ABSTRACT
Seldom has a nation experienced so definite an ending-point and a starting-point in its history as Ireland had in the Great Famine. The Repeal movement, the insurrectionary and even the constitutional agitation spirit all suddenly collapsed. The country lay prostrate, and in the course of a few years the population declined by some two millions. Emigration to America set in with a vast and steady flow (in 1852 there were two hundred and twenty thousand emigrants) and continuing for the next sixty years kept the population at home in a state of decline and made a greater Ireland in America of millions to whom Ireland has been either a passionate memory or an ancestral poetry. Those who emigrated did so for the most part at their own expense and in turn sent back the money for their relatives to follow them, so that the Irish in America have never felt gratitude to England even for that State-provided emigration which should have been an Imperial duty. Great numbers also crossed over into the English manufacturing towns or London. The support given by the Irish abroad in money to Irish political causes as well as to revolutionary agitation, and the way they have helped to make the Irish question a world one has been of momentous effect.
