The Irishman, and especially the New York
Irish voter, and his sister Bridget, the cook, have during the past
ten years rendered more or less service as butts for caricaturists,
but they are rapidly wearing out. They are not many-sided persons at
best, and their characteristics have become associated in the
American mind with so much that is uncomfortable and repulsive in
domestic and political life, that it becomes increasingly difficult
to get a native to laugh at them. It must be confessed, too, that
the Irish in America have signally belied the poet's assertion,
"_Coelum non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt_." There is
nothing more striking in their condition than the almost complete
disappearance from their character, at least in its outward
manifestations, of the vivacity, politeness, kindliness, comical
blundering impetuosity, and double-sightedness, out of which the
Irishman of the stage and Jo Miller's Irishman who made all the
bulls were manufactured in the last century.
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