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CHAPTER XI....concluded
My own previously formed convictions, which for years had been strong in favour of the Irish selecting the right place for their special industry, were, if possible, confirmed by a visit to tenement houses of different classes. I remember one in particular, occupied principally by Irish. It presented none of the revolting features common to the dens already described. There was no squalor, no dilapidation; the place appeared to be in fair order. But the tenants were not the class of people who should have remained in New York. In Ireland they belonged to the rural population; and when I lifted the latch and entered an apartment, it was just as if I had walked some miles into the country at home, and entered the cabin of the labourer, or the cottage of the farmer; for in the accent and manner of the inmates there was no difference whatever. They were all racy of the soil. You could not visit any house inhabited by a number of Irish in which instances of the beautiful charity by which the race are distinguished would not be displayed. Here, for instance, was a great strong fellow, not long from the old country, and not able to get work, listlessly leaning against the door-post of a lower apartment, the tenants of which had given `the poor boy' a hearty welcome, and a 'shake-down,' and `a bit and sup;' though they themselves had a hard struggle to keep want from their humble hearth. There was in another room a mother, with her own young brood, yet who found a corner in her woman's heart for the orphan child of a neighbour that died some months before.
In one of the upper 'domiciles' there were then six persons, a mother, four young children, and a female relative, who was engaged in washing. The husband, the seventh inmate, a labouring man, was out at work. The principal apartment measured about 9 feet by 12; the dimensions of the other, the bedroom, allowing little more than the space occupied by a fair-sized four-post bedstead. A stove, necessary for the season, occupied no small portion of the chief apartment. There was no actual want of essential articles of furniture, such as a table and chairs , and the walls were not without one or two pious and patriotic pictures, Catholic and Irish. The children were tolerably clean, but pale and sickly; and a poor little fellow, of wonderfully bright countenance, hopped about on one leg, from an injury which, owing to neglect, was likely to cripple him for life. For this house accommodation, for this confined space, in which seven human beings were pent up for so many hours together, there was paid $7 a month, or $84 a year. Work or no work--and it was not unfrequently the latter--this rent should of necessity be met. In English money, even at the present rate of 3s. 3d. the dollar in 'greenbacks,' a year's rent would come to 13l. 13s.; as much as would enable the tenant of these apartments to purchase the fee-simple of more than 50 acres of good land in a Western State.
The mother of the children was quiet, well-mannered, and respectable in appearance; and though the freshness had long since faded from her face, she retained the traces of a kind of grave and pensive beauty. She was the daughter of a decent farmer in West Carbery, county Cork, and her husband, now a day labourer in New York, had also held some land in the same locality. They had come to America 'to better themselves,'--'to be more independent than they were at home;' and here they were, stuffed into a little room in a tenement house, with four young helpless children depending on them for support, their only means consisting of the earnings of the father of the family--about $9 a week; out of which everything had to be provided, and at prices so excessive as to leave but a small balance en the Saturday night. A month's idleness, or a fortnight's sickness, and what misery! Necessaries to be had on credit, at a rate equal to the vendor's supposed risk; and to be paid for on a future day. in addition to the never-ceasing outlay for the daily wants of a young and growing family. Here then were intelligence, practical knowledge, special aptitude for a country life, madly flung away; and the all but certainty of a grand future, that is, a future of comfort and independence, sacrificed for the precarious employment of a day-labourer in New York . A few years of hopeful toil, not more trying, but less trying to the constitution, than that which he went through every clay, would have enabled the tenant of that stuffy apartment in a desperately overcrowded city to provide his wife and children with a happy, healthful, prosperous home, which would have been theirs for ever, and from which neither factor, nor agent, nor groggery owner could have driven them. But, alas for them and for him! the ready employment and its apparently large reward, and the attractions of a city, were more than a match for his good sense; and now, like so many of his countrymen, he is as thoroughly out of his legitimate sphere as man can possibly be. I regretted I could not see the husband; but I did, as a matter of conscientious duty, endeavour to make the wife and mother comprehend the magnitude of the mistake which had been made, and urged her to counsel him to free himself at the first opportunity from a position for which he was not suited, and which was not suited for him.
