The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

"During the year 1823, Bishop Connolly (of New York) made the visitation of his entire diocese. . . . He extended his journey along the route of the Erie Canal, which was commenced in 1819, where large numbers of Irish laborers had been attracted, and among whom the bishop labored with indefatigable zeal." At that time the clergy of the whole diocese consisted of eight priests with their bishop.

At last we find the "Irish people" at work. The spectacle is full of sadness; and the only emotion which can fill the heart is one of deep pity. In that vast wilderness of the West, for such it then was, along public works extending hundreds of miles, large gangs of men—such is the expression we are compelled to use—are hard at work along that dreary Mohawk River; blasting rocks, digging in the hard clay, uprooting trees, clearing the ground of briars, tangled bushes, and the vast quantity of debris of animal and vegetable matter accumulated during centuries. This was the work which "attracted" large numbers of Irish laborers. They had left their country, crossed the ocean under circumstances that should come under our notice, and landed on these (at that time) inhospitable shores, to find work; and they found the occupation just mentioned. We can picture the "shanties" in which they lived, the harpies who thrived on them, the innumerable extortions to which they were subjected. Bearing in mind that, in the immense State of New York and in one-half of New Jersey, there were just eight priests with their bishop, we may form some idea of the way in which they lived and died.

How they must have blessed this bishop, who had left Rome, his second country, and the noble associations which surrounded him in the Eternal City, to come to the succor of his unfortunate countrymen scattered away in a New World! And well did he deserve that blessing!

But his passage along the Erie Canal could be nothing more than a veritable passage—a transient sojourn of a few days or weeks at most. What became of those gangs of men after, what had happened to them before, no one has said, no one has told us, no one now can ascertain; we are only left to conjecture, and the spectacle, as we said, is too sad to dwell upon.

But, hidden within this melancholy view, lies a great and glorious fact. It was the beginning of an "apostolic mission" on the part of a whole people, a mission which will form one of the most moving and significant pages of the ecclesiastical history of the nineteenth century. Every Christian knows that apostolic work is rough work; the brunt of the battle must be borne by the earliest in the field, that it may be said of their successors in the words of the Gospel: "Vos in labores eorum introistis."

Such being the hard lot of the immigrants in the interior of the country, was that of those who remained in the cities much more enviable? On this point we are enabled to judge, at least as regards New York. In a letter written by Bishop Dubois, and published in vol. viii. of the "Annals of the Propagation of the Faith," we meet with the following exhaustive description:

"At the beginning of this century, the newly-arrived immigrants were employed as day-laborers, servants, journeymen, clerks, and shopmen. Now, the condition of this class here is precisely the same as its condition in England; it is entirely dependent upon the will of the trader: not because by law are they forced thereto, but because the rich alone, being able to advance the capital necessary for factories, steam-engines, and workshops, the poor are obliged to work for them upon the masters' own conditions. These conditions, in the case of servants especially, sometimes degenerate into tyranny; they are frequently forced to work on Sundays, permission to hear even a low mass being refused them; they are obliged betimes to assist at the prayers of the sect to which their masters belong, and they have no other alternative than either to do violence to their conscience, or lose their place at the risk of not finding another. Add to this the insults, the calumnies against Catholics, which they are daily forced to hear—a kind of persecution at the hands of their masters, who do every thing to turn them away from their religion; consider the dangers to which are exposed numbers of orphans who lose their fathers almost immediately upon landing; add to this the want of spiritual succor, a necessary consequence of the scarcity of missionaries; and you will have a feeble idea of the obstacles of every kind which we have to surmount. . . . Supposing an immigrant, the father of a family, to die, the widow and orphans have no other resources but public charity; and if a home is found for the children, it is nearly always among Protestants, who do every thing in their power to undermine their faith."

This picture of immigrant-life in New York was certainly repeated through all the other large cities. Under such a combination of adverse circumstances it is most probable that men and women of any other nation would have entirely lost their faith. Such, then, was the dreary prospect for the new-comers. Who at that time would have dared hope to witness the consoling spectacle which followed soon after? To begin with the dawn of that bright day, we must pass on to a new period of immigration, commencing in 1815 or shortly after, and continuing down to the "exodus" of 1846.

It may be well, before entering upon it, to look at the causes which drove so many to leave the shores of Ireland. From the year 1815 the number of immigrants increased considerably and kept on a steady increase until it swelled to the startling proportions of 1850 and the following years.

It is easy to demonstrate that the causes were twofold: 1. The wretched state of the vast majority of the Irish at the best of times. 2. The periodical famines which have regularly visited the island since the beginning of last century. At any time it was in the power of the English to remedy both causes by effecting certain changes in the existing laws. The first of these is evidently the necessary result of the penal laws which had converted the Irish, designedly and with the wilful intent of the legislators, into a nation of paupers. The second can only be the result of the laws affecting the tenure of land and the trade and manufactures of the country.