The Yankees and the Irish.
In one of the late Yankee raids through Hanover, a Federal officer, in conversation with a lady, remarked that, as to the loss of men on their side, they did not care how many men they lost, as they were either foreigners or their places could easily be supplied by such.We have already published the monstrous suggestion of the Yankee writer, Parke God win, to emancipate the negroes and make slaves of the Irish Catholics.
There is nothing new or strange in what the Yankee officer said touching the indifference of his people to the slaughter of foreigners. Every one can readily believe it. But Godwin's proposition may be regarded as the mere hallucination of a crazy philosopher, and not a fair exposition of the sentiments and designs of the Northern people. We do not so look upon it. Granting, as we readily do, that the anti Puritan portion of the North will scout it as indignantly as the people of the South, it is not anti Puritans who rule the United States. It is not the moderate men who in civil communities away the minds of the populace. It was "the Mountain," with no scruples and vast energy, not the philosophic and patriotic Girondists, who triumphed in the French Revolution. In like manner it is the audacious and violent fanatics of the North who have jostled aside the liberal and conservative men of the United States. Bearing in mind this fact, we see nothing in the proposition of Parke Godwin which may not fairly indicate the spirit and inclinations of the dominant power in Yankeedom. For the present it is expedient to use the Irish Catholics in the effort to subjugate the South, but that end once accomplished, and the same fanaticism which has made the South its victim will turn its Fagus upon a religion which it hates with a ferocity and bitterness equal to its detestation of slavery. Its animosity to the Catholic faith is older than its antipathy to African servitude, for a century has not passed since it was the most active slave trader of the nations, but the time has never been when it did not regard the Roman Catholic Church as the Mother of Abominations, the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon, whom it were doing God and man service to hunt down and exterminate. Puritanism has coexisted with slavery of the most cruel kind, for in its nature it is heartless, selfish, and tyrannical, but it was born from the womb of anti-Catholic bigotry, and if the Roman Church should cease to be it would be choked to death by the suppression of its own gall and bitterness.
To enslave Irishmen as such, is a proposition which even Yankee fanaticism would not dare to make; but to enslave Irish Catholics, that is a conception to which its brain and heart are quite equal. Know-Nothingism, exclusive and intolerant as it might have been regarded, even without the Catholic feature, found its chief recommendation to Northern fanatics in the political proscription of all Catholics, of whatever nation. Who can doubt that the fanaticism which sought to deprive Catholics of every civil and political franchise would hesitate, if it possessed the power, to reduce them to nominal as well as real servitude? --They were the men who had rode priests to death on rails — had burned convents and churches — and who, but for the South, would have disfranchised every Catholic in the land of every badge and vestige of freedom.--We warn the Irish Catholics of the North that they are in the hands of a party which will one day put Parke Godwin's proposition in practice, and convert them all into slaves.--After the developments of this war, what is there too monstrous for fanaticism to attempt? If they can commit upon our soil such horrors and abominations as modern warfare cannot parallel; if they can seek to enslave and exterminate those whom they claim as their own countrymen, why should they not deal as harshly with those whose religion is as execrable to them as our institutions? Nothing can prevent them but the want of power and opportunity; and this they will have if they ever can succeed in subjugating the South. Happily for the objects of their religious hatred, that is an event not likely ever to occur.
