Following is an extract of the speech given for the St. Patrick’s Banquet of the Hibernian Society of Savannah by Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan.

One period of Irish history has always held my attention, the first decades of the Irish immigrant in America, the time that brought forth and nourished those noble societies of charity and philanthropy like your own. A century ago, the exodus from Ireland was at its peak. The Spanish, French, English, and Scotch-Irish were already here, with some Dutch, Germans, Jews and Swedes--then came the Irish!

From 1833 on, more than 35,000 a year. By 1850, 206,000 were calling to swell the total to nearly a million. By 1860, it was 1,600,000. More than any other immigrant group they came principally because of starvation. They had a united faith and a language common to their new land--and little else. If we want to study a minority group, large in numbers, small in possessions, money and prestige--here it is. How did they appear to the Native American? How were they treated?

It is not a pretty chapter of American history. For each band of noble Americans like the Hibernian Society of Savannah, in which the Irishman and his neighbor lived in mutual respect and Christian honor, there were scores of cities and dozens of other societies that despised them. Every social historian of the 19^th century writes of the signs on factories and offices,--“No Irish Need Apply.” Edward E. Hale, the great American patriot, urged the United States to cut the number of Irish admitted down to eight for every 100 native-born American. Irish girls were hired as servants for $4 to $7 and board a month. In the Pennsylvania coalmines, the men worked fifteen hours a day for 50 cents.

The Catholic churches were labeled “Paddy churches,” and Tammany Hall issued an edict: “No Irish and other foreigners admitted.” Lyman Beecher called the Irish “a dead mass of ignorance and superstition.” The Chicago Post proclaimed, “Scratch a convict and you will tickle skin of an Irish Catholic.” One Bostonian held his nose, and wrote, “The gorilla is superior to the Irishman in muscle, and hardly inferior in moral sense.”

They were truly a race set apart, clinging to the lowest rung of the political, economic and social ladder, segregated by their race, segregated by their faith. The Italians who came later, the Slavic, Balkan and mid-East peoples still later suffered the same stigma, restrictions, bigotry and discrimination. But the Irish of mid-19th century American set the pattern for assimilation, almost wrote the formula of how to become an American. Unwanted and despised, they set their course to become a real and living part of a nation that seemed to want only the taxes paid and the blood they were ready to shed in her wars.

The assimilation went on, due in great part to their tenacious hold on their religious faith. They had Patrick to thank for that. Partly, it was due to their buoyancy and hope and gaiety in the darkest depths of trouble. But I find a deeper element at work in this process of assimilation. Its bedrock is justice, and this too goes back to Patrick.

Very few Irishmen today have ever heard of the “Senchus More,” Patrick’s Law. Today, the young politician in the House or Senate, of city council or state legislature, probably has not heard of it. But his ancestors knew about it, and to them may be traced that impulse for the fight. That instinct for justice that he feels within him, but cannot fully explain. When the saint first came to Ireland to preach the Catholic faith, he found a land whose civil laws bristled with injustice--man’s rights, as well as God’s, were disregarded; man was not judged on his merits as a man; human law reflected many things but it did not reflect human dignity; and—worst of all, these inequities, these inequalities were not aberrations, they were written into the very marrow of the law itself.

Patrick conferred with the native chiefs, proud and haughty men. The force of religion was brought to bear upon the morals of men. Justice became the theme of Celtic law, not just a world to shout about on the holidays, not a patriotic virtue to be mocked at the polls in the legislatures, in the courts, but a fact upon which all human dignity could be renewed. The young Irishman of the 19^th century, the immigrants were helped because the early Savannians were men of justice too,--these Irish were not saints. They harbored their own bigotries and prejudices. But down deep, they knew that these were emotional lapses, and eventually had to be squared with the law of justice. So they moved forward, from hold carrier, to section boss, to policeman and lawyer, city and state and federal leader. Sometimes they carried their prejudices with them, against the Chinese in California, the Negroes in the South, the French-Canadians in New England, but they carried deeper within their souls the awareness of Patrick’s Senchus More, the Law of Justice.

In this tremendous process of assimilation, we must see not just this or that completed chapter of American history. Assimilation is the American contribution to the world, and it will never end. Great societies such as yours have played their part in it, nobly, charitably, benevolently. There is still assimilation to be done; may we earnestly recognize that it will always be there to be done.