"THE LAZY IRISH."

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 23, 28 September 1883, Page 27

"THE LAZY IRISH."

(From the Brisbane Australian.) Gens supra modum, superstitioni dedita, is the character given by P the greatest of Boman historians to the children of Israel. Looking m this two thousand years' distance we cannot but see tice and absurdity of such words in the mouth of Tacitus. c afforded perching places to a thousand ridiculous forms ap. The fetishism of Mauritania, the grovelling fables of Anubis, the indecencies of Olympus, and the inhumanities V- all had their sacred fanes within the walls of the City. The one Diety excluded was the God of Israel. He whose great works are so simply chronicled in the first chapters of Genesis, who is prayed to in the Psalms, and who from Mount Sinai issues, in the Ten Commandments, that code to which man owes so much, was not recognised on the banks of the Tiber : nay, His cultus is stigmatised by the Pagan indweller as a superstition, and His worshippers as the most superstitious of all the subjects of the L«sars. We wonder what any philosopher of the piesant day thinks of the great annalist's judgment between the paganisms thick in ail the streets about him, and the pure doctrine of Sinai's Ten Commandments ? How indignantly does the history of to-day strike out tbe phrase Gens yrcs caterls superstitioni dedita. t „ ;Y 77 i milCh - akinto i bedpgmatiziD S tengnaire used by Agricola's SSTiS ftT f - Q + re e^ dto the "superstition "of the Israelites, is that used by nineteenth century historians when speaking of the ••laziness of the Irish." You find the latter in the? own count??

l ? g m£ c work o£ t'eastßt ' eastB o£ burden on the most miserable potato diet. The farms, in hundreds of thousands of cases, are too small and the farmers too poor to allow of agricultural engines or of borse assistance. The work is done by the manual labour of the household. Outside of Ireland the evidences of their bona fide desire for work are still more visible.. Every hive of industry in England and Scotland is thick with Irish. In the Mersey cities or those of the Clyde, we do not find them keeping cafes or res' taurante, they are not amongst the trim clerks, the cheery busconductors, the sweet-tongued book agents ; no, the Irishman is tound in Liverpool and Glasgow on the wharves, stooping over the crane-handle, or sweating in the stuffy hold of some ontward-bound snip, ever with his body bent, his guernsey saturated with sweat, his norney hand clenched on some heavy weight,— a being recognised as devoted to hard work almost as the great wheel that drives the ii a J etwr^ ers of t0 ' day call the Irish "lazy," just as Tacitas called the children of Jerusalem « svperstitiani dedtti." These Irish, almost alone, reap the harvest in Suffolk, Norfolk, and Essex. They cut open the hills and fill up the valleys, from Cape Baca to the Golden Gates, for the American railways. They take the enemy's hrst bullets at Ferozapore and Meanee. In Australia,— whoever may be the shepherd, or overseer, or ration-carrier,-— the Irishman general yis not. His lot is to burst heavy logs for fencing, to sink post-holes in unbroken ground under a pitiless sun. In the shearing shed his sweat runs fastest. In the deep mine his is the arm that drives the most advanced of the line of picks. Still to the on-lookers of the English-speaking world the Irish are " lazy," just as to the Komans of the first centuries the children of the Twelve Tribes were superstitious.