In the presence of Howe Hale frankly admitted his rank and mission. "I was present," wrote a British officer who was an eye-witness of the closing scenes, "and observed that the frankness, the manly bearing and the evidently disinterested patriotism of the handsome young prisoner sensibly touched a tender chord of General Howe's nature; but the stern rule of war concerning such offences would not allow him to exercise even pity."
As might be expected from such a man, Hale met his doom with the iron firmness of one who is convinced of the righteousness of his purpose. His last requests to Cunningham, the provost-marshal who supervised the execution, were refused, and even his poor, hurriedly written letters to his mother, his sisters and his youthful betrothed, Alice Adams, were ruthlessly destroyed before his face. There was, indeed, a real nobility about the whole person and demeanour of Hale which, as is commonly enough the case, called forth the brutality and coarseness of the completely opposite nature of Cunningham, who jeeringly requested the doomed youth to make his dying speech. And Hale replied, in words which still ring in the spirit of the Independence Fathers:
"I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country."
James M'Parlan, a North-of-Ireland man, must be ranked among the most successful spies in modern times and for the good reason that he was mainly instrumental in breaking up one of the most lawless and terrible conspiracies against public order and private liberty which any state has yet been called upon to suppress. Its home was Pennsylvania, its name the "Molly Maguires," and to find a parallel to its iniquitous arts and methods one must go to the Klux Klan, the Corsican Vendetta or the White Veil society of the Middle Ages in Italy. As the discovery of gold in Australia and California in the middle of the nineteenth century led to the commission of a vast amount of crime by reason of the peculiar character of the masses of adventurers who soon overran the gold-bearing regions, so also the discovery of anthracite coal in Pennsylvania led to the assembling of great camps of speculators and prospectors, wealthy capitalists and common labourers for whom the word Law meant next to nothing at all. The comparatively unorganised condition of new towns which had sprung up as if by magic in the anthracite zones made Pennsylvania in those days a likely jumping-off ground for any man who possessed good physique, a brutal bearing, a disregard of private rights and the ability to impose his ideas upon a band of men of his own kind and kidney. Knowing what we know of the enterprising courage of many types of Irishmen and their talent for the business of pioneering, it is not difficult to imagine that they swarmed to the valuable coal regions of the Quaker State in legions proportionate to the vast immigrant hordes of their countrymen that were then flowing into every port of the United States. Great settlements consisting only of Irishmen sprang up at once in the mining districts of Pennsylvania and this new Irish colony separated automatically into as many divisions as there were counties in Ireland itself, each section carrying with it all the local pride, prejudice and other characteristics which had marked it within its geographical bounds in the old home. In fact a New Ireland sprang up in Quaker State hardly differentiable from the Old.