Excerpt from Great Britain, America, and Ireland: A Reply Of the social prejudices of the richer class in England there are no mirrors more perfect than the great public schools. I was at Eton, about the most typical of those schools, and I declare that while there are other prejudices the existence of which I remem ber clearly enough, I search my memory in vain for the slightest trace of a prejudice against Irish boys. I can say the same thing with regard to Oxford, where I never heard it breathed that an Irish student was socially or academically at any sort of disad vantage. There may have been jokes against Irishmen as there are against Scotchmen and Welshmen, as there are against John Bull, but in these there was no sting. I cannot pretend to-know e great world of London society as well as I know the little worlds of Eton and Oxford, yet I feel sure that there also, if the self-esteem of an Irishman is hurt, he owes it not to his national ity, but to something in himself. Nobody ever objects to inter marriage with an Irish family, or regards Irish blood as a ground for blackballing at a club. That. The labouring classes of England cherish no very bitter sentiment against their Irish compeers has been proved by a crucial and even cruel test. They have suffered the bread to be taken from their mouths, their condition to be bowered, their efforts to improve it hindered, and themselves in large numbers to be supplanted and driven to emigrate by the torrent of pauperism annually poured in upon them from the land of the philoprogenitive and unthrifty Celt, almost without. Utter ing a murmur of discontent. Not a finger has been raised against the Irish immigration which is the bane of the British artisan. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.