As to its nature [Irish immigration], there needs here to be said only this, -- that the Irish emigration, as we see it, — the Celtic Exodus, as it has been called, — seems clearly to belong to the established, uninterrupted fortune of the Celtic race, as if it had been the immediate result of battle and bloody defeat. It will be remembered that within the scope of written history; this Celtic race, speaking, a language of kin to its language of today, marked with the same sign of physical conformation, held without intermixture of foreign races, all Western Europe, including parts even of Italy. Since that period of wide extent, its fortunes are dark in parts; but this much is clear, that the clans which composed it have been perpetually divided among themselves, and in contest against Gothic or other waves of population, pressing upon them from the East, that they
have constantly lost ground. Whether it is defeat by Camillus or by Caesar, or by the Ostrogoths or the Danes, or the Saxons or Cromwell, defeat is their history, not, of course, in every battle, but certainly in the experience of each single generation. Such defeats have driven them further and further westward, and have absorbed more and more of their race, either to enrich the battle-fields, or to serve as the slaves or as the wives of the conquerors, until the last two centuries have seen it pure only in its western fastnesses. Through those centuries it has stood at bay on the headlands of western England and France, and, I suppose, Spain; it has had full inhabitability, though not government, of most of Ireland and northern Scotland. Those points of the world are to be looked upon just like the "Indian Leap,’ or the Mount Kineo of our own Legends; they are the last resting places where a great gallant race has been driven in by its conquerors, before their last destructive attack upon it.
This last attack the conquerors have now made; not intentionally, but because they did not know how to resist their destiny; not as Cromwell destroyed the Irish at Drogheda, or as Caesar attacked the Treviri, but in the more destructive, though more kindly meant, invasion, of modern systems of agriculture, manufactures and commerce. The untaught and wretched Irish Celt, of the pure blood, could no more stand the competition of the well-compacted English social system than could his progenitors or their kinsmen stand the close-knit discipline of Caesar’s legions. In the effort to stand it poor Ireland counts her millions of slain. They have died of deaths more terrible than battle, and the rest conscious of
their last defeat have nothing left for it but to flee farther yet westward and leave their old homes to this invasion which will not end....
That inefficiency of the pure Celtic race furnishes the answer to the question. How much use are the Irish to us in America. The Native American answer is, “None at all.” And the Native American policy is to keep them away....
In fact, by every spade blow which foreign hands have driven, by every child which foreign mothers in their own homes have reared to this country, is the country richer forthe coming of the foreigner. By the worth of every spade blow, by the worth of every child would the country be poorer
if it debarred them from privilege of doing its meanest work ....We [the Anglo-Saxons] are here, well-organized and well trained masters of the soil, the very race before which they [the Celts] have yielded everywhere. It must be that when they come in among us they come in to lift us up. As sure as water and oil each finds its level they will find theirs. So far as they are mere hand-workers they must sustain the head-workers, or those who have any element of intellectual ability. Their inferiority as a race compact them to go to the bottom; and the consequence is that we are all of us the higher lifted because they are here....
Excerpters from Letters on Irish Emigration, Edward E Hale, Harvard University, Unitarian Minister, Author Man Without a Country
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It is somewhat instructive regarding what constituted Hale's brand of New England liberalism that he chose as his Man Without a County anti-hero Irishman Philip Nolan, an American frontiersman who in real life died long before the Aaron Burr conspiracy took place. Hale with his parochial Harvard point of view got his boat lifting wrong. In Hale's day when Harvard and Yale were little more than sectarian seminaries, "pure-blooded Celt" Dennis Hart Mahan was dean of faculty at West Point. In his capacity as academic dean, professor of engineering and the art of war, Mahan educated scores of soldiers and engineers who build America's bridges, railroad and canals and go on to seed the engineering faculties and libraries at places like Dartmouth and Yale.
