THE POORHOUSE.
When Father O'Shane left for the village of B----, in Vermont, to
administer the rites of Christian unction to a departing soul, the roads
were very hard to travel, and his progress, in company with his faithful
guide, was tedious and slow in the extreme. The call was to a sick woman
named Finmore, who was in the last stage of consumption, and who had
often, during her illness, expressed a desire that she should be
attended by a priest before she would die. Her husband did not oppose
her wish, but was yet either too indifferent on the subject, or too
lazy, to go such a journey as to the city of T---- in search of a
personage of whom he stood in such awe, and knew so little of, as the
Catholic priest. A neighboring Irish farmer, named O'Leary, hearing of
the wish of the dying woman, volunteered to bring the priest, if "there
was one to be found in all America," he said, "provided he got a horse
and wagon from the stable of the rich Yankee." And it was in company
with this simple but brave and faithful man that Father O'Shane set out
on the evening of the widow's death. They had not advanced many miles,
however, when the wind veered round to the north-west, and a most
violent snow storm blew quite in their face. Slow and unpleasant was
their progress over the hard, icy road; but in the course of a few hours
their farther advance became an utter impossibility with a wagon. They
had, therefore, to stop at a tavern; and after a good deal of entreaty,
and after having fed their horse, they succeeded in hiring from the boss
the use of a sleigh to carry them along to Vermont.
"Ye can't travel nohow to-night," said the boss; "the roads will be
blocked up, chuck full."
"We'll have to travel, sir," said the Irishman, "or die in the attempt;
so let us have the cutter. Charge what you have a mind to."
"Why, what in the world can be the matter? Ye ain't subpoenaed, or going
to arrest somebody?" said the jolly boss.
"Ah, no such thing, man," said the farmer; "but there is a woman
dangerously ill, and yon gentleman in the sitting room is a doctor,
going to visit her. Cost what it may, we must go ahead."
"O, that alters the case. Why did you not say so at first? and you
should have had it and welcome. It will be ready in no time. Hitch on to
that new, light cutter in the shed, Sam," said he to the hostler.
"Ya, ya," said Sam; and in five minutes the priest and his guide were
again proceeding on their charitable mission. They reached their
destination about two o'clock in the night, just one hour before the
death of her on whose account they had come such a journey. Father
O'Shane--poor old gentleman!--suffered terribly; had his ears
frostbitten, and two of his fingers frozen. But no matter; a soul was to
be saved, and that consideration alleviated all his sufferings, and
rendered him dead to every thing--cold, pain, watchings, hunger, thirst,
and weariness; nay, even death itself was but a trivial, inadequate
price to be paid by a mortal man to gain an immortal soul to Christ and
eternal happiness.
"'Tis an awful night, reverend sir," said O'Leary. "I fear we can't go
ahead."
"What matter, O'Leary," said Father O'Shane, "as we reached in time?
What is this night and all its violence compared with the sufferings of
a poor soul in the next world? All I regret is that you did not send me
in the sick call sooner. All is well, however; she was perfectly
conscious, and, I hope, worthily received all the rites of religion.
Hold up! you will rest well to-night, your conscience at ease, after
having been engaged in such a meritorious act of charity."
In nothing does the church of God manifest the divinity of her origin
and mission more than in the care which she bestows on her children, the
adopted brethren of Jesus Christ, at the awful hour of death. She
reserves all her good things for this her last service to her children.
She sends her keys there, to the bedside of the dying man, to open to
him the gate to the calm and peaceful walks of justification. She sends
her oils thither, too, to anoint the Christian gladiator for his last
and final struggle with his powerful enemies. She sends her divine
manna, to strengthen him and sustain him for the trying and unknown
journey; and she sends the music of her sweet hymns and litanies to
cheer him on, and the light of indulgences and benedictions to guide his
soul, illumine his understanding, and shed the rays of their heavenly
reflection on the difficult passage that he has to traverse. And this
food, these blessings, gifts, and graces, she has ready for all
repentant sinners without exception, be they the inmates of the true
fold, or straying without the boundaries of the city of God; be they the
timorous souls who are already washed, or the negligent, who have
followed the hard ways of the world. If, in her other functions, the
spouse of Christ is "terrible as an army set in array," "fair as the
moon, and beautiful as the setting sun," in this, her last office at the
death bedside, she is all mercy, tenderness, and goodness. O, how cold,
selfish, and intolerable would life be, if the Catholic church was not
present, on all occasions, with the graces, blessings, and consolations
of Christ!
