Page:Irish In America.djvu/209

Rh This state of things was becoming more distressing as emigration grew larger, and it even threatened danger to the public health. A number of citizens, to whose notice these facts were specially and frequently brought—to some from their connection with commerce and navigation, to others from personal sympathy with the children of the land of their own nativity,—met about the close of the year 1846, or the winter of 1847. and consulted on the means of remedying these evils. They proposed and agreed upon a plan of relief, which was presented to the Legislature of the State of New York, and was passed into a law in the session of 1847. The system then recommended and adopted was that of a permanent commission for the relief and protection of alien emigrants arriving at the port of New York, to whose aid such emigrants should be entitled for five years after their arrival, the expenses of their establishment and other relief being defrayed by a small commutative payment from each emigrant.*

Figures, however gigantic, afford but an imperfect notion of the work, the self-imposed and disinterested work, of this Commission—of the good they have accomplished, and, more important still, the evil they have presented. When it is stated that from May 1847 to the close of 1866, the number of passengers who arrived at the port of New York was 3,659,000—about one-third of whom received temporary relief from the Commissioners—we may understand how wide and vast was the field of their benevolent labours. But in order to appreciate the protection they afforded to those who had hitherto been unprotected, and the villanies they successfully baffled, it is necessary to describe some of the dangers which dogged the footsteps of the emigrant after landing in New York.

As voracious fish devour the smaller, and helpless of the finny tribe, so did a host of human sharks and cormorants prey upon the unhappy emigrant, whose innocence and inexperience left him or her completely at their mercy; and scant was the mercy they vouchsafed their victims. These bandits—for such they literally were, notwithstanding that they did not exactly strike down their victims with pistol or with po gnard—assumed many forms, such as


 * Now two dollars and a-half.