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Show 4. I RYAN'S GREAT ORATION I I AT THE CHICAGO GATHERING ON : IRELAND AND AMERICA : ' . ENGLAND ALWAYS THE FOE OF THE LAND OF OUR FATHERS AND OUR OWN COUNTRY 3 RUTALITY, BUTCHERY AND MURDER HAS MARKED HER SWAY BURNED THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND SLAUGHTERED CONTINENTAL PRISONERS PRIS-ONERS WARNING AGAINST ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE. Following Hon. W. J. Bryan's address ad-dress at the great Irish-American demonstration de-monstration at Chicago, J. J. Ryan of Philadelphia spoke at some length. His address in full is as follows: My Fellow Citizens: I have come nearly a thousand miles to join with you in this magnificent demonstration. I rejoice with you in its overwhelm-ing overwhelm-ing success, and I earnestly trust that the harmony which now pervades all Irish organizations and the unity of purpose that animates them will forever for-ever continue. Our people are confronted con-fronted by conditions as grave as ever menaced them. In Ireland the race is wasting away. During the reign of the present ruler, although Scotland and Wales and England have largely increased in-creased their population, that of Ireland Ire-land has been reduced one-half. Arable land that would support in plenty , human life is being converted into j sheen-walks, and the neonle who once tilled the soil have been driven as exiles ex-iles into foreign countries. The fraction frac-tion of the people that remain are taxed inordinately to pay the expenses expen-ses of an empire that destroys them. The civil rights which Americans hold so dear, of free speech and a free press, of trial by a jury of their peers, of peaceful "assemblage to protest against iniquity, and the right to bear arms are denied to the Irish people. The English common law exists for them but in theory. During the reign of the present queen coercion acts without number have been passed, sweeping away all the ordinary forms of law and clothing the representatives representa-tives of a hostile government with irresponsible ir-responsible power such as is only supposed sup-posed to exist in the despotisms of Turkey or of Russia. Although within the British empire there are more than thirty colonies or states with dependent depend-ent lawmaking bodies. Ireland and India In-dia of all her dominions are deprived of even the forma of self-government, and it is a sad commentary upon her rule that in each of them misery and Vant and shame have been the badge3 of her sway. From England there can be no hope of the granting of justice to Ireland. Gladstone's fruitless appeal to the conscience con-science of Englishmen afforded ample demonstration of the futility of appeals ap-peals to the reason of the rulers; but during the present year Lord Salisbury, with brutal frankness, has accentuated accentu-ated the position of the English people peo-ple and has announced that self-government for Ireland is beyond the pale of consideration." He has challenged the whole Irish race to the conflict. And their answer to his gage of battle has been the suppression of faction, their reunion the world over, and their lining-up for the death grapple. Men not of our race and to whom the history of Ireland is a sealed book wonder at the intensity of Irish feeling and are amazed that year after year our people gather in their great meetings meet-ings and seize unon occasions like this to pledge again their devotion to what seems to them a hopeless cause. The undying faith is indeed marvelous, marvel-ous, but the intensity of the strong feelings that inspire the Irish people to action in this land of liberty is the legitimate result of England's terrible rule. The history of that rule in Ireland Ire-land is the blackest spot in the annals of men. No crime ever committed by any savage conquerer in Asia or Africa but can be surpassed In brutality by the fiendish acts, of the English soldiery sol-diery upon the Irish people. Wholesale massacres followed their every invasion. inva-sion. Old and young, the feeble and the strong, women and children and men alike fell victims to the butchers. Over the land her ruthless soldiers swept with fire and sword, and time and again her Spencers, her Montjoys, her Pelhams, her Cromwells boasted "that naught was left but carcasses and ashes." From out the armory of her hate her Henrys, her Elizabeths, her Georges, her Victorias have drawn their every weapon. To man-made famine, the exile ship, the scaffold, the dungeon, to secure our physical extinction, ex-tinction, she has added crimes against the mind, the conscience, and the intellect in-tellect of the people of Ireland that afford af-ford no comparison with aught else for diabolical fiendishness. Her infamy in Ireland surpasses human comprehension. comprehen-sion. To educate the Irish youth was by law treason to England. To minister minis-ter unto the people by their chosen priesthood was punishable by death. By legislative enactments one by one the people were robbed of their manufactures manu-factures and their Industries. Foreign trade was prohibited. "Forbid to read, forbid to plead, disarmed, disfranchised, disfran-chised, imbecile," pitiless. Want went hand in hand with hopeless despair. Untrained, unskilled, deprived by law of every opportunity to