But I need not go back so far. Who that is fifty years of age, does not remember the aspect of Boston on public days; on the evening of such days? Compare the "Election day," or the Fourth of July, as they were kept thirty or forty years ago, with such days in our time. Some of you remember the celebration of Peace, in 1783; many of you can recollect the similar celebration in 1815. On each of those days the inhabitants from the country towns came here to rejoice with the citizens of this town. Compare the riot, the confusion, the drunkenness then, with the order, decorum, and sobriety of the celebration at the introduction of water last autumn, and you see what has been done in sixty or seventy years for temperance.
A great deal of the crime in Boston is of foreign origin: of the one thousand and sixty-six children vagrant in your streets, only one hundred and three had American parents; of the nine hundred and thirty-three persons in the House of Correction here, six hundred and sixteen were natives of other countries; I know not how many were the children of Irishmen, who had not enjoyed the advantages of our institutions. I cannot tell how many rum-shops are kept by foreigners.[42] Now in Ireland no pains have been taken with the education of the people by the Government; very little by the Catholic church; indeed, the British government for a long time rendered it impossible for the church to do any thing in this way. For more than seventy years, in that Catholic country, none but a Protestant could keep a school or even be a tutor in a private family. A Catholic schoolmaster was to be transported, and, if he returned, adjudged guilty of high treason, barbarously put to death, drawn and quartered. A Protestant schoolmaster is as repulsive to a Catholic, as a Mahometan schoolmaster or an Atheist would be to you. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Irish are ignorant, and, as a consequence thereof, are idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate, and barbarian; not to be wondered at if they conduct like wild beasts when they are set loose in a land where we think the individual must be left free to the greatest extent. Of course they will violate our laws, those wild bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle; will commit the great crimes of violence, even capital offences, which certainly have increased rapidly of late. This increase of foreigners is prodigious: more than half the children in your public schools are children of foreigners; there are more Catholic than Protestant children born in Boston.