It is not in accordance with the American doctrine of "Home Rule" that "Home Rule" of any sort for Ireland should be organised in New York or in Chicago by expatriated Irishmen.
No man had a keener or more accurate sense of this than the most eloquent and illustrious Irishman whose voice was ever heard in America.
In the autumn of 1871 Father Burke of Tallaght and San Clemente, with whom I had formed at Rome in early manhood a friendship which ended only with his life, came to America as the commissioned Visitor of the Dominican Order.

His mission there will live for ever in the Catholic annals of the New World.

But of one episode of that mission no man living perhaps knows so much as I, and I make no excuse for this allusion to it here, as it illustrates perfectly the limits between the lawful and the unlawful in the agitation of Irish questions upon American soil.
While Father Burke was in New York Mr.Froude came there, having been invited to deliver before a Protestant Literary Association a series of lectures upon the history of Ireland.

My personal relations with Mr.
Froude, I should say here, and my esteem for his rare abilities, go back to the days of the _Nemesis of Faith_, and I did not affect to disguise from him the regret with which I learned his errand to the New World.
That his lectures would be brilliant, impressive, and interesting, was quite certain; but it was equally certain, I thought, that they would do a world of mischief, by stirring up ancient issues of strife between the Protestant and the Catholic populations of the United States.
That they would be answered angrily, indiscreetly, and in a fashion to aggravate prejudices which ought to be appeased on both sides of the questions involved, was much more than probable.

All this accordingly I urged upon Father Burke, begging him to find or make time in the midst of his engrossing duties for a systematic course of lectures in reply.
What other men would surely say in heat and with virulence would be said by him, I knew, temperately, loftily, and wisely.