OCR Text |
Show A Timely Suggestion. MICHAEL DAVITT suggests that the Catholic bishops of Ireland should send a commission to the United States to inquire, into the condition condi-tion of Irish emigrants, and he thus indicates the lines upon which it might proceed: ' "Let them begin at New York and in the large cities by investigating how-many how-many unfortunate young girls, driven from Irish homes to seek a livelihood across the water, how many of those, owing to the circumstances .of their new life, found their way In the end to a life of shame. Let this commission go to the principal factory towns of the New England states, to Fall River and the other cities, and inquire into the conditions of factory employment under un-der which these Irish girls are trying to earn something for themselves arid a little to help pay the rent at home. Let this commission extend its inquiry into the coal fields and ironworks of Pennsylvania and Illinois, and, after taking a purview of the industrial life and social conditions of the great centers cen-ters of population in America, let them come back and write out their report, and let that resort te read on some Sunday from every single altar throughout the length and breadth of Ireland." On the same subject, "The Irish in America," Father Shinnors, O. M. L, has an article In last month's Irish Ecclesiastical Ec-clesiastical Record in which contrasting contrast-ing peasant life in Ireland with the condition of the Irish laborer in America, Amer-ica, he says: "Usually Irish immigrants live in great cities, where the workingman cannot have a house of his own, and where the sacred privacy of family life can hardly exist. In one great rookery (flats) you have as many as twenty families herded together, living in conditions con-ditions that are necessarily unsanitary, and breathing an atmosphere that is necessarily impure. I have often thanked God for his goodness to our poor people as I contrasted the life even of our most impoverished laborer with the condition of the miner or the navy or the dock worker in America or England. If I had to choose between be-tween the. two, I should undoubtedly prefer to live on fifteen shillings a week in a little cottage, sweetened by God's air and light, on an Irish hillside, than lead the life of a. laborer, skilled or unskilled, in the states, earning my $15 or $20 a week." Father Lambert says most sensible sen-sible people .would choose with Father Shinnors, even though Irish laborers in. America, received such pay as he mentions, the fact being that half those figures ' would be much nearer the average mark. |