Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/25

Rh in this country. Strikes were rare till the derangement of prices caused by the Legal Tender Act put the world of industry out of joint. They were generally the newcomers from Europe, I was told, who resorted to violent modes of raising wages; the native American workman, in whom the real tendency of the community appears, usually taking, in case of difference, a more rational and amicable course. There seems to be an approach on the whole to an adjustment of mutual rights between the two classes less by the the angry clash of adverse interests and more by intelligence and the common sense of justice. And, if it be so, assuredly this is in itself a sufficient cause for wishing well to the great community of labour which is tracing out for us the better way.

The Irish form a low and dangerous class. But this dark stream of barbarism has its shameful source, not in America, but in misgoverned Ireland. America receives as much of it as she can in her common schools, finds it work and good wages, civilises it, and, not without trouble and peril to herself, converts the Irish pauper into an orderly and thriving citizen. It is an office for which, if we were disposed to be grateful to her, we shall owe her some gratitude. The last news I heard in this country, before embarking for America, was that of the Belfast riots. The dominant church of the minority and the oppressed church of the people were tearing each other to pieces in the name of religion. The effects of this, and of the alien land system which we persist in maintaining in Ireland, on the Irish character are seen again upon the other side of the Atlantic, but they are not to be charged upon American institutions.

One observes, indeed, in America, a sort of aristocracy