Foreign News: Manxmen

In the midst of the Irish Sea about 60,000 persons live on an island. The island is called Man, the people Manxmen, and their cats, which are without tails, Manx Cats. The history of the Isle of Man is obscure and old. At present it is a British crown dominion, and many of its inhabitants emigrate to the U. S. or elsewhere. Of these emigrés there was a gathering last week in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland Manxmen to the number of 600 attended, World Manxmen to the number of 400, and Manxmen direct from Man to the number of 26. At the head of these came one Alderman B. Crookall, member of the lower branch of the legislature,

The House of Keys, reputed to be the oldest governing body in the world. He bore messages from distinguished Manxmen of whom one was famed Manxman Author Sir Hall Caine. Sir Hall Caine’s message contained this eloquent description of his birthplace:

“Just a sweet little green island set in the blue waters of the Irish Sea, with its rolling hills and slumbrous glens, full of gorse and heather and fern; three or four quaint little fishing ports and one larger town devoted to the joyous and rather rollicking life of the visiting industry.”

The Manxmen had some purposes other than curiosity for journeying so far from home. Manxman Crookall and his lieutenant, Manxman Richard Cain, wished to induce the government of the U. S. to make a special proviso in its immigration quota for incoming Manxmen. Said A. B. Crookall: “Our young men are anxious to come to this country. We want a quota like the Irish Free State and Scotland.”

“In the homeland there is little … to do except farm and fish,” said Manxman Cain. U. S. Manxmen, headed by Manxman Daniel Teare, did not favor this proposal. Said Manxman Teare: “I am an American as well as a Manxman and if we started making a separate quota for every little community the size of the Isle of Man, where would we be?” At the final session, however, the North American Manx Association was organized, with constitution and officers; its president was A. B. Crookall.

The visiting Manxmen were impressed by the size of the U. S., though not by its climate nor its political excitements. The latter, Manxman George J. A. Brown declared to be “weird,” while his companions, annoyed by the heat and dust and goings-on of the convention city, recalled with homesick joy that in Man, where each case requires individual legislation, there have been not more than half a dozen divorces; that there are no snakes or foxes in Man, and that even the insects are not malicious; that the Manx temperature rarely if ever exceeds 75 degrees.

The name of Man does not derive from its limited fauna but from the Latin name Mona. Its people are tall, Celtic, peaceable. In their looks there is none of that impish cruelty which is supposed by many to account for the condition of their cats. One of these last, a baleful creature with listless and ungraceful motions, attended the congress of the Manxmen, in the capacity of mascot.