cultivate the brain or hand, the people were driven to the soil for sustenance, and when the signals came for their periodical exile to foreign lands the mass of the. people set foot in the new countries fit only for the lowliest employments. But her barbarity to the Irish did not end when our fathers landed upon foreign soil. No; her hatred followed them wherever the exile ship carried them. Her.libelers have made them the subject sub-ject of caricature the world over. To justify her brutality to them, every vice, every failing has been distorted and magnified and chronicled to the world. She has arrayed against them brutality, ignorance, and prejudice. She has made more terrible their struggles for livelihood. She has planted plant-ed in the pathway of their honorable ambitions and hopes for "progress every obstacle. She has aroused through the propaganda of her press agents, .who find shelter in the offices of nearly every great newspaper, the vilest prejudices. prej-udices. Sometimes the antipathy to the Irish race, that England carefully fostered, fos-tered, has taken form in the burning of churches, sometimes in the business or social ostracism of the individual, and always in the determination that no one of them shall hold political elective elec-tive offices. In self-defense Americans of Irish blood have been compelled to take counsel together and form organizations organ-izations like those under which this great demonstration is held today. Their membership therein in nowise detracts from their duty to America, Their hopes, their interests, their am-, bitlons are centered here. Time and again, from the day when the news spread through London that Cornwallis had surrendered, and the bitter cry went out from parliament that "America "Amer-ica has been lost through the Irish," our race has demonstrated Its unfaltering unfalter-ing devotion to this land of their heart's hope and love. The existence of these organizations has been an absolute necessity. ne-cessity. They have enabled the Irish race to surmount the barriers in their pathway and to break down race hatreds, ha-treds, and today, no longer penned up in the little island, which she has so often made a charnel house, our race that she has scattered over all the globe, has prospered and is mounting to wealth and power. Clinging to the loftiest loft-iest leas of freedom, demanding for themselves and giving to others justice, jus-tice, they bave everywhere been the evangels of liberty, and have woven into the warp and woof of every government gov-ernment of which they form a part those principles of civil and religious freedom for which their fathers battled and died, and whose triumph has made this republic the hope of humanity. And in this mighty Union of sovereign states, "conceived," as Lincoln phrased , it, "in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are free and equal," that for more than a century has been the guiding star of civilization, civiliza-tion, to whom the oppressed of the earth turned with confidence and enthusiasm en-thusiasm .that the rights of a struggling strug-gling people would be upheld as against he claims of a monarch, the battle for liberty and humanity is again to be fought. The greatness of America, its tolerance toler-ance of religious differences, its clothing cloth-ing with sovereignty the lowly and the mighty, its maintenance of equality, of opportunity, of equal rights before the law, is the result of the combined efforts ef-forts of Celt and Saxon. Teuton and I Gaul, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile. From every portion of the globe, attracted by the rewards that follow Industry, and the glory of living in a land of liberty, have come the am-bitiious. am-bitiious. the chivalrous, the flower of the earth. By the mysterious alchemy of God the blood-streams of a hundred races have here been blended, and there has been evolved the liberty-loving American Amer-ican citizen. We contend that he stands as the exclusive product of no particular particu-lar race, and we protest against the impudennt claim set up that the German, Ger-man, the Irish, the Dutch, the French, the men who settled New York, Pennsylvania, Penn-sylvania, Maryland and the Carolinas, and whose descendants people the great west, are Anglo Saxons. We deny that England is the mother country. We affirm that the overwhelming mass of the population of the United States springs from people who never owed allegiance al-legiance to her. How can she be the mother country? What is the record of her loving and kindly care? Prior to 1776 we have it, on the authority of the Declaration of Independence, that she ravaged our coasts, burned our towns and destroyed the lives of our people." During the revolution her troops and her paid Indian allies massacred the women and children of the Wyoming valley and she armed every savage tribe from Canada to New Orlenas to war against us. Her soldiers butchered the Continental prisoners at Paoli, and her jaiirs allowed American prisoners of war to die by thousands of starvation in the prison hulks in the harbor of New York. Not satisfied with stopping our vessels upon the high seas and forcing into her service our seamen, in 1814 her armies, under General Ross, burned the Capitol at Washington, with all the early records of the Infant