Irish chapter in American history.” Editors are cordially invited to reproduce the address in whole or in part. JOSEPH I. C. CLARKE, President-General, American-Irish Historical Society. NEW YORK, January, 1917. MR. COBB’S ADDRESS. MR. PRESIDENT, AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I am speaking but the plain truth when I tell you that I would rather be here to-night facing an assemblage of men and women of Irish blood and Irish breeding than in any other banquet hall on earth. For I am one who is Irish and didn’t know it; but now that I do know it, I am prouder of that fact than of any other thing on earth except that I am an American citizen. I wonder if it ever occurred to you, what differences are to be found in many a country and in almost any country, between the temperaments and the spirits and the customs of those who live in the north of it and those who live in the south of it? To the north, to Prussia, the German Empire has always looked for its great scientists and its great mathematicians and its propounders and expounders of a certain cool and analytical philosophy; but it was to the south, to Bavaria and to Saxony, that Germany had to turn for its poets and its story-tellers.