Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/521

Charles Dickens] part of the steamer, living scantily on the limited allowance of bread, water, and occasional saloon leavings! They manage, nevertheless, to make a right merry voyage of it, after the home-sickness and sea-sickness are somewhat worn off, and a general acquaintance has been scraped; and on many a night, at sea, you and I, ensconced in the saloon, may hear their merry laughter, their rollicking songs, and the measure of their Irish jigs. And when the last morning comes, ushered in by of "Land!" "There's Long Island!" "There's Staten Island!" "There are the masts of the vessels anchored at New York!" perhaps there is no one aboard the steamer who strains eyes shoreward with such anxious gaze, as do these poor Irish emigrants, come to a strange land and among a strange people to seek the means of bare existence.

Of the Irish emigrants who thus land at the American ports, a very large majority remain where they first set foot on American soil. It is characteristic that, while French, German, Italian, and Scandinavian emigrants are prone to scatter themselves, to penetrate to the Western States, to become settlers on the vast fertile lands which the American Government parcels out and divides among those who will take and till them, to find out new and growing towns, and there establish themselves, the Irish almost invariably confine themselves to the vicinity, or the district of country round about the place where they reach the new continent. Thus it is that in nearly, if not all, of the Eastern cities there is, in the suburbs, a distinct Irish colony huddled together, living in little shanties, or in big houses which accommodate twenty or thirty families, and which is usually nicknamed by the native population "Dublin." According to the census, a large preponderance of the foreign population of the Atlantic cities is Irish; in the Western cities they are exceeded by the Dutch and Germans. Even the Frenchman, belonging to that nation which, of all civilised nations, travels least, is found in America to take more kindly to the life of a backwoodsman than the native of Erin. The Irishman is essentially a social animal; he sticks close to civilisation, hanging about its skirts; he huddles with groups of his own race near to populous cities and towns. The foreigner who visits New York for the first time is called upon to visit a certain notorious district in that metropolis, known, the land over, by the name of the "Five Points." It is in the heart of the lower town, and its name is derived from the junction of five narrow and filthy streets, which meet in a kind of open space in its centre. Here the Irish herd in squalid masses, living in houses where several families occupy a single room, issuing thence in the daytime to earn, or to pilfer, the pittance which is to keep them from starving for the next twenty-four hours. Here one sees the Irish in their state of lowest degradation. Here they are, thieves, vagabonds, murderers, garotters, burglars, here it is unsafe for the well-dressed citizen to pass, even in broad daylight, without an escort: so frightfully desperate is the misery of its low Irish denizens. Still, this "Five Points" district is, in a manner, a political power. Universal suffrage gives the people of the Fire Points control over the elections. There exists a coterie of wretched native American "roughs," bar-room-keepers, gamblers, prize-fighters, who, by acts corrupt, yet shrewd, have managed to get this Irish population under their leadership. The result is seen in the election of corrupt mayors, of more corrupt judges, and of pugilists and gamblers to seats in the national congress. Electoral corruption, intimidation, and bribery, are here carried on openly, unblushingly, and unmolested. It is unsafe for any man to approach the polls in the "Five Points" for the purpose of giving a vote against the favourite candidate. The polls are guarded by troops of ruffians; the population of this quarter is a perpetual mob, ever ready for action; even if the police were not kept away by the corrupt authorities which the "Five Points" have put into power, they would hardly dare to engage with so formidable a mass of desperate vagabonds. The riots which now and then break out in the American metropolis have their rise in the "Five Points," without exception.

It may be here remarked that the criminal statistics of New York, indeed those of all the large Eastern cities, prove that a great majority of the murders, thefts, and arsons committed, are the work of the foreign population, and especially of the Irish. The "Five Points" and the "Dublins" of the Atlantic cities are very pandemoniums of strife and quarrelling; and it is hard to conceive a more abandoned ruffian than the downright bad Irishman. The same spirit which commits agrarian crime on the soil of Erin, survives the Atlantic voyage, crops out on the other side, and fills the American courts and prisons with criminals of a most desperate and incorrigible class. All the virtue and patriotism in New York has hitherto been unavailing to destroy the political power which has its seat in the "Five Points."

But this is the darker side of the picture; it is a necessary penalty for the hospitality which America extends to the vagrants of all nations. While, however, the lower, desperate, poverty-stricken stratum of the Irish do certainly constitute a great sore on the face of all the large American cities, the better and more honest class of Irish are a highly important element in American society. The vast majority of the Irish who emigrate to the Western continent, not only succeed in getting a good living, and comfortable situations, but they give in return an ample equivalent in their industry, and capacity for hard rough work. Probably every railroad in America was built by Irish hands; nearly all the heavy, disagreeable drudgery to be performed in the country is done by them. It is the Irish, and the Irish alone, who clean the streets, dig the gutters, build the roads, make the sewers; the farms