From Sinn Féin, August 27, 1910.
During the last few weeks we have had the benefit of the views of men of many professions and different creeds and parties on the emigration problem. On the main point there is unanimity. All are agreed that our abnormal emigration is an evil and a menace and all are agreed that nothing could conduce more to the general benefit than its reduction to normal proportions. This unanimity is a cause for greater satisfaction than may appear on the surface to those who are unaware that for half-a-century opinion in Ireland was sharply divided on the question. Emigration was long boomed in Ireland by Irishmen—some of whom were knaves, but others of whom were sincere—as a panacea for Irish ills. The English Free Traders, who deprived our agriculture of its natural protection and threw hundreds of thousands of acres out of tillage and left hundreds of thousands of hands without work and mouths without food, announced that the poverty they had artificially created was caused by overpopulation, and the remedy was to ship the population off. They found in Ireland not only humbugs, but simple, honest men to support the view, and to vaguely inculcate in the peasant’s mind that when he left his country he left it for his country’s good. Another section, with no patriotism, but a pseudo-piety, landed emigration in the belief that the Catholic Irish emigrant would spread the Catholic faith. With a conception of the Creator born in lack of intellect, it was urged that God had afflicted and chastised the people of this country to the end that they should flee from it and involuntarily spread the faith. Instead, fifty per cent of them lost their own. It seems incredible to-day that an Irish journalist forty years ago who denounced emigration was assailed as a concealed enemy of religion. Yet such was the case. The Irish peasant was not only driven to emigrate—he was encouraged to do so by men on both political sides.
The folly is dead now—so dead that most have forgotten it ever existed, but the evil remains. We have, however, a united opinion against emigration. Nationalist and Unionist, Catholic and Protestant, alike deplore it. In the communications we have had with men of all sections we have had no difficulty in getting their opinions as to its causes. These opinions vary, but the variation is not great. They are, of course, in some instances coloured by the political or economic views of the writers, but they are in general assent that abnormal emigration now results from habit and false inducement in a much larger degree than from necessity. Our difficulty has been in collecting suggestions for the cure. Most of these are vague, many impracticable. It is by all recognised that support of the industrial movement is essential. Even to the meanest intelligence it is becoming obvious that if we do not support the Irish workshop we must support the Irish workhouse. The evil effect of the ranching system is generally admitted, but the cure suggested is not a unanimous suggestion. Other palliatives suggested need legislation. The English Government is not going to legislate against emigration from Ireland. If it does not work to stimulate it, it will remain inactive. There are certain definite things Ireland itself can do to check the outflowing tide, and the sooner they are begun the better.
A large proportion—thousands annually—of the emigration from Ireland is due to the prepaid passage ticket. The ticket is paid for in America by some person who, not content with himself deserting his country, seeks to induce his relatives or friends to do the same. If the prepaid passage ticket were unknown in this country it is safe to say emigration would decrease by fifteen per cent.
Whatever it may have been in former years when there was abundant employment in the United States, the system is not beneficial to the United States now, when its labour market is overcrowded, not by thousands, but by hundreds of thousands. That a movement in that country to render the prepayment of immigrant passages illegal would be popular is certain. Every labour organisation in America would back the demand, and if it were seriously and actively made by the Irish organisations in America there is no doubt that in a short time the pernicious system would be made illegal. Expressions of sympathy from Irish-America, however gratifying, have no practical value. Subscriptions from Irish-America of a few thousand pounds a year do not represent a hundredth of the cash value Ireland is losing to the United States every year by the emigration of her strong young men and strong young women, on each of whose upbringing a sum has been expended by the Irish taxpayer, for which he gets no return. The rendering illegal of the prepaid passage ticket by the United States Government as the result of Irish-American action, would leave Ireland in possession of some five thousand young men and women every year whom she now loses for ever. They would be worth a million tons of sympathy and a hundred years of charitable donations.
Next to the prepaid passage ticket, the most evil inducement to emigration is to be found in the advertisements displayed in many country post offices and many country national schools. On the walls of hundreds of schools in this country advertisements of emigration—mainly to Canada—are displayed before the pupil’s eyes day by day. For the years of his or her school life the boy or the girl has it day by day burned into the mind, if not by word of mouth by as dangerous a method, that this is a country to get out of, and that it is natural and proper for one to get out. In each case where schools have been turned into emigration traps such as we have described, it is the duty of the manager or teacher to banish the advertisements, open or covert, from its walls. There is no data to form a calculation upon, but it will not be over the mark to attribute two or three thousand of the emigrants we lose annually to the influence of the national school which lends its walls thoughtlessly to advertise every land but our own.
Many of the rural post-offices are equally offenders. The glowing advertisements of emigration agencies flaunt upon their walls, and mislead hundreds to barren lands and overcrowded cities. In every case of the kind it is the duty of an intelligent public to demand the removal of these advertisements, and if that be refused, to demand the removal of the post-office from the person who holds it. Since the post-office is an institution for which the public pay, and which the public must enter, the advertiser has no right to use its walls. When they are used to the detriment of the community, the scandal should be speedily ended by the community.
Even more dangerous is the association of emigration agencies with public houses. It is a scandal that the man who gets six shillings ahead on the export of human flesh and blood from Ireland should be permitted to carry on a traffic in liquor. Who can calculate the number of young men who decided to emigrate from Ireland under the combined influence of liquor and an oily tongue. In every case, therefore, where a liquor-seller holds an emigration-agency, his license should be opposed and renewal refused until he relinquishes the emigration-agency. By this means one of the snares that beset young men in many parts of Ireland would be destroyed.
The suggestions here do not exhaust the programme for practical grappling with the evil, but if carried into effect they will largely minimise it. Out of the thirty thousand emigrants Ireland loses each year, the abolition of the prepaid passage ticket, the removal of the emigration advertisements from the schoolhouses and post offices, and the refusal to permit any longer the emigration agent to be at the same time a liquor dealer, would save Ireland, perhaps, ten thousand. To save ten thousand men and women to Ireland every year is more practical work than any Irish politician has engaged in since the Land League won the fight for tenant-right. We in Ireland can do our share of it, not by appealing to the British Parliament for legislation, but by acting in our own districts the part of anti-Emigration Agents.