Irish News

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 21, 26 May 1904, Page 9

Irish News

pay immense bonuses to their agents to insure the wide-spread secret and open touting there is for emigrants.. It was discovered some time ago that the Canadian Emigration Uomipanies were actually supplying our National schools in the rural districts with free copy-books, the headlines being all pithy lines descriptive ofi the delights of that charmed region of eight long miontris of snow and ice, Canada : ' Peaches and grapes and apples growing in the open air, free to all!' Think of (he schoolboy's mouth watering as he reads ! ' Laud for nothing.' .No mention of the labor of clearing, of the deadly loneliness. ' Sunshine all summer.' No word of the scorching heat to boys and girls accustomed only to gentle warmth. ' Sleighing and toboggming all winter, under the glorious aurora borealis.' Nothing of the eight! months of snow and frost, often 60 degrees below anything ever known, in Ireland, and no money to buy sleighs, bells and furs, perhaps not even to buy tJhe bare necessaries of life. And beyond all, ah ! beyond all, no word of the sorrowful tales of the emigrants who fell by the way amongst briars and thorns ! Something must be done to stop this insane emigration, or tthere is a danger that while bjeautiful churches are springing up throughout the land, monuments of the Irish people's love of God and their Faith, there may not be congregations to nil them, and, now that theie is hope of the land for the people, that there may not be people, her own people, to till that land. So impressed by this danger have become all who truly love their country and their race, that an appeal has gone forth from the bishops and clergy of Ireland and the) Anti-Emigration Society to the Irish abroad, whether in the colonies or the United States, to cease The Unpatriotic Work of urging their relatives and friends at Home to leave home and country and join them in a foreign land, and for wbat ? Only too often for the poorbouse, the asylum, or an early grave. But, ahave all, they appeal to the Irish, abroad not to send pre-paid passage tickets to relatives or friends, for this, it appears, is the temptation that brings about the greater part of this caJ'amitous emigration. It is hoped that this appeal will be responded to. Ireland wants all her sons and daughters to work for their own land, and not, by selfishly flying from it, to let their soil be owned and tilled by the strangers who will fill their places. As I have said, the clergy and the Anti-Emigration Society are working strenuously to stem the tide, but, alas ' the tide still ebbs from our shores anid only flows back, now and again to cast some broken wreckage on the shores near hospital- or poorhouse. And all these deluded emigrants leave behind them ! At this time of the year, how many look back, straining eyes weariod with the glare of Canadian snow, gnow, snow : across trackless wihite wastes and again across trackless ocean to this little green island, shining now in all the gay beauty of the daffodil month. The trees are not quite awake yet, only just beginning to open their eyes, but the fields are emerald, the ejorse is putting on its golden vest, the primroses are nestling in their hedge, and the daffodils are everywhere, clusters of thorn, waving and beckoning on their slender stems, keeping time to the music of thrush and blackbird that are filling, the air with song. Yesterday I had a letter from an exile in Canada, arid there was a weary sigh in it : 'a long, cold wintter, two feet of snow still on the ground, and it's spring now in old Ireland '' How they must long, the-;c exiles, and how they must wish they ne>ver had listened to the tempter who so lied, who so deceived them by false promises ! M.B.