The million-peopled city
Garwood, John
1853
They have no Proper Feeling of Independence.
"The native Irishman does not share the Saxon's love of independence. He must lean on some other arm. Like the ivy he needs support, and cannot stand alone. ... It seems a relief to him to transfer, as he supposes, the whole respon- sibility of his soul's salvation to his spiritual guide. 'As soon | |
267 | as I have committed a sin,' I heard a woman say, 'I just runs to my dear Director and tells him, and then he says to me, Dear daughter, you must not do so again.' She evidently thought it enough to have opened her mind to her confessor. Having so done, the responsibility she thought was his. Multitudes of these native Irish really believe that if they confess to a priest they may leave it to him to do all the rest. And this is the substance of their belief."[1] . . |
The same feeling renders them so ready to enter a work- house, and be kept at the nation's expense. "They will treasure up halfpenny after halfpenny, and continue to do so for years, in order to send money to enable their wives and children, and even their brothers and sisters, when in the depth of distress in , to take shipping for England. They will save to be able to remit money for the relief of their aged parents in London. They will save to defray the expense of their marriage, an expense the English so fre- quently dispense with,-but they will not save to preserve either themselves or their children from the degradation of a workhouse; indeed they often, with the means of inde- pendence secreted on their persons, apply for parish relief, and that principally to save the expenditure of their own money. Even when detected in such an attempt at extor- tion, an Irishman betrays no passion, and hardly manifests any emotion-he has speculated and failed. Not one of them but has a positive genius for begging, both the taste and the facility for alms-seeking developed to an extraordinary extent." [2] | |
Footnotes: [1] Garratt's " Irish in London." [2] " Labour and the Poor," vol. i. p. 115. |