Page:Irish In America.djvu/237

Irish emigrants of the peasant and labouring class were generally poor, and after defraying their first expenses on landing had little left to enable them to push their way into the country in search of such employment as was best suited to their knowledge and capacity: though had they known what was in store for too many of them and their children, they would have endured the severest privation and braved any hardship, in order to free themselves from the fatal spell in which the fascination of a city life has meshed the souls of so many of their race. Either they brought little money with them, and were therefore unable to go on; or that little was plundered from them by those whose trade it was to prey upon the inexperience or credulity of the new-comer. Therefore, to them, the poor or the plundered Irish emigrants, the first and pressing necessity was employment; and so splendid seemed the result of that employment, even the rudest and most laborious kind, as compared with what they were able to earn in the old country, that it at once predisposed them in favour of a city life. The glittering silver dollar, how bright it looked, and how heavy it weighed, when contrasted with the miserable six pence, the scanty tenpenny-bit, or the occasional shilling, at home! Then there were old friends and former companions or acquaintances to be met with at every street-corner; and there was news to give, and news to receive too often, perhaps, in the liquor-store or dram-shop kept by a countryman probably a neighbour's child, or a decent boy from the next ploughland. Then the chapel was handy, and a Christian wouldn't be overtaken for want of a priest; then there was the schooling convenient for the children, poor things, so the glorious chance was lost; and the simple, innocent countryman, to whom the trees of the virgin forest were nodding their branches in friendly invitation, and the blooming prairie expanded its fruitful bosom in vain, became the denizen of a city, for which he was unqualified by training, by habit, and by