find what these causes were. In 1846 occurred the
unparalleled potato rot in Ireland, when the year's crop of what had
become the sole food staple of the peasantry of that island was entirely
lost. The peasants had been reduced to subsistence on the cheapest of
all staples through the operations of a system of landlordism scarcely
ever paralleled on a large scale as a means of exploiting tenants.
It was found that land used for potatoes would support three times the
number of people as the same land sown to wheat, and the small tenants
or the cotter peasants paid the landlord a higher rent than could be
obtained from larger cultivators. Reduced to a diet of potatoes by an
economic system imposed by an alien race, the Irish people are one of
the many examples which we find throughout our studies of a subject
people driven to emigration by the economic injustices of a dominant
race. We shall find the same at a later time in Austria-Hungary, whence
the conquered Slav peoples are fleeing from the discrimination and
impositions of the ruling Magyar. We shall find it in Russia, whence the
Jew, the Finn, and the German are escaping from the oppression of the
Slav; and we shall find it in Turkey, whence the Armenian and the Syrian
flee from the exactions of the Turk. Just so was it in Ireland in the
latter half of the decade, 1840 to 1850, and the contention of the
apologist for England that the famine which drove the Irish across the
seas was an act of God, is but a weak effort to charge to a higher power
the sufferings of a heartless system devised to convert the utmost life
and energy of a subject race into gold for their exploiters. Much more
nearly true of the part played by the Divine hand in this catastrophe is
the report of the Society of Friends in Ireland, saying that the
mysterious dispensation with which their country had been visited was
"a means permitted by an All-wise Providence to exhibit more strikingly
the unsound state of its social condition."

[Illustration: MOVEMENT OF IMMIGRANTS, IMPORTS OF MERCHANDISE PER
CAPITA, AND IMMIGRANTS PER 10,000 POPULATION--1800 TO 1906.]

Thus we have an explanation of the incentives under which, even in a
period of industrial depression in this country, the unfortunate Irish
flocked hither. It is true that the population of Ireland had increased
during the century preceding the famine at a rate more rapid than that
of any other country of Europe. It was 3,000,000 in 179