EMIGKATION FKOM GKEAT BKITAIX. 215 



They lowered the price of labor in England ; they were 

 everywhere in the* Englishman s way, and the English 

 hated them, and at the same time feared them. America 

 became the Irishman s home. On her soil, and under 

 her mild laws, the persecuted, despised, maligned Irish 

 man raised himself to the first rank;* and the second 

 generation held their head high in all things connected 

 with American matters. On their arrival in America, 

 they lived in the poorest places, often in places where 

 the infamous resorted ; they labored hard, economized, 

 and, with a generous heart, gave their hard-earned 

 savings to their relatives, to enable them to leave a land 

 crushed by oppressions of a profligate and dishonest aris 

 tocracy, who were aliens to them and their country. 



Hence it was that the poorest Irish were provided the 

 means of emigrating to a happier land and an honest 

 people ; while the poor of England had neither the same 

 reasons to flee their home, nor the means to emigrate. 

 Neither have the same class of people the same enter 

 prise that the Irish have ; and instances of this may be 

 produced in hundreds of thousands of cases, where Irish 

 men get as much money as pay their passage to Amer 

 ica, and live on the poor, and even unhealthy, diet sup 

 plied to them on board ship, and are set down at New 

 York, Philadelphia, Boston, &c., without a cent to get a 

 night s lodging. It is not only men who are so situated, 

 but even poor girls, who never before saw aught of the 



* The Irish were the first, or at least amongst the first, to promote 

 the manufacture of cotton cloths from American cotton. As early at* 

 1790, we find that the Irish had been supplying a large portion of the 

 surrounding country by a manufactory established by them near 

 Murray s ferry, in Williamsburg. 



