From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

The movement against emigration at home has much in it besides the instinctive protest of a nation against the loss of its people. It is in part religious and rests on a fear that faith is more easily lost in America than in Ireland. It is in part no doubt the result of shrinking of sensitive and loving souls from the horror of the great sorrow of farewell.

All emotions lose their keenness with repetition. The fine rapture of a joy is never quite so delightful as it was when the joy came first and was strange. The bitterness of sorrow and disappointment gradually loses its intensity when sorrow and disappointment become familiar things. Even insults cease after a while to move us to fierce anger. The law is universal; but there are some emotions which are only very slowly dulled. The sadness which comes of watching the departure of a train full of Irish emigrants is one of these. We are, or ought to be, well accustomed to the sight. Those of us who have lived long in the country parts of Ireland have seen these trains and traveled a little way in them many times; but we are still saddened, hardly less saddened than when we saw them first.

There is one day in the week on which emigrants go, and in the west of Ireland one train on that day by which they travel. It goes slowly, stopping at every station no matter how small, and at every station there is the same scene. The platform is crowded long before the train comes in. There are many old women weeping without restraint, mothers these, or grandmothers of the boys and girls who are going. Their eyes are swollen. Their cheeks are tear-stained. Every now and then one of them wails aloud, and the others, catching at the sound, wail with her, their voices rising and falling in a kind of weird melody like the ancient plain song of the church. There are men, too, but they are more silent. Very often their eyes are wet. Their lips, tightly pressed, twitch spasmodically. Occasionally an uncontrollable sob breaks from one of them. The boys and girls who are to go are helplessly sorrow stricken. It is no longer possible for them to weep, for they have wept too much already. They are drooping despairingly. At their feet are carpet bags and little yellow tin trunks, each bearing a great flaring steamboat label. They wear stiff new clothes, shoddy tweed suits from the shop of the village draper, dresses and blouses long discussed with some country dressmaker. These pitiful braveries mark them out unmistakably from the men in muddy frieze and the women in wide crimson petticoats, with shawls over their heads, who have come to say good-by.

The train comes in. There is a rush to the carriage doors. Soon the windows of the carriages are filled with tear-stained faces. Hands are stretched out, grasped, held tight. Final kisses are pressed on lips and cheeks. The guard of the train gives his signal at last. The engine whistles. A porter, mercifully brutal, by main force pushes the people back. The train moves slowly, gathers speed. For a while the whole crowd moves along the platform beside the train. Then a long sad cry rises, swelling to a pitch of actual agony. Some brave soul somewhere chokes down a sob, waves his hat and makes pretence to cheer. Then the scene is over.

What happens next in the railway carriages? For a while there is sobbing or silence. Then wonder and the excitement of change begin to take the place of grief. Words are whispered, questions asked. Little stores of money are taken out and counted over. Steamboat tickets are examined, unfolded, folded, put in yet securer places. Already the present is something more than a dull ache; and the future is looked to as well as the past.

What happens next to the crowd which was left behind? In little groups the men and women go slowly back along the country roads to the houses left at dawn, go back to take up the work of every day. Poverty is a merciful mistress to those whom she holds in bondage. There are the fields to be dug, the cattle to be tended, the bread to be made. The steady succession of things which must be done dulls the edge of grief. They suffer less who are obliged to work as well as weep. But the sorrow remains. He has but a shallow knowledge of our people who supposes that because they go about the business of their lives afterward as they did before there is no lasting reality in their grief. An Irish mother will say: "I had seven childer, but there's only two of them left to me now. I buried two and three is in America." She classes those who have crossed the sea with those who are dead. Both are lost to her.

Sometimes those who have gone are indeed lost utterly. There comes a letter once, and after a long interval another letter. Then no more letters nor any news at all. More often there is some kind of touch kept with the people at home. Letters come at Christmas time, often with very welcome gifts of money in them. There are photographs. Molly, whom we all knew when she was a bare-footed child running home from school, whom we remember as a half-grown girl climbing into her father's cart on market days, appears almost a stranger in her picture. Her clothes are grand beyond our imagining. Her face has a new look in it. There are few Irish country houses in which such photographs are not shown with a mixture of pride and grief. It is a fine thing that Molly is so grand. It is a sad thing that Molly is so strange.

Sometimes, but not very often, a boy or girl comes home again, like a frightened child to a mother. America is too hard for some of us. These are beaten and return to the old poverty, preferring it because the ways of Irish poverty are less strenuous than the ways of American success. Sometimes, but this is rare too, a young man or woman returns, not beaten but satisfied with moderate success. These bring with them money, the girl a marriage portion for herself, the man enough to restock his father's farm, which he looks to inherit in the future. Sometimes older people come back to buy land, build houses and settle down. But these are always afterward strangers in Irish life. They never recapture the spirit of it. They have worked in America, thought in America, breathed in America. America has marked them as hers and they are ours no longer though they come back to us.

Often we have passing visits from those who left us. The new easiness of traveling and the comparative comfort of the journey make these visits commoner than they were. Our friends come back for two months or three. It is wonderful to see how quickly they seem to fall into the old ways. The young man, who was perhaps an insurance agent in New York, will fold away his city clothes and turn to with a loy at cutting turf. The girl, who got out of the train so fine to look at that her own father hardly dared to greet her, will be out next day in the fields making hay with her sisters and brothers. But there is a restlessness about these visitors of ours. They want us to do new things. They find much amiss which we had not noticed. They are back with us and glad to be back; but America is calling them all the time. There is very much that we cannot give. Soon they will go again, and any tears shed at the second parting are ours, not theirs.

There are many histories of Ireland dealing sometimes with the whole, sometimes with this or that part of her story. They are written with the passion of patriots, with the bitterness of enemies, with the blind fury of partisans, with the cold justice of scientific men who stand aloof. None of them are wholly satisfactory as histories of England are, or histories of America. No one can write a history of Ireland which will set forth intelligently Ireland's place in the world. We wait for the coming of some larger-minded man who will write the history, not of Ireland, but of the Irish. In one respect it is not with us as it is with other nations. Their stories center in their homes. Their conquerors go forth, but return again. Their thinkers live amid the scenes on which their eyes first opened. Their contributions to human knowledge are connected in all men's minds with their own lands. The statesmen of other nations rule their own people, build empires on which their own flag flies. The workmen of other nations, captains of industry or sweating laborers, make wealth in their home lands. It has never been so with us.