FUGITIVE SLAVE

"To return from this digression: I could but grieve , joyous as is the prospect before the Irish peasant, that his present condition is so degraded. I belong to a degraded race. Of the one hundred sixty-four million of my unfortunate race, one hundred fifty millions are heathens, eight millions are slaves! In speaking, therefore, of the Celt's degradation, I do not forget the Negro's nor my own sad inheritance of and share in it. How can I forget an ever-present fact? But I must be permitted to say, as I said freely in America , that in no part of that country where Negroes are nominally free (and I doubt if the same remark will not, with some exceptions , apply to the enslaved class), did I ever see such degradation as abounds not only in the towns, but in the rural districts, of Ireland . In other countries, poverty is deepest in towns--it recedes as you reach the farming districts; but in Ireland, the roadside cabin and its inhabitants are as dirty, as scantily fed and clad, as those who swarm in the most densely populated towns. I have seen Ann Street, the worst haunt of the most debased colored population of Boston--the Five Points,the Aceldama of New York--the Moyamseng District, the incomparable , unfathomable slough of Philadelphia's indecency ; but never saw so large a proportion of a population so utterly degraded, as that in the neighboring island... Neither Saxon rulers nor Papal priests can hinder a peasant's cleanliness of person, nor his wife's use of the broom and brush. It is not owing to the rule of one or the religion of the other that a peasant's cabin is, by a peasant's election, a pigstye. Begging, instead of working, is the choice of the Irish beggar. A decent self-respect would make it impossible; but you cannot enter a town, nor stop at a country tavern, nor walk in the streets, nor stroll on a country road , nor take your way to 'the place of prayer and praise', but at every yard or two you are beset and besieged with persons sound in health and strong of limb, with rags and reeking with filth, begging, and doing nothing else you can see, for a living . Kingstown swarms with them; in Dublin they dog your footsteps at every turn. The same is true of them in Cork, in Sligo, everywhere . 'That' you will not find among my unfortunate people, in any part of America or elsewhere." P.256-257, "Great Britain," AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FUGITIVE SLAVE by Samuel Ringgold Ward (1855, 1970)