Anti-slavery bugle. [volume] (New-Lisbon, Ohio) 1845-1861, 1845-11-28

ly for a scanty pittance, and of that pittance
the landlord and the priest must receive a
share. They are strangers to the comforts of
life, and they exc out their miserable exist
ence day by day amid sorrow and privation.
Their children are reared in wretchedness
and want, they are doomed to grow up in ig-
n%orance, and probably to entail upon their
postetity, the heirloom of the Irish peasant
ry-abject ~poverty-which was all their pa
rents had to bequeath to them. Guant star
vation is the constant companion of the peas
ant through life, and at death those who
strive to give him an "iAigant i0ake and a
dacet berrien,"'i in order to do so, must make
their own condition more wretched, and if
possible their own cabins more destitute.
Such is the condition of thousands and
tens of thousands of Ireland's suffering poor,
and who that has humanity in his bosom
does not commiserate their hapless LOTT
Were we not accustomed to looking upon
scenes darker still, upon degradation deeper
than theirs, upon suflerings more intense, the
sympathies of our nature would be entirely
engrossed with the misery of the furnishing
peasant. But what, we ask, is the poverty of
the lrishman compared with the wretchedness
of the American Slavel Go, ask the peasant to
exchange his rude home, fora southern planta-
ton, ask him to put himself into the power
of an irresponsible master, to surrender soul
and body to one who may lawfully whip
and chain, and torture him, who may burn
his face with a red hot branding iron, and
hunt him down with savage blood-hounds!
Ask him to lay down his humanity, and en-
roll himself with the brute creation, to give
up the right to his own body. the right to
the wife of his bosom, and the children of
his love! Ask him, ifyou please, to exchange
conditions with the most comfortable, well
fed, and well clothed American Slave, and
he will deem you a mailman or a fool!-
He knows that although he is deeply oppress-
ed, and obliged to face all the horrors of pow
erty, yet he has rights, Tor the loss of which,
he never could be recompensed by food, and
clothing, and shelter. He is indeed COM
pared to the slave, a free man, and lie feels
that it is so. His potatoe and his pig may
be taken from him, but the landlord dare not
sell his children for debt, dare not seize his
wife and dispose of her to the highest bidder,
dare not claim him as his chattel personal,
and load him with chains and letters. If he
dies of want or starvation, he dies as a man
and not as a brute.
"Better to live in Freedoms hall
With a cold damp floor, and Wondering wall,
Than to bow the neck, and bend the knee
In the proudest palace of slavery"
When we see the bodies of the Irish peas
antry mangled and fostering from the deep
gashes of the whip; when we hear the dis
NAL wailings, and piteous shrieks of helpless
victims, naked, stretched and bound with
cords, and see the warm blood following eve
ry stroke of the lash; when we sec them
chained to the floor or ceiling, and barely
food sufficient allowed to keep body and soul
longed; when we see them writing under
the eXcruciating pain of the gag and the
thumb-screw; when we see them hung UP
between the heavens and the earth and roast
ed by a slow fire, without Judge or jury:
when we see Irish children sold by the pound
and a million and a half of Irish women shu
up in one great Brothel, and forced to sub
nit to the unhallowed desires of a sodomitisl
community on penalty of death, then shall
we begin to think that the condition of tn,
Irish peasant is as bad as that of the Ameri
can Slave. When British law stretches Oh
its parallyzing arm and says to the intellect
50 thou shalt not expand" says to the mother
for the second offence of learning your chill,
to read, you shalt be shot through the head
when maternal feeling, conjugal love, all tn
sensibilities and affections of the soul ar
converted into so many barbed arrows tina
rankle and tester in the hearts core, then shaI
we begin to think the Irish peasant is a
wretched as the American Slave. w
would be the last to divertsympathy from til
Irish people, for heaven knows they nee
it, and assistance too, in their struggles ft
liberty; but whilst We aid them, and max
their cause our own; let us be careful to d
our duty towards those whom we have b'
meath our W feet, and whose condition
far worse than theirs.
SOUTHWESTERN A. S. SOCIETY.
e The Convention which met in Cincinna
on the 18th inst, formed an Anti-Slavery s.
/. ciety with the above title. We understar