There is an astonishing difference in the appearance and behavior of the
steerage passengers who are sailing east from those who are sailing
west. A few years, or even a few months, in America causes an
extraordinary change in the dress and the manners of a European peasant.
You can see it in the passengers that land at Genoa and Naples, and
those that land at Hamburg and Trieste. But it is even more noticeable
in the Americanized Irish who land at Queenstown by the thousand every
summer from New York. The Italian, the Hungarian, or the Pole who goes
aboard a steamer to America with his humble belongings and his quaint
looking garments is a very different person from the man who sails from
New York back to the fatherland a few years later. And the Irish boys
and girls who went ashore with us just as the sun was waking up Ireland
were as hearty, well dressed, and prosperous looking as you would wish
to see. And every young woman had a big "Saratoga" in place of the
"cotton trunk with the pin lock" that she carried away with her when she
left the old country for America the first time. I don't know what was
in those big trunks, although one can get a glimpse of their contents if
he stands by while the customs officers are inspecting them, but you can
see the names "Delia O'Connell, New York," "Katherine Burke, Chicago,"
and "Mary Murphy, Baltimore," marked in big black letters at either end.
And what is most noticeable, the trunks are all new. They have never
crossed the ocean before, but will be going back again to America in a
few months. Their owners will not be contented with the discomforts they
will find at their old homes. Ireland is more prosperous today than for
generations, but conditions among the poorer classes are very different
from those that exist in the new world.
The purser told me that he changed nearly $4,000 of American into
English money the day before we landed, for third-class passengers
alone. One man had $400; that was the maximum, but the rest of those who
disembarked at Queenstown had from $50 up to $250 and thereabouts in
cash, with their return tickets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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