Irish laborer

“ In Ireland, a workman must always spend more for his food, his firing, and the maintenance of his family, than if he lived in France or America. The workman’s associations, which are now multiplying on all sides, will soon reveal this disadvantage to him; he will demand an increase of salary and ruin his master.
I have therefore little faith in the resurrection of Irish industries. ”

“ Good policy requires it no less. Those who, knowing neither Ireland nor any foreign country, take as their sole standard of social and economical excellence English practice, propose as the single remedy for Irish wretchedness, the transformation of the cottiers into hired labourers. But this is rather a scheme for the improvement of Irish agriculture, than of the condition of the Irish people. The status of a day-labourer has no charm for infusing forethought, frugality, or self-restraint, into a people devoid of them. ”

“ It plans to include every worker from the "white collar" to the "muffler" labor. And the laborers alone make up seven-eighths of the population. For while there are just 252,000 members of the professional and commercial classes, there are 4,137,000 who are in agricultural, industrial and indefinite classes [2] —most of the farmers are held to be laborers because outside the great estates, holdings average at thirty acres and are worked by the holders themselves. [3]
There's the revolutionary rub. The Irish farmers make up the largest body of workers in Ireland. ”

“ A newly-arrived American cannot help noticing the deference paid to caste and position; we, who treat Irish servants and laborers so well as we do, are surprised to see how much better they treat their employers in Ireland, and how little kind treatment the working class receive from those immediately above them. ”

“ Many of our people spend part of their lives in one country, and part in the other. An army of Irish labourers goes over annually to assist in the work of the harvest. They cannot be unaware of circumstances open to obsrvation, and deeply affecting the condition of the poor; and they must be struck by the inferiority of their own position at home to that of the English labourer. ”

“ We are happy to state that a large portion of the Irish labourers who have arrived in this province, have, within a period of a few years, been enabled to withdraw themselves from the labour market, to become proprietors of land and stock, and employers of labour. ”

“ They look to their nets and their boats; they sail for Ireland, catch the fish, and sell them to the Irish people. With them, industry brings capital, and forms the fertile seed-gronnd of further increase of boats and nets. Surely what is done by the Manxmen, the Cornishmen, and the Cockenziemen, might be done by the Irishmen. The difficulty is not to be got over by lamenting about it, or by staring at it, but by grappling with it, and overcoming it. It is deeds, not words, that are wanted. Employment for the mass of the people must spring from the people themselves. ”

“ It is the absence of all demand for labour that constitutes the real evil of Ireland. In the distressed Unions a man's labour is absolutely worth nothing. It is not that the Irish people will not work. I spoke to an Irish navigator the other day respecting his work, and I asked him why his countrymen did not work in their own country. ”

“ He [the Irishman] would do the same amount of work at home, if properly fed; but the principle is much the same as keeping a horse without his oats, and expecting him to get through his work the same as if well fed. The Irishman at the English harvest, or as a railway labourer, and the London heavy goods or coal porter, is not excelled in his willingness or industry."—Ib. 196.
"It is a mistake to suppose the Irish people will not work. ”

“ The Irish here, as everywhere else, throughout the United States, constitute the labouring population; excepting negro-slaves, the greater portion of servants are Irish.
Spite of the greatly increasing trade of the city, it is still extremely difficult, nay almost impossible for a young emigrant to obtain a situation in any place of business. If, on the contrary however, he will begin by doing coarse hand-labour, as a miller's man, for instance, or a worker in a manufactory, he can easily find employment and get good wages. ”

“ That employment could not be had. With the suppression of Irish manufactures the demand for labour had disappeared. An English traveller, describing the state of Ireland in 1834, thirteen years after the free-trade provisions of the Act of Union had come fully into operation, furnishes numerous facts, some of which will now be given, showing that the people were compelled to remain idle, although willing to work at the lowest wages—such wages as could not by any possibility enable them to do more than merely sustain life, and perhaps not even that. ”

“ In Ireland even the industrialism is not industrial. That is what I mean by saying that Irish Labour is the exception that proves the rule. That is why it does not contradict my former generalisation that our capitalist crisis is on the English side of the road. The Irish agricultural labourers can become guildsmen because they would like to become peasants. They think of rich and poor in the manner that is as old as the world ”

“ Then the influence of the natural law—sure in its action as that under which water finds its level—began to be felt; and the Irish labouring classes began to pour in a continuous stream from a country where wages were low, and it was not easy to live, to countries where wages were high, and no one need want who was able and willing to work. ”

“ The Irish who have been in this country long enough, and are educated, and have accumulated money, are giving up the labor work, and engaging in the various kinds of business, leaving the labor work to be performed by others, and in such cases they cease to be prejudiced. ”

“ For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status—in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition. ”

“ Three hundred thousand of them in less than my lifetime have left the fields of Ireland for the factories of the new world. Yet I can only rejoice if Irishmen, who are badly dealt with in their motherland, find an ampler life and a more prosperous career in another land. A wage of ten or eleven shillings a week will bind none but the unaspiring lout to his country. But I would like to make Ireland a land which, because of the human kindness in it, few would willingly leave. The agricultural proletarian, like all other labor, should be organized in a national union. ”

