OVERSEAS The Irish figures have an utterly different meaning both in their rise and fall. But their fall at home, terrible in its causes, was the next most powerful factor in promoting English-speaking expansion throughout the world. Here we note a curious thing. The effect of American influences on the economic and social life of Great Britain and Ireland has been enormous. The American potato revolutionized Ireland twice, first by stimulus, then by destruction; American cotton and Eli Whitney's cotton-gin turned the old Slave States into the great source of raw material for England's chief textile industry; and, long afterwards, the flood of cheap American wheat swamped the former position of British agriculture.
The American Potato Revolutionizes Ireland.—Of these influences the most powerful historically for good and ill was the strange factor of the potato in Ireland. As every one knows it was introduced by Raleigh into his estates in the county of Cork about 1610 (when the question on the other side of the Atlantic was whether Virginia should be abandoned). Within two generations this facile product offering in good seasons a large yield from little labour became the common food of Ireland. The oppressed and neglected people, growing accustomed to the poorest nourishment in wretched mud-hovels, married young and bred rapidly—en couraged by religion as in French Canada and Italy. Shortly after the time when American Independence was won, the overgrowth of population in Ireland began to be abnormal and even startling as the figures show.
The land more and more subdivided began to swarm with small holdings and young families, more and more dependent on the potato, raised with ease and in quantity on almost any sort of soil. But it was a hazardous crop periodically subject to failure. Minor famines preceded the great one, but their warning was not learned. In 1845 the Irish population had doubled itself within the memory of many persons then living and had reached a figure of nearly 8,300,00o souls. Then Ireland was swept by a catas trophe comparable with the general calamity of the Black Death in western Europe during the 14th century and with the devastation of I7th century Germany by the Thirty Years' War. "The priest hood favoured early marriages. The Irish policy favoured sub letting. Early marriages and sub-letting combined made for an over-rapid increase of population. . . . Nearly three and a half millions of the people lived in mud-cabins, badly thatched with straw, having each but one room and often without a window or a chimney" (Right Hon. Sir James O'Connor, History of Ireland, PP. In these circumstances of life on the margin of subsistence with no resource in an evil day, the terror came like the potato itself from the other side of the Atlantic. The terror was the disease soon known as the blight, turning in a few days the expected food to rottenness.
The Blight and the Flight.—The blight first appeared in America in 1844. The year after, it attacked all western Europe. Twelve months later, in the black summer of 1846, it destroyed utterly the food-basis of the majority of the Irish peasants on their crude little plots. Probably the population had reached its maximum on the eve of inconceivable ruin and may have numbered very nearly eight and a half million. The sequel was exodus. Within one decade afterwards a quarter of the whole Irish people as numbered before the blight—that is to say over 2,0o0,o00 souls—emigrated, mainly to the United States. That outpouring did not cease. In the two generations between the Great Famine and the World War well over 5,000,00n emigrants quitted Ireland —an enormous number relatively to so small a country—and nearly four-fifths of them, with all their promise of large posterity in any new home, took ship for the United States. Many of them, especially in the original years of the great flight, were Gaelic speaking.
Thus by strange fortune the Irish disaster played a great part in English-speaking expansion.
But Total Irish Emigration much less than British.— Still it was not the main part. Great Britain itself, the mother island of the language, the law, the systems of popular govern ment, the machine-revolution and the sea-power, still sent out overseas the largest nation-building forces, though not so large a proportion of them went to the United States. Great Britain con tinued to increase while Ireland diminished. If Irish emigration in the whole century between the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the World War in 1914 amounted to something more than a total of 5,000,0on souls, the number of English and Scotch emigrants, with the small Welsh contingent was well over 9,000,000. Most of them were the pick of the stock. Agriculturists and artisans, they left their native fields and towns to "better themselves" as the word went. After the close of the American Civil War the Irish Celtic emigrants soon ceased to be in a majority. By comparison the English and Scotch set tling overseas outnumbered them more and more thencef orward by two to one for instance in the decade 18 7 1-81, by three to one in the couple of decades thereafter, and so onward in rising proportion. There has been nothing at all in history like England and Scotland together as a reservoir of human vitality maintain ing at home on an area considerably less than half the size of France a ceaseless increase of population, yet as ceaselessly supply ing streams of life to those new nations across the ocean whereof one has become far mightier than the mother.
1790-1928: GROWTH AND TRANSFORMATION OF