Page:Emigration - a paper read at the Burdett Hall, Limehouse.djvu/17

 I have seen and known young women emigrating with new empty boxes; they like the new boxes, "for the sake of appearance," and they expect to fill them at the other side. If Pat goes unfledged, he has "an idea" that he will be able to feather his nest on the western side of the Atlantic.

Now, if Englishmen expect to do as much in the emigration line as Irishmen, they must take a leaf out of Pat's book. There is nothing better than light weights for a long run: the baggage of the Roman soldier was called impedementa, from which we have our word "impediment." Take all the money you can get, and no luggage that you can possibly do without. You can buy things in Canada—where I should recommend the emigrant to go—as cheap as you can here. There, as Mr. Kitto will inform you, there is an emigration agency, for receiving emigrants, and drafting them on to those who require their services.

I should recommend you not to remain in or hang about large towns. Press on into the country: try and get farming work. Any man can dig, or cut down a tree; and, in farming work, women are as useful as men. If they are not able to milk a cow, they may feed a pig, and help to gather in the harvest; or bake a cake, and keep the house clean and tidy.

Farming work is so well remunerated in America, that the man who follows it for two or three years will be able to purchase ground and turn farmer, and employ labor on his own account.

"I deliberately assert," says Mr. Maguire, M.P. for Cork, in his late work, The Irish in America, "that it is not within the power of language to describe adequately, much less exaggerate, the evil consequences of this unhappy tendency of the Irish to congregate in the large towns of America."

"Two Irishmen," continues the same writer, "were working as helpers in a blacksmith's shop at Niagara Docks, in 1844, and having saved some money, they each purchased one hundred acres of land, at a dollar an acre; one, in particular, after bringing his family with him to their new home, and purchasing an axe, had but three quarters of a dollar in his possession. These men divided their time between working for themselves and others; at one time chopping away with the ever-busy axe, at another hiring their labor to the neighbouring settlers, who were anxious to obtain their services. In the summer months they earned as much as enabled them to live during the winter, when they were hard at work at home, clearing and fencing; and when they had cropped their own land, they went out to work again. At the time of which their story was thus told, they were each in the possession"—that is, were the owners—"of two hundred acres of cleared land, with horses, cattle, good houses, and every comfort that reasonable men could desire."