Having said this, I ought, in justice to my fellow-citizens of Irish
birth, to say that these elementary truths have too often been obscured
for them by the conduct of public bodies in America, and of American
public men.

No American public man of reputation, holding an executive office in the
Federal Government, has ever thrust himself, it is true, so inexcusably
into the domestic affairs of Great Britain and Ireland as did Mr.
Gladstone into the domestic affairs of the United States when, speaking
at Newcastle in the very crisis of our great civil war, he gave all the
weight of his position as a Cabinet Minister to the assertion that Mr.
Jefferson Davis had created not only an army and a navy, but a nation,
and thereby compelled the Prime Minister of Great Britain to break the
effect of this declaration by insisting that another Cabinet Minister,
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, should instantly make a speech countering
it, and covering the neutrality of the British Government.[4]

Nor has either House of the Congress of the United States ever been
guilty of the impertinence of adopting resolutions of sympathy with the
Home Rule, or any other movement affecting directly the domestic affairs
of the British Empire, though, within my own knowledge, very strong
pressure has been more than once put upon the Foreign Affairs Committees
of both Houses to bring this about.

But such resolutions have been repeatedly adopted by State Legislatures,
and individual members, both of the Federal Senate and of the Federal
Lower House, have discredited themselves, and brought such discredit as
they could upon the Congress, by effusions of the same sort. The bad
citizenship of Irish-American citizens, however, is not the less bad
citizenship because they may have been led into it by the recklessness