Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/522

512[May 1, 1869] teem with Irish labourers ; they are the best fellers of wood and diggers of potatoes. They are, in America, emphatically toilers by the sweat of their brow. They form a striking contrast with their companion in labour, the negro : all the world over, he has to be driven to his work—all the world over, he is lazy, and only exerts himself on compulsion of some sort or other. The Irishman works heartily and sturdily. He is impudent, he is obstinate, he is inclined to get into hot discussion with his comrades—but he works with a will. I have often seen Irishmen working on New England farms ; I never saw one with an inclination to indolence. This indefatigable capacity for hard toil enables the Irishman to outbid every competitor. And his lot is not to be despised. Let him once find work on a New England farm, and he has capital wages, comfortable lodging, healthy meals, good land to work on, plenty to drink, and people to bicker with. He was never born to manage a farm ; he is not thrifty ; as good a piece of ground as there is in the peerless Shenandoah valley of Virginia would go to ruin under his control ; but set him his farm work—leave him no option but to dig this acre of potatoes, or reap that field of wheat—and he stands unrivalled. The rule is, of course, not an universal one; there are exceptional Irishmen who, from obeying, do learn to command; from inhabiting a farm, and plodding on it, these get to be thrifty and able to manage. Such an Irishman sometimes takes his place among the independent farmers ; one of the richest farmers in Massachusetts—a man who gets from his land some three or four thousand dollars a year—is an Irishman who emigrated to America twenty years ago without twenty shillings in the pockets of his patched trousers, who plodded and plodded, bought a little plot, added to it, and now sends his daughters to fashionable boarding schools, his sons to the university, and his wife to town in a two-horse carriage. Among the farmers in the rural districts of New England—and especially in New Hampshire—it is the custom to treat the labourers and servants much as if they were members of the family. The Irish "helps," male and female, take their places at the table with the farmer, his wife, sons, and daughters ; they are helped from the same dishes ; they join in the conversation, they enjoy their post prandial pipes with the "boss," on the little lawn in front of the farmhouse. They are provided with bedrooms in no respect inferior to those occupied by the master and mistress ; they join in many of their amusements—go a-fishing or picnicing with them ; they sit in the parlour and hear the papers or books read in the evening ; and, in short, partake of all the comforts and enjoyments of home. And the constant companionship of the average New England farmer's family is no mean advantage to the poor, ignorant Irish emigrants.

The New England farmer who so democratically admits his poorest and most ignorant "hand" to his table and his family circle, is almost without exception a man of some education, and of vigorous and independent habit of thought. He is not only capable of reading and writing, but he has a keen love of papers and books ; is admirably posted in the politics and events of the day ; is himself a most enthusiastic politician, and fairly revels in argumentation with a rustic opponent. He has been educated at one of those free schools of which New England people are justly proud : working on the farm, when a boy, during the summer months, and availing himself of the bleak winters to attend the little rustic school which a wise legislation has provided for him. Thus the Irish labourer, separated from the association of other ignorant Patlanders like himself, having in the association of the farmer's family and in the comforts of the farmer's house an efficacious substitute for the public-house, becomes more intelligent and more industrious, and is gradually moulded into an useful member of democratic American society. Treated as an equal, ambition of a worthy kind is begotten in him ; if he be as good as the "boss," and worthy to break bread with him, why not aspire to be a "boss" himself? And so it comes about that now and then examples appear, of Irishmen becoming landed proprietors. But the larger part of the emigrants who penetrate beyond the cities, are of a nomadic, restless, roving disposition. They wander about the country in the summer time, picking up a farming job here and there, indisposed to remain long in one place, working with a will, but thriftlessly spending their earnings as fast as they make them. Labour is so much in demand, that they never have to go far without employment, and in return for whatever work they do, they receive what must seem to them, coming from over-crowded Ireland, a very handsome wage. Notwithstanding all its advantages, the Irishman in America does not appear to take so kindly to farm work as to the irksome drudgery which is his lot in the cities. After all, he prefers to live in "Dublin," if it be only the imitation Dublin which hangs on the outskirts of every American city. Here he has his mates and his wife, and here he cheerfully digs gutters, and clears streets, for the privilege of living in an over-crowded and dirty nest of children of Erin like himself. And here, in the cities, he is a godsend to the corporations, who get their more humble jobs done better and cheaper by the Paddies than by any other workmen.

The mass of Irish remain in the Northern and Eastern States. To the South the Irishman is loath to go, for he finds in the negro a competitor who contests the market with him at great advantage. No white race can compete with the negro on a cotton, rice, or sugar plantation. The Irishman cannot exist on so little as the black man. The Irishman is the more vigorous labourer in the North ; but the Southern sun melts him, gives him sunstroke, paralyses him, while the hotter the day, the livelier the negro. It is amusing to note what an instinctive antipathy exists between these two rival races for securing the work of the American employer. Each seems