regiments run into the thousands.  Hundreds of Irish soldiers suffered in the prison ships of New York, the horrors of which served so conspicuously to stimulate American determination to carry the war to the only rightful conclusion.  Washington always recognized America’s debt to the Irish.  “St. Patrick” he made the watchword in the patriot lines the night before the English evacuated Boston forever on the memorable 17th of March, 1776.  After the war he was made, with his own consent, an honorary member of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.  Major-General Richard Butler and his four brothers, all officers, and Brigadier-Generals John Armstrong, William Irvine, William Thompson, James Smith, and Griffith Rutherford all fought with distinction.  All of these officers were Irish-born.  It was in truth an Irish war, so far as Irish sentiment and whole-hearted service could make it.  The record of Irish soldiers’ names alone would fill volumes.

The thirst of the Irish race for the glory of war is shown in the large enlistments in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and since, in the English army and navy.  Grattan, in pleading for Ireland, claimed that a large percentage of the British forces were Irish.  Wolfe Tone avers that there were 210 Irishmen out of 220 in the crew of a British frigate that overhauled his ship on its way to America.  Bonaparte had in his armies an Irish Legion that did good service in Holland, Spain, Portugal, and Germany.  Marshal Clarke, Duke of Feltre, French Minister of War in 1809, was Irish.  Up and down the Spanish Peninsula, Irish blood was shed in abundance in the armies of Wellington.  Never was more brilliant fighting done than that which stands to Irish credit from the lines of Torres Vedras to Badajos and Toulouse.  Of the Waterloo campaign volumes have been written in praise of Irish valor.  As Maxwell says in his Tales of Waterloo:—­“The victors of Marengo and Austerlitz reeled before the charge of the Connaught Rangers.”  Wellington himself was Irish, as in the later wars of England Lord Gough, Lord Wolseley, Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, and General French came from Ireland.  The Irish soldiers in the English service by a pitiful irony of fate helped materially to fasten the chains of English domination on the peoples of India in a long series of wars.

In America, the War of 1812 once more gave opportunity to the Fighting Race.  The commanding figure of the war, which opened so inauspiciously for the United States, was General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans, and afterwards twice elected President of the United States.  “Old Hickory”, as he came to be lovingly called, was proud of his Irish father, and sympathized with the national longings of the Irish people.  He was a splendid soldier, and his defeat of the English general, Pakenham, on January 8, 1815, which meant the control of the mouths of the Mississippi, as well as safeguarding the city of New Orleans, reflected the highest credit on his