thing, it was only men in those days that went in any large numbers,
while to-day it is both men and women. From the point of view of England
the result has been in no small degree serious. Of the four million
people who have emigrated since the great tidal wave began with the
famine, nearly ninety per cent. have gone, not to British Colonies, but
to the United States. Of the fifty thousand who emigrated in 1905 more
than forty-four thousand went to the North-American Republic.

_Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_; the Ulster
Protestants who were driven from their country by the commercial
restrictions of the eighteenth century formed the nucleus of the most
implacable enemies of Great Britain in the War of Independence--half
Washington's army was recruited from Irishmen in America; and in the
same way the exiles of the nineteenth century became, and have remained
even to the second generation, irreconcilable adversaries of the system
of government which, by affording for too long no relief to the
conditions in Ireland, was responsible for the flight from their home to
a land which was, by comparison, flowing with milk and honey.

Side by side with emigration goes on another factor in the social life
of the country which is very significant of the stress under which, in
some districts, the Irish peasant ekes out an existence. I am referring
to the migratory labourers, of whom nearly 18,000 leave their homes in
Ireland every year to work in the harvest fields of England and
Scotland, that they may there secure a wage by which they are able to
make both ends meet in a manner which the uneconomic nature of their
holdings does not permit. How small is the diminution in this annual
migration is seen by the fact that the highest figures in connection
with it recorded in the last quarter of a century are those of 1880, in
which year nearly 23,000 migrated, while within the last six years--in