Page:The Irish Emigrants Guide.djvu/22

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
13

food or clothing, and instead of procuring employment and wages which would enable him to provide those necessaries of life, he finds hundreds reduced to the same miserable condition, whose most patient and persevering efforts, like his own, had proved unsuccessful. This condition of things, however, mostly results from a want of information and experience. There are others again, (and perhaps their case is even more worthy of commisseration), that land with a diminished purse, where they witness the distress of their fellow-passengers, and fear the approach of like misery, when they find their funds give way under the numerous impositions practised on them, and when they cannot discover any possible means of immediately improving their condition, take the fatal resolution of returning to the land of their birth, with all future prospects blasted, with the inevitable certainty of sinking far beneath their former condition in life, and perhaps doomed for the rest of their days to a hopeless pauperism. Instances of this kind are, unfortunately, too numerous to be merely suppositions, and should, therefore, oblige the intending emigrant to calculate his chances before leaving the land of his fathers, and the home of his affections.

In the present social disorganization of Ireland, it would be a matter of difficulty for one who had not resided there for the last decade of years, to say what classes of its inhabitants should emigrate, and what remain. It has been a subject of perplexity to veteran politicians, in speculating on her future prospects, to decide whether the signs of the times indicate a progressive downward tendency, or