MR. COBB: He is not a Southerner, I regret to say. I suppose I could go on for hours, if your patience held out--and my throat--telling of the achievements of Irishmen, and of the imperishable records that Irishmen have left on the history of that part of the Union from which I came, but to call the roll of the great men who have done great things and won achievement and fame south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line since there was such a line, would be almost like running through the parish registers of the counties of Ireland, both north and south. Indeed, in my opinion, it is not altogether topography or geography or climate that has made the South what it is, and given it those distinguishing characteristics which adorn it. The soft speech of the Southerner; his warm heart, and his hot head, his readiness to begin a fight, and to forgive his opponent afterwards; his veneration for women’s chastity and his love for the ideals of his native land--all these are heritages of his Irish ancestry, transmitted to him through two generations. The North has put her heroes on a pension, but the South has put hers on a pedestal. There is not a Southern hamlet of any size to-day that has not reared a bronze or marble or granite monument to its own defenders in the Civil War, and there is scarce a Southern home where at the knees of the mother the children are not taught to revere the memories and remember the deeds of Lee and Jackson and Forrest, the Tennessee Irishman, and Morgan, the Kentucky Irishman, and Washington, and Light Horse Harry Lee, and Francis Marion, the Irish Swamp Fox of the Carolinas. I believe as firmly as I believe anything on earth that for that veneration, for that love of heroism and for that joying in the ideals of its soil, the South is indebted mainly to the Irish blood that courses through the veins of its sons and of its daughters.