Even the shrubbery-loving Canary, and lofty-soaring
Eagle, may be tamed to the cage, and learn to love it from habit of
confinement. It has been so with us in our position among our
oppressors; we have been so prone to such positions; that we have
learned to love them. When reflecting upon this all important, and to
us, all absorbing subject; we feel in the agony and anxiety of the
moment, as though we could cry out in the language of a Prophet of old:
"Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I
might weep day and night for the" degradation "of my people! Oh that I
had in the wilderness a lodging place of way-faring men; that I might
leave my people, and go from them!"
The Irishman and German in the United States, are very different persons
to what they were when in Ireland and Germany, the countries of their
nativity. There their spirits were depressed and downcast; but the
instant they set their foot upon unrestricted soil; free to act and
untrammeled to move; their physical condition undergoes a change, which
in time becomes physiological, which is transmitted to the offspring,
who when born under such circumstances, is a decidedly different being
to what it would have been, had it been born under different
circumstances.
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