He read it with a kind of humorous wrath; and when the evening came, he prefaced his lecture with a few strong and stirring words, in which he castigated with equal sense and severity the misconduct of his country-people, anticipating thus by many a year the spirit in which the supreme authority of his Church has just now dealt with the social plague of "boycotting," whereof the strike of the servant girls at Boston sixteen years ago was a precursory symptom.
Father Burke understood that American citizenship imposes duties where it confers rights.

Nobody expects the European emigrant who abjures his foreign allegiance to divest himself of his native sympathies or antipathies.

But American law, and the conditions of American liberty, require him to divest himself of the notion that he retains any right actively to interfere in the domestic affairs of the country of his birth.

For public and political purposes, the Irishman who becomes an American ceases to be an Irishman.

When Mr.Gladstone's Government in 1881 seized and locked up indefinitely, on "suspicion" of what they might be about to do, American citizens of Irish birth, these "suspects" clamoured, and had a right to clamour, for the intervention of the American Government to protect them against being dealt with as if they were Irishmen and British subjects.