Page:Emigration - a paper read at the Burdett Hall, Limehouse.djvu/16

 pauperism. Some grand lessons are startling truths in political economy may be still dug up from the debris of the Irish famine. which English legislators would do well to study.

It taught the Irish nation a lesson, which they have never forgotten, and which they never will forget—and that is, that God has given the earth to man. But it was hard to teach the Irish people this lesson, for an Irishman loves his country just as much as an Englishman loves his. That beautiful elegy, by Campbell, "The Exile of Erin," is as true in its description of Irish feeling as it is beautiful in a poetical point of view;—my only puzzle is, how a Scotchman could ever manage to write it. Some say Campbell stole it.

"You ask me," says Oliver Goldsmith, writing to a friend, "how the plague I am so fond of Ireland. Then all at once, because you, my dear friend, and a few more, have a residence there; for myself, I never brought any thing out of Ireland, but my brogue and my blunders, so that my affection must appear as ridiculous as that of the Scotchman who refused to be cured of the itch, because it made him unco' fond of his wife and bonny Inverary!"

The builders of Babel required the performance of a miracle to induce them to migrate and spread themselves abroad upon the earth, but it required something more terrible than this to induce the Irish to emigrate: it required a fearful famine. The bird that will not leave its nest at the approach of winter, for more genial climes, will be shaken out of it by the storms of spring; the boy who would not come down from the tree by the application of a little gentle pressure, was "pelted heartily with stones." I do not think I overstate the number, when I say that three millions of Irish people have emigrated since the famine. Bear in mind, there were nearly nine millions in Ireland when the famine commenced, and that there are now—notwithstanding the natural increase of the population—only five millions and a half.

A Grecian philosopher defined man an "unfledged biped." If I were asked to define an Irishman, and to give what logicians call the "essential difference" between him and an Englishman, I should style him an emigrating unfledged biped. For one Englishman who has spoken to me on the subject of emigration, I have had twenty Irishmen. An Irishman, though unfledged, thinks nothing of crossing the Atlantic; his motto seems to be, "A light heart and a thin pair of breeches."

"Pat," said an Englishman to an Irish friend, who was about to emigrate, "you should buy that box." "What for?" said Pat. "To keep your clothes in," said his friend. "And is it go naked?" said Pat. "I'd like that!"—Pat could imagine no clothes but those on his back.