labouring classes began to pour in a continuous stream from a country where wages were low, and it was not easy to live, to countries where wages were high, and no one need want who was able and willing to work.
The cheapness and abundance of the potato had alone enabled the Irish working classes to exist on the wretched wages which prevailed before 1846. Its failure, therefore, accelerated the emigration which was already in progress. Liberal contributions were sent over from America in the period of the greatest distress, and it is worthy of observation that these contributions came in the form, not of money, but of food. Nothing could more strongly affect the imagination of a starving people than the large supplies of wheat and Indian corn which then arrived from the United States. They placed in the strongest contrast the abundance of America with the destitution of Ireland, and irresistibly attracted the labourer from a scene of penury to a land of plenty.
Neither the emigration itself nor its remarkable increase is a phenomenon peculiar to Ireland. It appears from the interesting work of M. Duval ("Histoire de l'Emigration"), that almost all the countries of western Europe have increasingly participated in the movement since the peace of 1815. Thus, for example, the number of emigrants from Germany, in the period between the years 1819 and 1826, did not exceed from 2,000 to 4,000 a-year. In 1851 the number had risen to 112,547, in 1853 to 162,568, and in 1854 to 251,931. These numbers, indeed, have not been maintained since then. But in 1855 there were 81,698 emigrants, and in 1856, 98,573; and now the average is from 50,000 to 60,000 per annum.
But it is still more important for us to bear in mind that from England and Scotland, as well as Ireland, this movement is in progress. It appears from the report of the English Census Commissioners of 1861 that 640,316 English, and 102,954 Scotch, emigrated from the United Kingdom in the ten years between 1851 and 1861, which gives an annual average of more than 74,000 for Great Britain during that period.
The same causes which brought about the emigration to America and the British colonies had still earlier produced a large migration to England and Scotland. About 230,000 went to reside there in the ten years before 1841; from 1841 to 1851, about 400,000; and from 1851 to 1861, about 300,000. The number of persons born in Ireland and residing in England and Scotland was ascertained in the census of 1861 to be upwards of 800,000. If we add to these their children and the living descendants of all who had emigrated since 1841, the aggregate will not be less than 2,300,000; and we shall arrive at the remarkable result that, notwithstanding the emigration that has been in progress in the interval, the total number of persons of Irish descent in the United Kingdom, in 1861, was as great as it had been twenty years before.
It is plainly impossible to stop either the migration to England and Scotland, or the emigration to America and Australia. With wages in England and Scotland at two shillings a-day, and the cost