republic. re-public. In 1847. when we were at war with Mexico, she tried to seize Llwer California. In 1861, within three weeks after Fort Sumter was fired upon, she was the first nation in the world to rush to grant belligerent rights to the southern confederacy. In 1863 she fitted out her Alabamas, her Floridas, and the horde of English-owned pirates that preyed upon our commerce and swept our merchant marine from the seas. From '63 to 1900 she has spent her treasures by the millions to make impregnable im-pregnable Bermudas, Halifax and Vancouver Van-couver as menaces to us. She has supported sup-ported Canada in every raid upon our fisheries and upheld her in every exorbitant exor-bitant demand and act of aggression upon our miners. At the breaking out of the Spanish-American Spanish-American war her press denounced us with vindictive malignity. The civilization civil-ization of Cervantes and Calderon and Velasquez was compared with what it symbolized as the corn and oil and iron pigs of America. From out her harbor of Hongkong, in 189S. she ordered Dewey and his fleet, and she only spoke of us with respect when his guns thundered victory at Manila, and she saw visions of the coming again of the day when a Barry, a Stewart, a Perry and a Macdonough would crush again her navies and a John Paul Jones would sweep in triumph tri-umph the English channel. When we speak the truth of England, when we repeat the wise injunctions of Washington contained In his farewell address, when we point to the flames of the burning Capitol, at which Goth and Vandal would have stood aghast, but for which the English general received the thanks of the English parliament, when we remember that within the last thirty-five years England has paid to us $15,000,000 for wrongs done to us rather than go to war; then we recall the criticisms of President Grant of tyr unjust treatment of the Union, as contained con-tained in his inaugural address; that portion of the press of America whnso opinions upon any subject foreign or domestic may be purchased by the highest bidder and which is now completely com-pletely under the domination of English Eng-lish influence proclaims that the opponents oppo-nents of the proposed Anglo-American alliance that would fetter forever America Am-erica and crush the aspirations of the Irish people for liberty, are trators and demagogues. These Tory journals arrogate ar-rogate to themselves the right to make of us partners in England's infamous raids upon liberty and giving way to the maudlin sentiment that is now running run-ning through the vulgar, the newly-rich, newly-rich, the ambitious to shine in the vicious vi-cious society of degraded London, their columns reek with stories of alleged American sympathy and a demand for an official union between this country and England. The scheme has been wonderfully planned. Immediately following fol-lowing the discovery of the certainty of our success in the Spanish war, England, Eng-land, with knowledge of her utter friendlessness unon th mnHni Europe, set in motion the machinery to secure the help of America in her proposed pro-posed extinction of the South African Republics and her aggressions in the east. With that object, she caused to be industriously circulated through her foreign correspondents and news agencies agen-cies that England was our only friend Mysterious statements from anonymous authorities passed current of proposed intervention on behalf of Spain' by various continental powers, which were only checked by English diplomacy. The government of Germany was singled sin-gled out for especiall obloque. and although al-though by millions of ties of kindred we are knitted in bonds of iendshlp to the people of that great empire, they were made the butt of the administration's administra-tion's ridicule and "Hoch der Kaiser!" was the favorite declamation at the Anglo-American official gatherings The whole story of German or French unfriendliness is a malicious fabrication. fabrica-tion. No human being can present the slightest proof from any responsible source of any continental Intervention ever thwarted by England., or proof that any such intervention was ever contemplated. We did not need England's help at any period of the war. Of what use I would her armies be in a battle with civilized, men? The Btreets of her great capital but a few weeks ago ran wild with riotous rejolcine when the news flashed across the ocean deytha tiiat 50.000 of her veteran trained soldiers, until then tought to be invincible, under un-der her only general, after week's of fighting had secured the surrender of Cronje with 3,000 men. England's military mil-itary strength, it is demonstrated, would be valueless to us, and the opinion opin-ion is prevalent that her navy will prove as frail a reed to lean upon as her boasted battalions are known to be. England's prestige, no matter what may b the result in the Transvaal, has suffered an irrecoverable shock. Her weakness is apparent to all the world, and she now cunningrly turns j for strength and support to the young giant of the west that a generation ago she sought to cripple. Against iier insidious influences the fathers of the I Republic Warned the American peo-j peo-j pie. "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with ail nations, entangling alliances with none," said