BROWNSON ON THE IRISH RACE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 108, 22 May 1875, Page 14

BROWNSON ON THE IRISH RACE.

Dr. O. A. Brownson, in reviewing Father Thebaud's -work on " The liish Eace in the Past and Present," says : — " We are far from pretending that the Irish in our country are faultless ; indeed, they have many faults very shocking to American respectability, and to our Puritan scribes and pharisees. But their chief real faults are of American associations, and do not belong to the race as we find it in Ireland, or in any other country. They come from their attempt to imitate Americans, whose civilization ie really antagonistic to their own, and, from their natural gaiety, full flow of animal spirits, and great physical vigor, which our Puritan civilization seeks to repress, and but only forces to break out in the shape of vice or crime. No people are so free from crime against person and property, and vice and immorality as the Irish in Ireland, anywhere under the British flag, except always offences of political nature which are almost the only offences one hears of in Ireland. Even here, the Irish and their descendants are by all odds, and under every point of view, the purest, the best, and the most trustworthy portion of the American people. The great body of them are chaste, industrious, ardently attached to their religion, and liberal in their contributions — often out of their very necessities — for its support. Drunkenness do you cay ? Drunkenness there certainly is amongst them, but less than there was — perhaps, less than there is — among the pharisaic yet respectable Americans. There are what are called low Irish ; but the low Irish never fall as low as the lower classes of any other nation. Go where they are huddled together in wretched tenement honses, damp cellars, and unventilated garrets, in narrow alleys and blind courts, in the pestilence-breeding parts of our cities. Tou will find there poverty and dirt enough to frighten a Yankee half to death, but you will also find there a patience and resignation, a loving trust in God, cleanliness of heart, a purity of life and conversation, that give the lie to that Puritan notion, that vice, or crime, and poverty go together. It was there we first learned that divine lesson, to respect poverty and to honor the poor, or the meaning of our Lord when he said, • Blessed are the poor.' Such heroic virtue as is daily and hourly practised there I have not found elsewhere. Even the most depraved Irishman is capable of sincere repentance — of grand expiation. Seldom does an Irish criminal await the last penalty of the law without opening his heart to the inflowing graces of our Lord, and consoling us with his really edifying death. It may also be added that the law in its administration punishes as criminals among the Irish many more innocent than guilty persons. Your great criminals are not Irish, but Americans, Englishmen, or Germans, though sometimes assuming Irish names."

The Eussian Government has forbidden the observance of the Papal jubilee.