that the inevitable horrors of the time have been deepened and
intensified by a sense of ill-usage, which has left a terrible legacy
behind--one which may prove to be a peril to generations still unborn.
Even where those who emigrated have prospered most, and where they or
their sons are now rich men, they cling with unhappy persistency to the
memory of that wretched past--a memory which the forty years which have
intervened, far from softening, seem, in many cases, to have only lashed
into a yet more passionate bitterness.

In Ireland itself the permanent effects of the disaster differed of
course in different places and with different people, but in one respect
it may be said to have been the same everywhere. Between the Ireland of
the past and the Ireland of the present the Famine lies like a black
stream, all but entirely blotting out and effacing the past. Whole
phases of life, whole types of character, whole modes of existence and
ways of thought passed away then and have never been renewed. The entire
fabric of the country was torn to pieces and has never reformed itself
upon the same lines again. After a while everyday life began again of
course, as it does everywhere all over the world, and in some respects
the struggle for existence has never since been quite so severe or so
prolonged. The lesson of those two terrible years has certainly not been
lost, but like all such lessons it has left deep scars which can never
be healed. Men and women, still alive who remember the famine, look back
across it as we all look back across some personal grief, some
catastrophe which has shattered our lives and made havoc of everything
we cared for. We, too, go on again after a while as if nothing had
happened, yet we know perfectly well all the while that matters are not
the least as they were before; that on the contrary they never can
or will be.

LVIII.

THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT.

The story of the last forty years must be compressed into a nutshell.
The famine was over at last, but its effects remained. Nearly a million
of people had emigrated, yet the condition of life for those remaining
was far from satisfactory. The Encumbered Estates Act, which had
completed the ruin of many of the older proprietors, pressed, in some
respects, even more severely upon the tenants, a large number of whom
found themselves confronted with new purchasers, who, having invested in
Irish land merely as a speculation, had little other in