"O Lord, if it be thy will, deprive us of every thing--riches, health,
renown, pleasure; but never leave thy creatures, thy inheritance, thy
children, without the consolations of thy church! O Lord, the many sheep
that are here not of thy fold gather and bring in speedily, that there
may be but one fold and one Shepherd, as thou thyself hast foretold."
Thus prayed this pious priest of God, after having added another strayed
sheep to the fold of his divine Master; and his soul was at peace.
For two days the storm continued unabated, the whole country becoming
like an undulating ocean of snow. Drift snow, mountain high, was
accumulated in the valleys between hills; whole herds of sheep and
cattle were suffocated; and the bodies of several teamsters, whose teams
were overset, were dug out lifeless from under the drifts by the men who
had assembled with their ox teams and shovels to open the interrupted
communication with the city.
Father O'Shane bemoaned his fate in doleful terms; the more so as Sunday
was approaching, when he feared he should be absent from his
congregation; and he also regretted that he had it not in his power,
according to his promise to the widow O'Clery, to visit her next day,
and provide for her poor orphans among the benevolent of his flock. And,
well aware of the character of the hard-hearted Van Stingey, he
shuddered for the fate of the children.
The apprehensions of the good priest were not groundless; for no sooner
was the body of Mrs. O'Clery consigned to its narrow, cold habitation,
than the official, assisting the children into the sleigh that had borne
their mother's body to the tomb, drove off in a rapid trot towards the
poorhouse.
"Have we far to go yet, sir?" said Paul, thinking that the "county
house" was something different from the much dreaded poorhouse. "I am
afraid Bridget will perish with cold, sir."
"No fears of her; she's hardy, I guess."
"Yes, sir, but her dress is so very light."
"Well, she can pull that ere buffalo around her."
"Ou, hou, hou!" cried Bridget, breathing on her little bare hands, which
she kept pressed to her lips.
"I hope, sir, you are not going to take us to the poorhouse," said Paul;
"we don't want to go there. The priest that attended my mother--God rest
her soul!--told us he would provide for us."
"Indeed! How can he do so?" said Van Stingey.
"Why, sir, I don't know; but perhaps he will write to my uncle, who is a
vicar general in Ireland, and he will send us money to take us back
home."
"Is your uncle in the British sarvice, then, and a general in the army?"
"No, sir, but he is a priest next to the bishop in station in the
church."
"That's it, eh? Wal, I guess you better not talk of going back, any how.
You must live here in this free country, and learn to be a man and a
Christian--a thing you could not be at home, in the old country."
"I beg your pardon, sir," replied Paul; "the very best Christians are in
Ireland, which was once called the 'Isle of Saints,' when all the people
were Catholics; and where I came from, even now, they are all mostly
Catholics. There are in the whole parish but two _peelers_, the minister
and his wife, and the tithe proctor, or collector of tithes; in all,
five Protestants."
"You are a lad, I see," said the official, as he dismounted from the
sleigh and ordered the children to enter their new home.
"O, woe, woe, woe!" cried they, as they found themselves admitted as
_paupers_, and enclosed within the precincts of the terrible poorhouse.
"O Lord, what will we do?" cried they. "O sir, don't keep us here, or
send word to the priest first. I will go to his house, myself," said
Paul.
"Shet up, ye little fools!" said the official; "this is a better place
nor ye think. Ye ain't going to get no potatoes, nohow, but something
better than ye ever were used to. Take these young 'uns to the stove in
the kitchen," said he to an under official. And the sobs and groans of
the destitute orphans were drowned in the uproarious rumbling of the
gong that called the officers of the establishment to dinner, it being
now noon.
The repugnance of the Irishman to the poorhouse is proverbial. Neither
prison, dungeon, nor death is invested with greater horror, in the minds
of the peasantry of Ireland, than this institution. Solely founded, as
they are told, for their special use and benefit, there are instances,
countless, on record, where the affectionate mother has thanked Heaven,
when by fever, plague, or hunger it deprived her of her darling infant,
rather than that it should become an inmate of the poorhouse!
