Life in the Clearings versus the Bush | Page 8

a useless
aggravation of an old national grievance to perpetuate the memory of
the battle of the Boyne. What have we to do with the hatreds and
animosities of a more barbarous age. These things belong to the past:
"Let the dead bury their dead," and let us form for ourselves a holier
and truer present. The old quarrel between Irish Catholics and
Protestants should have been sunk in the ocean when they left their
native country to find a home, unpolluted by the tyrannies of bygone

ages, in the wilds of Canada.
The larger portion of our domestics are from Ireland, and, as far as my
experience goes, I have found the Catholic Irish as faithful and
trustworthy as the Protestants. The tendency to hate belongs to the race,
not to the religion, or the Protestant would not exhibit the same
vindictive spirit which marks his Catholic brother. They break and
destroy more than the Protestants, but that springs from the reckless
carelessness of their character more than from any malice against their
employers, if you may judge by the bad usage they give their own
household goods and tools. The principle on which they live is literally
to care as little as possible for the things of to-day, and to take no
thought at all for the morrow.
"Shure, Ma'am, it can be used," said an Irish girl to me, after breaking
the spout out of an expensive china jug, "It is not a hair the worse!" She
could not imagine that a mutilated object could occasion the least
discomfort to those accustomed to order and neatness in their
household arrangements.
The Irish female servants are remarkably chaste in their language and
deportment. You are often obliged to find fault with them for gross acts
of neglect and wastefulness, but never for using bad language. They
may spoil your children by over-indulgence, but they never corrupt
their morals by loose conversation.
An Irish girl once told me, with beautiful simplicity, "that every bad
word a woman uttered, made the blessed Virgin blush."
A girl becoming a mother before marriage is regarded as a dreadful
calamity by her family, and she seldom, if ever, gets one of her own
countrymen to marry her with this stain on her character.
How different is the conduct of the female peasantry in the eastern
counties of England, who unblushingly avow their derelictions from the
paths of virtue. The crime of infanticide, so common there, is almost
unknown among the Irish. If the priest and the confessional are able to
restrain the lower orders from the commission of gross crime, who

shall say that they are without their use? It is true that the priest often
exercises his power over his flock in a manner which would appear to a
Protestant to border on the ludicrous.
A girl who lived with a lady of my acquaintance, gave the following
graphic account of an exhortation delivered by the priest at the altar. I
give it in her own words:--
"Shure, Ma'am, we got a great scould from the praste the day." "Indeed,
Biddy, what did he scold you for?" "Faix, and it's not meself that he
scoulded at all, at all, but Misther Peter N--- and John L---, an' he held
them up as an example to the whole church. 'Peter N---' says he, 'you
have not been inside this church before to-day for the last three months,
and you have not paid your pew-rent for the last two years. But, maybe,
you have got the fourteen dollars in your pocket at this moment of
spaking; or maybe you have spint it in buying pig-iron to make
gridirons, in order to fry your mate of a Friday; and when your praste
comes to visit you, if he does not see it itself, he smells it. And you,
John L---, Alderman L---, are not six days enough in the week for work
and pastime, that you must go hunting of hares on a holiday? And pray
how many hares did you catch, Alderman John?'"
The point of the last satire lay in the fact that the said Alderman John
was known to be an ambitious, but very poor, sportsman; which made
the allusion to the hares he had shot the unkindest cut of all.
Such an oration from a Protestant minister would have led his
congregation to imagine that their good pastor had lost his wits; but I
have no doubt that it was eminently successful in abstracting the
fourteen dollars from the pocket of the dilatory Peter N---, and in
preventing Alderman John from hunting hares on a holiday for the time
to come.
Most of the Irish priests possess a great deal of humour, which always
finds a response in their mirth-loving countrymen, to whom