IRISH
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IRISH
that they were already numerous enough to need
episcopal care. Bishop Plessis lias left us some edify-
ing pages in his "Journal" on the Catholicity of the
Irish colony in Halifax in 1S15, and the warm recep-
tions he met with from the Irish during his tour along
the coast of Nova Scotia.
New Brunswick was separated from Nova Scotia in 1784, when the United Empire Loyalists, among whom were a few Protestant Irish, began to arrive. The records of tliis Pro\ince reveal the presence of Irish Catholics even in the early years of the nine- teenth century. The Bishop of Quebec found about twenty families at St. John in 1815, and he named St. Malaohy as titulary of the small church they were about completing there. Immigration to New Brims- wick did not start in earnest until after 1830, when the Irish began to carve out homes for themselves along the beautiful St. John River and the shores of the Bay of Fundy, where their descendants are now prosperous. Prince Edward Island, or Isle St-Jean, as it was originally called, was ceded to Great Britain and made a separate province in 1769. It was first settled by the French, but in 1772 MacDonald of Glenaladule brought his hardy Scottish Highlanders over, and they took up large tracts of land there. A few Irish, from Ireland and Newfoundland, also settled in Charlottetown during the closing years of that century. According to the Abbe de Calonne, a French missionary working among them, they had neither social nor political influence. This was nat- ural and yet, were it not for the veto of the British authorities, the first governor, Patterson, would have changed the name of the island from Isle St-Jean to New Ireland. Irish Catholics continued to arrive every year in groups and singly, and settled on farms and in the growing centres of population. Some of the most distinguished names in the liistory of Prince Edward Island are found among the descendants of those early Irish settlers. Manitoba and the North- west Territories were then, and for many years later, an unknown land as far as the Irish were concerned.
Emigration from Ireland to Canada continued in earnest between 1820 and 1850. Davin asserts that in the two years following 1832 over eighty thousand Irish landed on Canadian soil, and proportionate numbers continued to arrive every season in sailing vessels, wooden tubs most of them that had been used in the Canadian lumber trade. According to the report of the Agent for Emigrants, in the ten years ending in 183G, 164,338 Irish landed in Quebec, "a convenient stepping place on the way to the Far West". Thousands, however, made their homes in LowerCanada. Awriterinthe "Dublin Review" (Oct., 1837) asserts that even then the Irish were an influen- tial body in Quebec and Montreal, and that in the troubles leading up to the Insurrection of 1837 they threw in their influence with the French Canadians and the House of Assembly against the oligarchy that were trying to withhold responsible government.
The cholera epidemic of 1832 wrought havoc among the Irish as well as the French, but the year 1847 will always stand out in the history of the race in Canada. In the simamer of that year, one hundred thousand men, women, and children, fleeing from famine and death in Ireland, "were stricken with fever and were Ij'ing helpless in the seaports and riverports of Can- ada". Thousands of those unhappy people died and found only graves where they had hoped to find peace and plenty. Rarely in the annals of a civilized nation have such scenes been witnessed as those enacted, during the eventful summer of 1847, among the fever- stricken Irish in all the (juarantine stations along the St. Lawrence and at other points in Canada. Numbers of heroic priests and nuns faced death to bring the consolations of religion to these afflicted people, who, conscious of past WTongs, and forced to abandon their beloved homeland, were yet confident of suc-
cess in their fight for existence, if only the chance
were given them, but who found themselves, on the
threshold of their new home, facing a struggle with
disease and death. The official figures tell us that in
1847 four thousand one hundred and ninety-two died
at sea, four thousand five hundred and seventy-nine
on Grosse Isle, seven hundred and twelve at Quebec,
five thousand three hundred and tliirty at Montreal,
seventy-one at St. John, N. B., one hundred and
thirty at Lachine, eight hundred and sixty-three in
Toronto, three thousand and forty-eight at other
places in Ontario; but, owing to the circumstances of
the time and the difficulty of getting accurate statis-
tics, these figures are hardly reliable. Other and
more trustworthy reports declare that the number of
the dead and buried on Grosse Isle alone exceeded
ten thousand, while Dr. Douglas, a medical superin-
tendent of the time, estimated that at least eight
thousand had been buried at sea. The survivors of
the famine years — the few who still survive — recall
with tears the memory of those scenes witnessed in
their early childhood; and yet what seemed an ir-
reparable disaster only proved, as in so many other
instances in the history of the Irish race, to be a
triumph of their Faith, and history has not failed to
record it. The Irish, in 1847, brought their Catholic
traditions with them across the Atlantic, and in those
moments of direst sorrow and misery it was their re-
ligion that buoyed them up. It will ever be to their
glory that, far from yielding to despair at the sacri-
fices demanded, they accepted their sad fate with
sublime resignation, and went to their death blessing
the Hand that smote them. A Celtic cross, fitting
symbol of Erin and her undjnng faith, was raised
during the summer of 1909, on Grosse Isle, by the
Ancient Order of Hibernians, to recall the victims
of the fever years and the heroism of those who as-
sisted them.
The holocaust of 1847 threw thousands of Irish children on the charity of the pubhc. Those of them who were without friends and relatives were adopted by French Canadians, and were, with all tenderness and sympathy, reared to manhood and womanhood. They learned the language of their foster parents, and, as their forbears, the Irish soldiers in the eighteenth century, had done, they married into French families and became identified with the French, very often revealing their origin only in their Celtic names. Their Celtic blood, how- ever, with its concomitant gifts of mind and heart, generously infused into the dominant French race, proved a rare asset to this older people living along the banks of the St. Lawrence, and v/as the noblest requital the Irish could make for the whole-hearted hospitality given them in 1847.
However, accidents of ethnic absorption, such as occurred in Canada among the French and Irish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were the re- sults of exceptional conditions and are not likely to occur again. The Irish in Canada have grown in numbers and influence during the last half-century, and will be alile to shoulder their future burdens alone. The following figures furnished by the Do- minion Census Bureau are official, and show the trend of the Irish element. Catholic and non-Catholic, in Canada between the years 1871 and 1901, when the last census was taken. The fluctuation of popu- lation shown in several of the provinces was not con- fined to the Irish alone, and was the indirect result of commercial stagnation consequent on the Con- federation Act of 1867.
These figures show an increase in thirty years of 142,307. In 1871 there were still 219,451 persons who had been born in Ireland; in 1901 there were only 101,(129, marking a decrease, owing to death or eiiiigration from Canada, of 117,822 in the foreign- born Irish population. As the emigration from Ire-
