should
be reduced within the limits "law and order" prescribed, either by
starvation or flight to America.

Fleeing in hundreds and thousands from the rule of one who claimed
to be their Sovereign, expelled in a multitude exceeding the Moors of
Spain, whom a Spanish king shipped across the seas with equal pious
intent, the fugitive Irish Nation found friendship, hope, and homes in
the great Celtic Republic of the West. All that was denied to them in
their own ancient land they found in a new Ireland growing up across
the Atlantic.

The hate of England pursued them here and those who dared to give help
and shelter. The United States were opening wide their arms to receive
the stream of Irish fugitives and were saying very harsh things of
England's infamous rule in Ireland. This could not be brooked. England
in those days had not invented the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and
a united Germany had not then been born to vex the ineptitude of her
statesmen or to profit from the shortcomings of her tradesmen.

So the greatest Ministers of Queen Victoria seriously contemplated war
with America and naturally looked around for some one else to do the
fighting. The Duke of Wellington hoped that France might be played
on, just as in a later day a later Minister seeks to play France in a
similar role against a later adversary.[3]

[Footnote 3: Sir Edward Grey and the _Entente Cordiale_.]

The Mexicans, too, might be induced to invade the Texan frontier.
But a greater infamy than this was seriously planned. Again it is an
Irishman who tells the story and shows us how dearly the English loved
their trans-Atlantic "kinsmen" when there was no German menace to
threaten nearer home.

Writing from Carlsruhe, on January 26th, 1846, to his friend,
Alexander Spencer, in Dublin, Charles Lever said: "As to the war the
Duke[4] says he could smash the Yankees, and ought to do so while
France in her present humour and Mexico opens the road to invasion
from the South--not to speak of the terrible threat that Napier
uttered, that with two regiments of infantry and a field battery he'd
_raise the slave population in the United States_."

[Footnote 4: The Duke of Wellington: the report was brought to Lever
by the Marquis of Douro, the Duke's heir.]

The infamy of this suggestion cannot be surpassed. The brilliant
soldier who conceived it was the chivalrous Englishman who conquered
Scinde, one of the chief glories of the Britannic hierarch