The Lost Tribes of the Irish in the South

As a boy, down south, there were two songs that stirred me as no other songs could—one was a song that I loved and one a song that I hated, and one of these songs was the battle hymn of the south, “Dixieland,” and the other was “Marching Through Georgia.”

Mr. President, and Ladies and Gentlemen: I am speaking but the plain truth when I tell you that I would rather be here tonight facing an assemblage of men and women of Irish blood and Irish breeding than in any other banquet hall on earth. For I am one who is Irish and didn’t know it; but now that I do know it, I am prouder of that fact than of any other thing on earth except that I am an American citizen.

I wonder if it ever occurred to you, what differences are to be found in many a country and in almost any country, between the temperaments and the spirits and the customs of those who live in the north of it and those who live in the south of it? To the north, to Prussia, the German Empire has always looked for its great scientists and its great mathematicians and its propounders and expounders of a certain cool and analytical philosophy; but it was to the south, to Bavaria and to Saxony, that Germany had to turn for its poets and its story-tellers.

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