I saw much in other tenement houses--whether houses specially built for the purpose, or houses adapted to that purpose--to justify the accuracy of the descriptions given in the Reports from which I have quoted; but though I witnessed much misery and squalor, and in a few instances glanced into places scarcely fit for the shelter of animals, I must confess to have been more impressed by the sad blunder of these young people--who would have made such splendid settlers in some fertile region, whether of Canada or the States--than with all I saw or heard during the day.
Even where there is sobriety, industry, good conduct, constant employment, the city is not the place for the man bred in the country, and acquainted from his boyhood only with country pursuits, whether as farmer or farm labourer. The country wants him, clamours for him, welcomes him, bids him prosper, and offers him the means of doing so. But suppose there is not industry, sobriety, good conduct, or constant employment, is it necessary to depict the consequences? The once simple peasant is soon smirched by the foulness of such city corruption as too frequently surrounds him or lies in his daily path; and the dram shop, so ruinously convenient to the dwellings of the toiling poor, finds him one of its best customers. If his children escape the perils of infancy, and grow up about him, what is their training, what their career, what their fate? Possibly they are saved, through some merciful interposition; perhaps by the tears and prayers of a good mother, perhaps by the example of a sister who has caught the mother's spirit. Possibly they grow up in industry and virtue, but the odds are fearfully against them; and it is not at all improbable that the quick-witted offspring of the father, who become intemperate and demoralised, fall into the class known as the Arabs of the Street, those victims of parental neglect or unprovided orphanage, that, as they arrive at manhood, mature into a still more dangerous class--the roughs and rowdies of the city, who are ready for every kind of mischief, and to whom excitement, no matter at whatever expense it may be purchased, becomes the first necessity of their existence.
Let it not be supposed that, in my earnest desire to direct the practical attention of my countrymen, at both sides of the Atlantic, to an evil of universally admitted magnitude, I desire to exaggerate in the least. From the very nature of things, the great cities of America--and in a special degree New York--must be the refuge of the unfortunate, the home of the helpless, the hiding-place of the broken-down, even of the criminal: and these, while crowding the dwelling-places of the poor, and straining the resources and preying on the charity of their communities, multiply their existing evils, and add to their vices. Still, in spite of the dangers and temptations by which they are perpetually surrounded--dangers and temptations springing even from the very freedom of Republican institutions no less than from the generous social habits of the American people--there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Irish-born citizens of the United States, residing in New York and in the other great cities of the Union, who are in every respect the equals of the best of American population--honourable and upright in their dealings; industrious, energetic, and enterprising in business; intelligent and quick of capacity; progressive and go-ahead; and as loyally devoted to the institutions of their adopted country as if they had been bom under its flag. Nevertheless, I repeat the assertion, justified by innumerable authorities -- authorities beyond the faintest shadow of suspicion--that the city is not the right place for the Irish peasant, and that it is the worst place which he could select as his home.
The Irish peasant, who quits his native country for England or Scotland, may be excused for hiding himself in any of its great towns, manufacturing or commercial, inland or seaport; for not only may he find employment for himself, and have some chance for his young people in them, but there is no opportunity of his much bettering his condition by going into the county. But there is no excuse whatever for his remaining in the cities of America, crowding and blocking them up, when there are at this hour as many opportunities for his getting on in the country--that is, making a home and independence for himself and his children--as there were for the millions of all nationalities who went before him, and who now constitute the strength and glory of the Republic. The Irish peasant who goes to England or Scotland has little chance of being accepted even as the tenant of a farm in either of those countries--a remote one, indeed, of ever becoming a proprietor of English or Scottish soil; but the most miserable cottier of Connemara or the worst-paid day-labourer of Cork or Tipperary, who has the good sense to push on from the American seaboard towards those vast regions of virgin land that woo the hardy vigour of the pioneer, may in the course of a few years possess hundreds of acres of real estate by a more glorious title than has been too often acquired in the old countries of Europe, his own included--by the right of patient industry, blessed toil, and sanctifying privation.
END OF CHAPTER XI.
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