Excerpt from Irish Wit and Humor: Classified Under Appropriate Subject Headings, With in Many Cases, a Reference to a Table of Authors
There is one element which, to my mind, accounts more than anything else for this perennial stream of spark ling fun which flows from the Irish nature. It is ito/je fulness. The Irish have a hopefulness which oi/ting can kill - or it had died long since. This hopefulness is, I say, indestructible, and is the prophecy and earnest of a magnificent future. As an Englishman, I tell them that the selfishness of my country in the past, and the perverseness of the powers that be in the present, is becoming as real a burden on the hearts of Englishmen and Englishwomen as the sufferings of Ireland have been for centuries to those who bore them with so little retaliation. But the hopefulness that has kept them, in the main, from the methods and resources of despair, is perhaps all the stronger as a national characteristic than it might have been in less trying circumstances and yet, who can tell It may be, that, set free from its earthly cage, it would show that its wings were capable of as glorious flights as that of the Israelites liberated from Egyptian subjection.
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