emigration was for the most part involuntary. Cromwell, for example,
shipped off thousands of families indiscriminately to the West Indies
and America for sale, as "servants" to the colonists. The only organized
and voluntary expedition in which Irish Catholics took part was that to
Maryland under Lord Baltimore. The distinction in course of time became
immaterial. In the free American air English, Scotch, and Irish became
one people, with a common political and social tradition.

It is interesting, and for a proper understanding of the Irish question,
indispensable, briefly to contrast the characteristics and progress of
the American and Irish settlements, and in doing so to observe the
profound effects of geographical position and political institutions on
human character. I shall afterwards ask the reader to include in the
comparison the later British Colonies formed in Canada and South Africa
by conquest, and in Australia by peaceful settlement.

Let us note, first, that both in America and Ireland the Colonies were
bi-racial, with this all-important distinction, that in America the
native race was coloured, savage, heathen, nomadic, incapable of fusion
with the whites, and, in relation to the almost illimitable territory
colonized, not numerous; while in Ireland the native race was white,
civilized, Christian, numerous, and confined within the limits of a
small island to which it was passionately attached by treasured national
traditions, and whose soil it cultivated under an ancient and revered
system of tribal tenure. The parallel, then, in this respect, is slight,
and becomes insignificant, except in regard to the similarity of the
mental attitude of the colonists towards Indians and Irish respectively.
In natural humanity the colonists of Ireland and the colonists of
America differed in no appreciable degree. They were the same men, with
the same inherent virtues and defects, acting according to the pressure