August 23rd, 1847: What would Ireland do without the United States, a New York Quaker asks the Dublin committee. The British colonies cannot take one-quarter of those who must emigrate, Jacob Harvey observes; and except to Canada the passage money is enormously high; emigrants to the US "not only relieve you from their own wants, but they assist you by their remittances in supporting the poor who remain behind".
Harvey, a philanthropic exponent of the American Dream, never encourages men of property or clerks to emigrate, "but when we come to the broad-fisted farmer and mechanic, with a young family, I say make a new home for your children in a country where you will find thousands of your own people, and where starvation is unknown".
A new US emigration law is working well. He advises against sailing during winter months: "We receive emigrants with open arms for seven months in the year and this ought to satisfy them."
Mr Harvey reports that industrious Irish immigrants "soon get into profitable employment and attend very much to their own affairs. When they get above the world, their ideas of comfort become exalted and they give their children a good education. Many others who come out are too easily satisfied in the cities; the high wages tempt them to remain as `hewers of wood and drawers of water'.
"They do all the rough work, carrying the hod, paving the streets, digging canals etc and care not much for the comforts of life. These are mostly too old to change their habits, and we must look for improvement to their children, who become Americanised as they grow up. The city Irish, I must say, have not the ambition of the Americans to rise above their condition. I speak in the general; but they are affectionate and kind-hearted, generous to their relatives at home and willing to serve each other."
Mr Harvey wishes more of this class could be induced to go west. "As farmers, they very soon catch the native spirit and long to become proprietors of land themselves. But so long as there is so much hard labour to be done in the city, which Americans dislike to do, the very poorest emigrants, to whom a dollar-a-day is a fortune, cannot be enticed into the country."
Harvey's impressions are valuable but limited. Although an energetic fund-raiser, he is a stranger to the stricken Irish countryside. He has little comprehension of the exodus from Ireland, where tens of thousands of Famine refugees are migrating eastwards, mainly to Dublin port.
In contrast with raucous pre-Famine crowds, their silence is striking. As they pass through relatively prosperous towns, citizens are shocked by their appearance but for the most part shun any contact with them. This is largely because of fear of infection, but also from an aversion to the sight of their passivity and degradation.