abor-markets of the
Old World. A liberal homestead policy on the part of the national
government, and naturalization laws that were more than liberal,
agencies for the encouragement of settlers organized by individual
States and by railroad corporations and other great landed proprietors,
and the eager competition of steamship companies drumming for steerage
passengers in all parts of Europe--all these cooeperated with the growing
facility and cheapness of steam transportation to swell the current of
migration. The discovery of gold in California quickened the flow of it.

As if it had been the divine purpose not only to draw forth, but to
drive forth, the populations of the Old World to make their homes in the
New, there was added to all these causes conducive to migration the
Irish famine of 1846-47, and the futile revolutions of 1848, with the
tyrannical reactions which followed them. But the great stimulus to
migration was the success and prosperity that attended it. It was
"success that succeeded." The great emigration agent was the letter
written to his old home by the new settler, in multitudes of cases
inclosing funds to pay the passage of friends whom he had left behind
him.

The great immigration that began about 1845 is distinguished from some
of the early colonizations in that it was in no sense a religious
movement. Very grave religious results were to issue from it; but they
were to be achieved through the unconscious cooeperation of a multitude
of individuals each intent with singleness of vision on his own
individual ends. It is by such unconscious cooeperation that the
directing mind and the overruling hand of God in history are most
signally illustrated.

In the first rush of this increased immigration by far the greatest
contributor of new population was Ireland. It not only surpassed any
other country in the number of its immigrants, but in the height of the
Irish exodus, in the decade 1840-50, it nearly equaled all other
countries of the world together. The incoming Irish millions were almost
solidly Roman Catholic. The measures taken by the British government for
many generations to attach the Irish people to the crown and convert
them to the English standard of Protestantism had had the result of
discharging upon our shores a people distinguished above all Christendom
besides for its ardent and unreserved devotion to the Roman Church, and
hardly less distinguished for its hatred to England.