George F. Hoar

You seem to be a well-meaning and intelligent man; yet I am amazed that any well-meaning and intelligent man should believe such stuff as you repeat in your letter of August 3.

There, briefly but still more emphatically, I called upon the people not to revive the bitter memories of ancient, social and religious strife.

I declared: "I have no patience or tolerance with the spirit which would excite religious strife.

That was the condition of things when, in the early summer of 1895, I delivered an address at the opening of the Summer School of Clark University in which I spoke briefly, but in very strong terms, in condemnation of the secrecy and of…

It seemed not unlikely that the surprise of 1854 would be repeated, and that the great Republican party, which had done so much for civil liberty, would either be broken to pieces or would be brought to take an attitude totally…

So a great many men are active and busy in such organizations, who would be equally active and busy in movements founded on precisely the opposite doctrines, if they could as well find their advancement in them.

The secret organization, founded on religious prejudice, or on race prejudice, is a good instrument to advance the political fortunes of men who could not gain advancement in an established political organization.

It is a remarkable fact that of the men known to join the Know-Nothing Party, no man, unless he were exceedingly young and obscure when he did it, ever maintained or regained the public confidence afterward, with the exception of Henry…

The slavery question was still very prominent, and the people were deeply stirred by the attempt to repeal the Missouri Compromise.

The accession of the Irish laborer increased largely the productive forces of the State.

There was some jealousy on the part of our working people, especially the men and women employed in large manufacturing establishments, lest the Irish, by working at cheaper wages, would drive them out of employment.

From their scanty earnings, Edward Everett, a high authority, estimates that there were sent twenty millions of dollars in four years to their parents and kindred.

They exhibited an incomparable generosity toward the kindred they had left behind.

They had a most pathetic and touching affection for the Old Country.

Even then they gave an example--from which all mankind might take a lesson--of many admirable qualities.

They had brought with them the habit of drinking whiskey, comparatively harmless in their native climate--though bad enough there-- but destructive in New England.

The Irishmen were glad to build our railroads at sixty cents a day, dwelling in wretched shanties, and living on very coarse fare.

Those priests who were revered by millions as their natural advisers and guardians, as the only authorised dispensers of the Christian sacraments, were treated by the squires and squireens of the ruling faction as no good-natured man would…

Courts of law and juries existed only for the benefit of the dominant sect.

In those evil times originated that most unhappy hostility between landlord and tenant, which is one of the peculiar curses of Ireland.

The statute book of Ireland was filled with enactments which furnish to the Roman Catholics but too good a ground for recriminating on us when we talk of the barbarities of Bonner and Gardiner; and the harshness of those odious laws was…

The Irish Roman Catholics were permitted to live, to be fruitful, to replenish the earth; but they were doomed to be what the Helots were in Sparta, what the Greeks were under the Ottoman, what the blacks now are at New York.

They forgot the eight hundred years during which Ireland had been under the heel of England, and the terrible history so well told by that most English of Englishmen, and Protestant of Protestants, Lord Macaulay.

They forgot that the English Protestants not only retaliated on the Catholics when they got into power, but that the Bishops from whose fury, as John Milton said, our own Pilgrim Fathers fled, were Protestant Bishops and not Catholic.

Our people forgot that the religious persecution, of which they cherished the bitter memory, was the result of the spirit of the age, and not of one form of religious faith.