"Is not this prejudice unreasonable and strange?" it will be asked. "And
why is it that the Irishman shuns and abhors an institution which his
English neighbor enjoys and petitions to enter?" The reasons are
numerous, and the difference in the feelings of both obvious and
palpable. It must be first remarked, that the Irish are a traditional
people, and remarkably conservative of the customs and usages of their
ancestors. They look back into the history of their country, or consult
their fathers and grandfathers, and in vain look back for the existence
of a poorhouse, or any necessity for its existence, before the advent of
the "godly reformation" and the established church in their midst. They
heard of such establishments as the ancient "_beataghs_," or houses of
hospitality, which were provided for the stranger and destitute in every
townland, the doors of which were open day and night, and on the boards
of which cooked victuals for scores of men were continually ready. These
were the substitute for the poorhouse in the days when England and all
Europe sent their poor scholars to receive a gratuitous education among
the inhabitants of the Island of Saints. There the poor and the hungry
could come in and eat, and be filled, and go his way, without being
questioned who he was, without being asked for a _pauper ticket_ to
admit him, without being obliged or compelled to lead a life of
celibacy, or running the risk of his soul's salvation, to keep his body
from perishing of hunger.
In a word, when Brian Boru expelled the Danes from Ireland, when Hugh
O'Niel triumphed over the troops of Elizabeth, as well as when Dathi
held the sceptre, or Nial of the hostages planted his colors on the
Alps, there was enough to feed the poor of Ireland. There was no
necessity for a poorhouse; and there is no need of it now, says the
Irish peasant, if justice was done to Ireland. "Give us back our
monasteries and abbeys, and we will bestow you the poorhouses."
Besides these considerations, the English poorhouse has this advantage
over the Irish one--that the former is conducted and presided over by
Englishmen, who have a sympathy for, or at least are of, the same blood,
religion, and race with its inmates. But in Ireland the case is
different. The poorhouses, prison-like edifices, in Elizabethan style of
architecture, presided over by Englishmen, generally, and nominees of
the crown, are a monument of conquest and tyranny.
The inmates being principally "mere Irish," and the cost of their
support derived chiefly from the land, the landlords consider their
health, comfort, or life of only secondary importance. Hence we find the
number of deaths in these charnel houses averaging that of years of
plague; and each pauper is allowed far less weekly for his support than
the lord of the soil allows the meanest dog in his kennel. Add to these
the separation of man and wife, the isolation of members of the same
family, the dangers of perversion and proselytism to the thinning ranks
of the "law church;" and then, if you can, blame the poor Irishman for
his horror of the dreadful poorhouse of England. He saw hundreds of his
neighbors enter the gates of the poorhouse, but he never saw one return
back. Less active imaginations than that of the Irish peasant would be
worked on so as to conclude that some means more _active_ than sickness
or old age were had recourse to, for the purpose of lessening the taxes
on land, by getting rid of the poor.
In truth, the British poorhouse is a great government establishment,
where the sons of the low squirearchy are provided for--a terrible mill,
where the bodies and souls of Irishmen and women are ground up and
annihilated--a labor-saving machine of political economy, introduced
into the world by the robbers of the reformation, in order to get rid of
surplus population, and in order that the Lazaruses of society might not
disturb the false repose of their hypocrisy, by begging the crums that
fall from their plunder-burdened tables!
The American poorhouse, however, is of quite a different description,
and the promptitude and unanimity of the public mind regarding the
necessity of a law to provide for the support of the poor are among the
most laudable traits in the American character. In America, the
patrimony of the poor was never wrested from the church, to which God
committed their care; the charities and bequests of ages were not
plundered and squandered by the vilest of the human race, as in Britain;
hospitals, churches, abbeys, monasteries, convents, and other endowed
provisions for the poor, were not robbed and confiscated by the
sectarians of the new world, (probably because they did not exist
there;) and hence the essential difference between the English and
American poorhouse. There is no part of the Scripture the reformation
people so rigidly adhered to, or now pretend to adhere to, as the
advice of Judas, "Let this be sold and given to the poor." They made the
sale, but the poor they left unprovided for, till their numbers
increased so as to threaten the ill-gotten goods of the plunderers, who
at length passed laws compelling the poor to support the poor. And this
was the origin of poorhouses--a true Protestant creation.