Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[162] who could not read and write until he grew to maturity, and then learned it from his wife. The complaint is very general at the South (though I am satisfied of its being premature) that the older men and women among the blacks, who were wholly illiterate, had more vigor and trustworthiness than their better-educated children. The same discrimination is often made at the North, justly or unjustly, in favor of the first Irish immigrants as compared with their more enlightened descendants.

Who that recalls the war for the Union does not remember how we all, from President Lincoln downward, played upon the string of “the open doors of this nation,” its being “a home for all oppressed mankind” ? Lowell again referred to this in that magnificent “Commemoration Ode,” which is the high-water mark of American poetry, and which no Englishman, except perhaps Hughes and Bryce, was ever yet able to appreciate or even understand. How fearlessly we then appealed to the Germans, the Irish, the Swedes, the Scotch, within our borders, and how well they responded? Even the green flag of Ireland, now forbidden to be displayed from our City Halls-and perhaps wisely — was then