IRON HORSE 101

It was the fitting climax of a history of neglect and oppression
which went back into the mists of antiquity. Of late the English,
grown kindlier and more tolerant, had endeavoured to make
amends for the wrongs they had done to Ireland by removing
the political disabilities of the Catholic majority and even by vot-
ing small sums of money to assist their education. But the brutish
poverty of a people whom long deprival of property and oppor-
tunity had rendered idle and improvident, remained a standing
reproach to British wealth and civilisation. Whenever in the
early issues of Punch it was desired to depict an Irishman, there
was drawn a poor, fierce, half-mad-looking savage with simian
features, stunted nose, low brow and matted hair, wearing
a tattered tail-coat and broken crowned hat, and squatting
with his shillelagh beside a slatternly hovel or brute-like in the
mire before the figure of a fat priest.

The English were not unacquainted with Irish misery and
degradation in the slums of their own cities. But they never
asked what had created them. The Irishman who fled into
England from his own despoiled land carried vengeance in his
person. Nothing did so much to impoverish and debase the
English urban worker as the inrush of hungry Irish labour
glad to accept the lowest wages and worst conditions offered
by the greediest millowner. Engds reckoned that 50,000 arrived
from Ireland annually, packed like cattle into filthy boats at
qd. a piece. By 1844 there were over a million of them in England.

The slums of Dublin, fouling its lovely bay, were among the
most hideous and repulsive in the world. In the twenty-eight
tiny rooms of Nicholson's Court, 151 human beings lived in the
direst want with no other property or conveniences between
them but two bedsteads and two blankets. These conditions and
the habits they engendered the Catholic Irish brought with
them into Protestant England and Scotland, thus unconsciously
repaying an ancient debt. In the slums of Manchester a whole
Irish family would sleep on a single bed of filthy straw. Many
cellars housed up to sixteen human occupants as well as pigs. A
few hundred yards from the heart of the Empire, in the Rookery
of St. Giles, there were courtyards and alleys swarming with
Irish barbarians, the walls crumbling, the doorposts and window-
frames loose and without doors and glass, and with heaps of
garbage and excrement lying on every floor. It was by their
needs and standards that employers, buying in the cheapest
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