Love of country, love of the scenes of childhood, love of the soil from which we spring, is strong and enduring ; but love of kind, love of blood and brotherhood, is, if possible, more potent and imperishable. This love at once invokes history and tradition, penetrates the misty realms of the past, chasing back enquiry to aboriginal conditions, migrating fortunes and primitive alliances.
It also follows up and watches through the culminating & spreading epochs of a people marks their varying movements, and anticipates their destiny. Of no race, perhaps, arc these remarks more true than of our own.
The nervous Greek, the plastic Italian, the philosophic German, the vivacious Frenchman, and the matter-of-fact Englishman, may not greatly cherish this pride of race, this ancestral affection, this blood relationship; but the Irishman, mercurial though be his nature, entertains it as the noblest attribute of his national character.
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It also follows up and watches through the culminating & spreading epochs of a people marks their varying movements, and anticipates their destiny. Of no race, perhaps, arc these remarks more true than of our own.
The nervous Greek, the plastic Italian, the philosophic German, the vivacious Frenchman, and the matter-of-fact Englishman, may not greatly cherish this pride of race, this ancestral affection, this blood relationship; but the Irishman, mercurial though be his nature, entertains it as the noblest attribute of his national character.
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