starvation is known to have occurred in a close compacted population of over a million, of which it was generally reported fifty thousand were out of employment. Those who needed charitable assistance were, in nearly every case, recent foreign immigrants, sickly people, cripples, drunkards, or knaves taking advantage of the public benevolence, to neglect to provide for themselves. Most of those who received assistance would have thrown a slave's ordinary allowance in the face of the giver, as an insult; and this often occurred with more palatable and suitable provisions. Hundreds and hundreds, to my personal knowledge, during the worst of this dreadful season, refused to work for money-wages that would have purchased them ten times the slave's ordinary allowance of the slave's ordinary food. In repeated instances, men who represented themselves to be suffering for food refused to work for a dollar a day. A labourer, employed by a neighbour of mine, on wages and board, refused to work unless he was better fed. "What's the matter," said my neighbour; "don't you have enough?" "Enough; yes, such as it is." "You have good meat, good bread, and a variety of vegetables; what do you want else?" "Why, I want pies and puddings, too, to be sure." Another labourer left another neighbour of mine, because, as he alleged, he never had any meat offered him except beef and pork; he "didn't see why he shouldn't have chickens."
And these men went to New York, and joined themselves to that army on which our Southern friends exercise their pity—of labourers out of work—of men who are supposed to envy the condition of the slave, because the "slave never dies for want of food."[1]*
- ↑ Among the thousands of applicants for soup, and bread, and fuel, as charity, I never saw, during "the famine" in New York, one negro. Five Points Pease said to me, "The negro seems to be more provident than the Celt. The poor
