These Irish were neither stupid nor barbarians. Mayhew often remarked upon their generosity, their ‘powers of speech and quickness of apprehension’. They adhered to a different value-system than that of the English artisan; and in shocking English proprieties one feels that they often enjoyed themselves and acted up the part. Often, a Bolton attorney recalled, they played the fool in the dock, bringing forward a tribe of countrymen as ‘character witnesses’, showing an acute knowledge of legal procedure in their prevarications, and making magistrates dizzy with their blarney. The same disregard for veracity made many of them consummate beggars. Generous to each other, if they saved money it was for some definite project – emigration to Canada or marriage. To bring wives and children, brothers and sisters, to England they would ‘treasure up halfpenny after halfpenny’ for years, but ‘they will not save to preserve either themselves or their children from the degradation of a workhouse…’ As street-sellers they remained in the poorest grades, as hawkers or rag-dealers; their temperament, Mayhew dryly commented, was not adapted to ‘buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest’. To the English Poor Laws they maintained a cheerful predatory attitude. They turned the obsolete Settlement Laws to their advantage, joy-riding up and down the country at parochial expense (and who would know whether Manchester was or was not the parish of origin of Paddy M’Guire?) and slipping out of the overseer’s cart when the stopping-place seemed congenial. They would accept parochial relief ‘without the least sense of shame’.1