Jefferson, and he summarized what should be our complete foreign policy. Against England Eng-land and her diplomacy we have repeatedly re-peatedly been cautioned to be watchful. watch-ful. We Americans of Irish descent know England, and know her to be incapable in-capable of keeping faith with any people. peo-ple. Great Britain has not a friend in the world. The distrust of her upon th continent is deep-seated and deter- , mined. It cannot be due to religious j differences, for Holland and Germany and Norway and Sweden are as hostile hos-tile to her as France, Austria or Russia. Rus-sia. No people in all the world would enter into a treaty with her expect- ( ing it to be kept, and for the people of the United States to permit their government to jH.n hands with her would check perhaps forever the onward on-ward progress of humanity. Thomas Jefferson said of her that, "in spite ; of treaties she would ever be ourn-emy." ourn-emy." Our interest can in no way be ; identical with hers. She has ever been and is our great commercial rival. Her trade policies have ever been opposed to ours. Her prosperity has been the result of our adversity. Our merchant marine was swept from the seas by her privateers, and the carrying trade . ' of tho world that once was ours has passed to the practical monopoly of i her flag. The people of America want honorable peace. The triumphs they ; seek are of trade, and commerce and j arts and literature, and their glories i are happy homes, free altars and equal ', rights. During the past sixty years j; England has been engaged in constant warfare, and with two exceptions upon j helpless peoples. More than forty dlf- -j ferent wars have been carried on by I England during the re'gn of Queen Victoria. Ruthless carnage, wholesale ; i extermination, violation of every rule of civilized warfare have marked the ' progress of her arms. Who that seeks j the welfare of humanity can glory in her achievements? We need not look beyond the present year. The people of ; India are starving by the million. Has any honest effort been made by England Eng-land to alleviate their distress? Has ; any loan been floated in the United States to raise funds to feed them? The life insurance companies of New H York, that promise to pay to their pol- icy holders enormous dividends, have l rushed to nut their trust funds into I the precarious British war loan issued j below par and netting but 3 per tent. I The funds from that loan are to be used to crush the Boers, and are part of the $400,000,000 that England has al- t t ready spent to satisfy her greed for gold and her lust for the land of the Transvaal. The cry of India's stricken people falls upon deaf ears. The crime f j of the Boers is that they pitched their ; : tents upon the richest strlo of land in I the world and that England coveted ,,j their, possessions must be avenged. j With the aid of the American rovern- j ment and the wealth of America the j embattled farmers fighting for home j and liberty on the veldts and in the ; mountain fastnesses of South Africa, j with a courage unsurpassed in the j pages of history, may be crushed cut. j j The present administration has been ! completely subservient to England. Our ' foreign policy is as completely dom- j inated by it as If John Hay were in. j theory, as he is In fact, under the di- ! rection of the British ambassador. That i England might have free foot, undisturbed, undis-turbed, the consideration of our con- j troversies with Canada as to the rights of our fishermen and miners ha3 been Indefinitely postponed. To demonstrate to continental Europe that our government govern-ment was ready to back England to any extent, the Hay-Pauncefote treaty j was submitted to the senate, by which j the dead Clayton-Bulwer treaty has j been revived, and the permission era- i venly asked from England to build th Nicaraguan canal on American soil ! with American money, with the abject promise that we will never fortify it. j but leave it forever at the mercy of f t England's guns. Forgetful that the American flag had l j waved in triumph in Canada and Mex- ; ico and on the shores of the Mediter- j ranean sea, and had come back with i j honor, the president of the United I States, pointing to the Philippines, asked: "Who will tear down the ) flag?" Within the past few days he has answered his own inquiry and has given giv-en to England American territory larger than Rhode Island, and there has been run up In place of the trampled tram-pled stars and stripes the cross of St, George. That America may again be "lost to the British," -that the republic may be preserved In all its glory, that our ? land shall remain the land of liberty J and law, of equity, of opportunity, ! of unfettered labor, that our starry j banner shall float over freemen and i not slaves, over sovereign common- j wealths and not dependent servile col- j onies, that every foot of soil upon the I American continent that is ours must be kept by us, and that there shall be j no surrender of American rights, the j manhood of America will rally and re- j store the rule of the American people. "He has sounded forth the trumpet ! that shall never call retreat: He Is sifting out the hearts of men before be-fore his judgment seat. Oh, be swift my soul to answer him! Be Jubilant my feet! Our cause is marching on." I |