The Emigrants Of Ahadarra: The Works of William Carleton, Volume TwoCarleton, William
General
The Emigrants Of Ahadarra: The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two
Carleton, William
Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
This, however, is a subject on which it is not our intention to
expatiate here. What we say is, that, in all the relations of civil
life, Her people were shamefully and criminally neglected. They were
left without education, permitted to remain ignorant of the arts of
life, and of that industrial knowledge on which, or rather on the
application of which, all public prosperity is based.
And yet, although the people have great errors, without which no people
so long neglected can ever be found, and, although they have been for
centuries familiarized with suffering, yet it is absolute dread of
poverty that drives them from their native soil; They understand,
in fact, the progress of pauperism too well, and are willing to seek
fortune in any clime, rather than abide its approach to themselves--an
approach which they know is in their case inevitable and certain. For
instance, the very class of our countrymen that constitutes the great
bulk of our emigrants is to be found among those independent small
farmers who appear to understand something like comfort. One of these
men holding, say sixteen or eighteen acres, has a family we will suppose
of four sons and three daughters. This family grows up, the eldest son
marries, and the father, having no other way to provide for him, sets
apart three or four acres of his farm, on which he and his wife settle.
The second comes also to marry, and hopes his father won't treat him
worse than he treated his brother. He accordingly gets four acres more,
and settles down as his brother did. In this manner the holding is
frittered away and subdivided among them. For the first few years--that
is, before their children rise--they may struggle tolerably well; but,
at the expiration of twenty or twenty-five years, each brother finds
himself with such a family as his little strip of land cannot adequately
support, setting aside the claims of the landlord altogether; for rent
in these cases is almost out of the question.
What, then, is the consequence? Why, that here is to be found a
population of paupers squatted upon patches of land quite incapable of
their support; and in seasons of famine and sickness, especially in a
country where labor is below its value, and employment inadequate to the
demand that is for it, this same population becomes a helpless burthen
upon it--a miserable addition to the mass of poverty and destitution
under which it groans.
Such is the history of one class of emigrants in this unhappy land,
of ours; and what small farmer, with such a destiny as that we have
detailed staring him and his in the face, would not strain every nerve
that he might fly to any country--rather than remain to encounter the
frightful state of suffering which awaits him in this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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