“ These laborers are not in Ireland half so numerous as farmers, for it is a country of small holdings, where the farmer and his family are themselves laborers. Labor is badly paid, and, owing to the lack of continuous cropping of the land, it is often left without employment at seasons when employment is most needed. No class which is taken up today and dropped tomorrow will in modern times remain long in a country. Employers often act as if they thought labor could be taken up and laid down again like a pipe and tobacco. ”

“ Even when wages are higher, and work more regular than now, he will require to be secured against bad seasons and the consequent fluctuations of employment, whether general, or local. If the Irish labourer be placed in the same position as the Englishman, with respect to public relief, our peasant farmers and cottiers will, with far less difficulty, be induced to resign the holdings which they cannot cultivate properly ”

“ This erection of labourers' cottages, which is going on to-day all over Ireland, seems to me almost as important as land purchase. If there is any class of Irish more deserving of pity than another, it is the agricultural labourer. He is worse off than the tenants; he has no land, however poor, to cultivate, except perhaps a tiny patch in front of his door; he has no means of livelihood except the unskilled labour of his hands; if he can manage to earn ten shillings a week he is unusually fortunate. ”

“ As it is, when so many of the Irish have already gone, when so many in America think of their friends left behind as to send them yearly £400,000, it is more than probable that the emigration of labourers will proceed until the ordinary wages of agricultural labour will be, in Ireland, about 1s. ”

“ There was no part of Ireland, he said, which might not be made ten times more productive than it was, and yet it was proposed to feed men in idleness in a workhouse. The system of workhouses acted well in England, where a sort of slave labour was adopted in them, to force the idle to seek employment elsewhere; but what could be expected from it in Ireland where men worked for twopence per day? Many expected that a poor-rate in Ireland would prevent the influx of Irish labourers into England; there could not be a greater mistake: unmarried men would still go to England ”

“ Must not the economic conditions, already adverted to, affect the other portions of the United Kingdom? Undoubtedly, I reply, they are coming into operation there as well as here. The influx of the English agricultural labourers into the large towns, is a phenomenon quite similar to the Irish migration to England and Scotland. There is, besides, a large emigration going on from the rural districts of Great Britain. The rapid introduction of agricultural machinery is an index of the rise of wages, and the consequent growing necessity of economising labour. ”

“ For, although the conditions that started emigration have been modified, the habit continued. The enormous industrial development that began in the United States gave unlimited employment to the Irish emigrants, whose numbers never appeared to" overcrowd the labour market. ”

“ Rather than bear the restrictions of a workhouse, the Irishman, if in possession of health and strength, would wander the world over to obtain a living. All the opinions I have collected from persons most conversant with the Irish character, agree in this. Confinement of any kind is even more irksome to an Irishman than to an Englishman. Hence, although he might be lodged, fed, and clothed, in a workhouse, better than he could lodge, feed, and clothe himself—he will yet, like the Englishman, never enter the workhouse, unless driven thither by actual necessity ”

“ I rejoice that labourers in Ireland are no longer content to work at their present rate of wages, but that they try their fortunes in another land. If they were permanently so content, the greater part of this population could never rise from semi-barbarism. I say, distinctly, semi-barbarism; for scarcely any more deplorable condition can be imagined than that of the Irish-speaking peasantry of the south-west, who, by their ignorance of the English language, were almost cut off from civilisation—who could scarcely hope to rise above the condition of labourers at 6d. ”

“ With regard to emigration, although in some districts “there exists a population exceeding that for whose labour there is a profitable demand,” the committee nevertheless consider emigration to the full as much an imperial as a provincial question. The cause of the great influx of Irish labourers into Great 107Britain is, they say, the higher rate of wages which prevails there, and emigration from Ireland would “diminish that inducement, and lessen the number of Irish labourers in the British market.” ”

“ In the villages and country places where the co-operative movement is growing strong, there are those who believe that the new republic must be a co-operative commonwealth.
I WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH IRELAND? OUT OF A JOB Is Ireland poor? I decided to base my answer to that question on personal investigation. I dressed myself as a working girl—it is to the working class that seven-eighths of the Irish people belong—and in a week in the slums of Dublin I found that lack of employment is continually driving the people to migration, low-wage slavery, or acceptance of charity. ”

“ IV. Yet another, and perhaps as surprising a result as any, is the contrast between both classes of people with respect to economy and foresight: The English street-sellers are found everywhere spending all their income in the satisfaction often of brutish appetites; the Irish, on the contrary, save their money, either for the purpose of transmitting it to their poor relatives in Ireland, or bringing up their children properly, or- -if they are young—to provide for their marriage-expenses and home. Such cares as these never seem to afflict the English costermonger. ”

“ Side by side with emigration goes on another factor in the social life of the country which is very significant of the stress under which, in some districts, the Irish peasant ekes out an existence. I am referring to the migratory labourers, of whom nearly 18,000 leave their homes in Ireland every year to work in the harvest fields of England and Scotland, that they may there secure a wage by which they are able to make both ends meet in a manner which the uneconomic nature of their holdings does not permit. ”