We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have
immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more
closely the causes and results of this immigration. The rapid extension
of English industry could not have taken place if England had not
possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a
reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to
gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that
the east side of St. George's Channel offered steady work and good pay
for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It
has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and
not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom
enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there
form the lowest class of the population. Thus there are in London,
120,000; in Manchester, 40,000; in Liverpool, 34,000; Bristol, 24,000;
Glasgow, 40,000; Edinburgh, 29,000, poor Irish people. {90a} These
people having grown up almost without civilisation, accustomed from youth
to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring
all their brutal habits with them among a class of the English population
which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and
morality. Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject: {90b}
"The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness,
unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways.
The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his
whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat
to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In
his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that
can be done by mere strength of hand and back--for wages that will
purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to
his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears
a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a
difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides
of the calendar. The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms,
finds no work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by
the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes
possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason,
in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of
degradation and disorder. Whoever struggles, swimming with
difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not
swimming, but sunk. That the condition of the lower multitude of
English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish,
competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to
which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done,
will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the
Irish price; at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is,
superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior,
yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to
an equality with that."
If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish
national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who
migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which
they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The
worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them
little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes
they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only;
whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does
such a race want with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large
towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished
for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely
count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the
first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and
the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses. I have
occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly
populated parts of Manchester. The majority of the families who live in
cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have,
as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and
are now making the English workers acquainted with it. Filth and
drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness,
which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered,
and which is the Irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely
dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The
Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he
was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps
which disfigure the working-people's quarters and poison the air. He
builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is
prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with
himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is
wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his
horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to
kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it,
ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand
times repeated in all the great towns of England. The filth and
comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to
describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a
heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for
his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a
table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his
kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want
of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts,
mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should
he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for
all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in
England. So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now
so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration. And
since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him
out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink
is the only thing which makes the Irishman's life worth having, drink and
his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of
the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the
Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his
contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him
incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The
temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he
gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society
blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of
necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his
savagery?
With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle with a
competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for
this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is
therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English
working-men should be forced down further and further in every branch in
which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such
as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which
requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the
dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a
mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation,
the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all
simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than
skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are
therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers,
bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen
among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to
depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who
have forced their way into other occupations, should become more
civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong
degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in
view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. 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.