The first settlement of English-speaking Catholics beyond the Allegheny Mountains was not located in the north but in the south, and in my own State of Kentucky at that. It endures to-day, after having given to this country one of its greatest and most scholarly churchmen, Bishop Spaulding. (Applause.) The children of the pioneers of Kentucky, almost without exception, learned their first lessons in log cabins under the teachings of that strange but gifted race of men, the wandering Irish schoolmasters, who founded the old field schools of the South and to whom the South is largely indebted for the seeds of its culture. Irishmen from Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland bore the brunt of the western campaigns in 1812 against the British. Irishmen from Kentucky fell thick at the disastrous battles of the Thames, and the Raison, and their Irish bones to-day rest in that ground sanctifying it and making of it an American shrine of patriotism. It was the hand of a Kentucky Irishman, Colonel Richard Johnson, afterwards Vice-President of the United States, that slew the great Tecumseh. A good share of the Kentucky and Tennessee riflemen who at New Orleans stood behind Andy Jackson’s cotton bale breastworks, mowing down Packenham’s Peninsular Veterans and making their red coats redder still with the life blood of those invaders, were Irishmen, real Irishmen. They proved their Irish lineage by the fact that they fell out and quarreled with Old Hickory, because he denied them all the credit for winning the fight, and he quarreled back, for he was by way of being an Irishman himself. (Laughter and applause.) It was a Kentucky Irishman, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who performed the first operation for ovariotomy--performed it on a kitchen table with a mad husband standing over him with a drawn revolver, threatening to shoot him if his wife died under the knife. But he went ahead and it was a successful operation, and it has brought relief and life and sanity to millions of women all over the world. It was a Kentucky Irishman and a soldier, Theodore O’Hara, who penned perhaps the most beautiful lyric poem, and certainly the sweetest tribute to the brave in our language, the immortal “Bivouac of the Dead.” It was another Kentucky Irishman, the saintly poet-priest, Father Ryan, whose hand wrote those two fondest poems in memory of the Lost Cause, “The Conquered Banner” and “The Sword of Robert E. Lee.” In the Civil War it was a Kentuckian of Scotch and Irish descent who led the North--Abraham Lincoln--and it was another Kentuckian of mingled Irish and Scotch blood--Jefferson Davis--who was President of the Confederacy. The historian Collins said the five greatest lawyers Kentucky ever produced were Barry, Rowan, Haggin, Breckenridge, and Bledsoe--four Irish names and one Indian name--and yet these five have been called Anglo-Saxons, too.