Irish emigration

“ The whole subject of Irish emigration may be safely predicted to be the key which will unlock the future fate of Great Britain. It is true that, at this moment, every effort is being made by the English nation to conciliate America; it remains to be seen how Americans will be disposed to accept present flattery as a compensation for past injustice, and scarcely past contempt. ”

“ Indeed, if we believe so much, there is a great deal more we must believe. We must believe that all those general incentives to emigration which I have already enumerated, and which have told with such effect upon England, upon Scotland, and upon Germany, have had no influence in Ireland, although the peculiar circumstances of Ireland were so well calculated to intensify their operation. ”

“ But it is time at last to enter on the consideration of what we esteem the first great issue involved in the resurrection of Ireland, namely, all the probable consequences of the present emigration, which is the true point we are aiming at, as our purpose is to show the benefit that Ireland has already derived, and is sure to derive later on, from that incessant flow of the great human wave starting from her shore to oversweep vast continents and islands of the sea. ”

“ In order to judge with proper understanding of the prospective effects of Irish emigration, it is fitting to study the fact in all its bearings; to examine the origin and various phases of the mighty movement, the religious direction it has invariably taken, the immediate good it has produced, and the special consideration of the vast proportions which it has finally assumed. ”

“ They were here from the very beginning of the white man’s settlement on Manhattan Island. Before 1820, no governmental roster of immigrants was kept, but in the eighty years from 1821 to 1900, the United States census bureau counts up a total of 3,871,253 Irish immigrants, nearly 3,000,000 coming hither between 1851 and 1900. That this enormous inflow came from a country that at its highest tide-mark of population never numbered more than 8,000,000 souls is a fact at once astounding and appalling. Ireland literally cuts itself in two to supply the emigration to America. ”

“ Spontaneous emigration, chiefly to the United States, and irrespective of aid from the poor-rates, was exceedingly active from all parts of Ireland at this time, the natural love of country having been deadened by the pressure of want and disease. ”

“ Since the census of 1900 was taken the average arrivals from Ireland have been about thirty-eight thousand per year, which has added at least three hundred thousand to the total of 1900, and, making due allowance for deaths and departures, increased the number of natives in the United States to nearly two millions.
The improved conditions in Ireland during the last few years have caused a considerable decrease in emigration. At the present time a smaller number of people are seeking work in other countries than ever before since the famine of the ’40s. ”

“ They will tend, as the older generation passes, to become more American and less Irish. This is already felt in Ireland itself. Of late years there has arisen a strong feeling against emigration. It is realized, as it used not to be, that Ireland loses those who go. The feeling is quite new. The phrase "a greater Ireland beyond the seas" is beginning to mean a little less than it did, and the general consciousness of patriotic Irishmen at home is instinctively recognizing this. But it is noticeable that this dislike of emigration has not found expression among politicians. ”

“ We all know what came of the selfish policy of the landowners in France before the Revolution, which consigned them by hundreds to the guillotine. A little self-sacrifice, which, in the end, would have been for their own benefit, might have saved all this. The attempt to depopulate Ireland has been tried over and over again, and has failed signally. It is not more likely to succeed in the nineteenth century than at any preceding period. Even were it possible that wholesale emigration could benefit any country, it is quite clear that Irish emigration cannot benefit England. ”

“ During the decade following 1820, Ireland contributed more than forty per cent, of the entire immigration to America from all European countries, and the Irish Emigration Statistics show that between 1830 and 1907 the number of people who left Ireland was 6,049,432, the majority of whom came to America. ”

“ The redundancy of the Irish populaticn is so great, that no one measure can in a short time be expected to produce even an approximation to the great desideratum, the maintenance of the peasantry out of wages. An extensive emigration managed by Government, and in combination with agents in Canada and the United States, would at any rate assist in bringing about this consummation. ”

“ Since 1900 it has steadily declined, mainly for the reason that Ireland is nearly drained of its emigration material, but also in some degree that better conditions are obtaining there. A backward glance shows that of the nearly twenty millions of immigrants from all lands up to 1900 one in every five came from Ireland.
For the eighty years back of 1820 the proportion of Irish immigrants was even larger—probably one in four. And it was not, as many of the descendants of the early Irish immigration have imagined, entirely of the better off and entirely from the north of Ireland. ”

“ The fact that emigrants come from Europe is accepted as a proof that the countries which they leave are ill-governed; and Americans, in dealing with the emigration question, are apt to forget the existence and nature of the forces which induced their own ancestors to seek homes in the New World.
The New York Times declared in an article last June, that there is no essential difference between the two divisions of the Irish in America and of the Irish in Ireland. ”

“ But if we leave statistics aside for the moment, and found our observations on the personal experience of those well acquainted with the emigration movement, we shall find that the great majority of emigrants who leave Ireland for America, or for the manufacturing districts of England or Scotland, consists of unmarried men and women—the junior members of small farmers' and cottiers' families, who are unable to find remunerative employment at home, and set out to seek it in other countries. ”

“ In fact, Irishness as a concept seems to me at its strongest when it reaches out to everyone on this island and shows itself capable of honouring and listening to those whose sense of identity, and whose cultural values, may be more British than Irish. It can be strengthened again if we turn with open minds and hearts to the array of people outside Ireland for whom this island is a place of origin. After all, emigration is not just a chronicle of sorrow and regret. It is also a powerful story of contribution and adaptation. ”

“ Both in Parliament and elsewhere I have recorded my conviction that were it not for the agitation which now scares capital from her shores, and prevents the development of her industrial resources, Ireland might be rendered capable of sustaining a population far larger than any she has ever borne, and no one has deplored in more emphatic terms than myself the circumstances which compel so many noble-hearted Irishmen to leave the land of their birth. [31] But to lament an emigration you are unable to arrest, and which is composed of those you cannot employ, is a useless waste of feeling. ”

“ There is no doubt that the restraints on Irish commerce and industry affected this class more than any other. From the very beginning of the eighteenth century, after the restrictions on the woollen trade, there was a great and continuous emigration of Protestants from the North of Ireland to America and the West Indies. The sturdy Protestant settlers of Ulster simply refused to submit to the new conditions of living in the country, and preferred emigration. ”

“ The advocates of emigration replied to the first question by estimating at a minimum of two million the number of individuals who would have to leave Ireland, at one time, in order to produce there that kind of vacuum which would improve the conditions of labor and the existence of the rest of the agricultural population. ”

“ If Ireland (as it was once remarked to me) could be stretched out like a piece of india-rubber, the peasantry would be as tranquil and contented as that of England. But as this is impossible, we must strive to do what is possible. As we cannot make more land to the inhabitants, we must make fewer inhabitants to the land,"—Sir G. C. Lewis on Irish Disturbances, p. 332.
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The Effect of Emigration on Population in Ireland. ”

“ Tears and howls are the Irish emigrant’s stock-in-trade. I do not deny that this is wrong, but it seems possible that a great deal too much capital has been made out of it, both by the poets and by the politicians. Excepting at the immediate hour of embarkation, the Irish emigrant makes a very good emigrant indeed. If his emigration takes him only so far as England, he becomes at once an industrious, and not infrequently a fairly prosperous, member of the community. If his emigration takes him to America the same thing happens to him, and he has been known to blossom out into millionairedom. ”

“ First, then, emigration has given Ireland and Irishmen an importance in the eyes of the world which they and it would never have acquired unless that emigration had taken place; so that England, on whom in a great measure their future fate depends, is now compelled to respect and render them justice; and justice is all that is wanting to bring about their complete resurrection. ”

“ Where do we get the right to say that the negroes must emigrate?
All such schemes will, in my judgment, prove utterly futile. