It would have been a strange doctrine to the Irish emigrants themselves to tell them that they were Scotch. From 1720 they swarmed over to people Pennsylvania, as if, men said at the time, Ireland was sending out all its inhabitants--in one year alone (1729) no less than 5,655 Irish, to 267 English and Welsh, and 43 Scotch. There was a Scotch Society of St. Andrew’s in Philadelphia (1749); but the emigrants from Ireland, Catholic and Presbyterian alike, looked on themselves as plain Irishmen, not Scotch; they gave to their settlements Irish names; the wealthier men among them established in 1765 an “Irish Club”; out of this they formed in 1771 the leading Irish organisation before and during the Revolution--the famous Society of the “Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.” There were at first but three Catholics in the Society, but the Irish Presbyterians and Episcopalians of that day chose for their patron the Saint of Ireland, not of Scotland, and for their President a Catholic, Moylan, certainly not a Scotchman; they met on St. Patrick’s Day; their medal bore figures of _Hibernia_ with a harp, and _St. Patrick_ carrying a cross and trampling on a snake. The heroic services of that devoted Society of Irishmen cannot be told here. After the war it founded and became merged in the _Hibernian_ Society of “the natives of Ireland or descendants of Irishmen” (so little did they fear the name), for the relief of emigrants from Ireland. These Irishmen had not yet learned to despise their race and country, and to invent for themselves a new nation without any root in history. In English history, where certain general lines of knowledge have been laid down as the common property of educated men, serious lapses are held a reproach: in Irish history an ambassador from the United States to Great Britain and Ireland can allow himself to tell us that an “Ulster Scot” is no more an Irishman than a man would be a horse if born in a stable. The imaginations of a mock “Imperial history,” by which all treasure found is thrown “impartially” into the common stock of the United Kingdom, in other words of Great Britain, leaving Ireland bare, belong not to science but to politics. By such a perverted history the honourable pride of a people may be transformed into humiliation and self-distrust. They are made to stand before Europe with the appearance of defeat, ruin, and rebuke; a race without the dignity of ever having had a true civilization, incapable of development in the land they wasted. What vigour or self-respect can grow out of a maimed history such as this? Or can any promise of material advancement serve as the substitute for a good reputation, or consolation for spiritual impoverishment?