In proportion to its total population, Ireland has lost more of its
sons and daughters by emigration than any other country. From
1820 to 1920, over four and a quarter million Irish immigrants came
to the United States. Many were eager seekers for larger opportu-
nities for freedom and economic security in a new land across the
sea; thousands had no choice save that between starvation and flight.
A land which once had a unique culture had been subjected to alien
rule for centuries. It would be difficult to find another country
where the causes for large-scale emigration were so compelling as
in the Ireland of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Ireland was conquered territory. Her people hated not only for-
eign rule, but a foreign church which their conquerors tried to
establish among them. They suffered from a system of landholding
and trade restrictions which ruined their economy and deprived
them of the incentive to improve their status. Fruitless rebel-
lions, periodic famines, primitive agricultural methods, unemploy-
ment, low wages and high rents, and intermittent civil wars among
various factions--these were some of the reasons for the Irish
exodus to America. Minor reforms by Great Britain, though well-
intentioned, did little to alleviate a situation which was basically
unsound.

Economists are agreed that Ireland witnessed a progressive de-
terioration of its farming class from 1815 to well past the middle of
the century. Taxation, finance, and the courts were under the
control of the landed aristocracy. The normal wage in Ireland was
sixpence a day including one meal and eightpence a day without
food. The food of the peasant, in his happiest and most prosperous
times, consisted of nothing more than potatoes, a little milk, and
occasionally fish. Meat was so scarce that many families never saw
it from one year to the next. The peasant's hut, in which he reared a

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