be formed of the treatment received by the wretched emigrants whose hard fate drove them into those institutions. The Committee discovered in one apartment, 50 feet square, 100 sick and dying emigrants lying on straw; and among them, in their midst, the bodies of two who had died four or five days before, but been left for that time without burial! They found, in the course of their inquiry, that decayed vegetables, bad flour, and putrid meat, were specially purchased and provided for the use of the strangers! Such as had strength to escape from these slaughter-houses fled from them, as from a plague, and roamed through the city, exciting the compassion, perhaps the horror, of the passers-by; * those who were too ill to escape had to take their chance—such chance as poisonous food, infected air, and bad treatment afforded them of ultimate recovery. Thanks to the magnitude and notoriety of the fearful abuses of the system then shown to exist, a remedy, at once comprehensive and efficacious, was adopted—not, it is true, to come into immediate operation, but to prove in course of time one of the noblest monuments of enlightened wisdom and practical philanthropy. In the Preface to the published Reports of the Commissioners of Emigration, from the organisation of the Commission in 1847 to 1860, the origin of the good work is thus told:—
- A prominent and much respected citizen of New York, born of Irish parents, eminent for ability and humanity, assured me he never could forget the appearance of a miserable old Irish woman who, as the snow lay on the ground, and a bitter wind swept through the streets, was begging one Sunday morning in Broadway. Her hair was almost white, her look that of starvation, and the clothing, if such it could be called, as scanty as the barest decency might permit. Shivering and hungry, she held out her lean hands in mute petition to well-clad passers-by — her air and attitude as much a prayer for compassion in God's name, as if her tongue had expressed it in words. A This half-naked, starving, shivering creature was one of a ship-load of human beings who had been 'packed off to America' by an absentee nobleman enjoying a wide reputation for benevolence! She was but a type of the thousands whom a similar lofty humanity had consigned to the fever-ship and the fever-shed, or flung, naked and destitute, on the streets of New York, objects of pity or of terror to its citizens, and of scandal to the civilised world.
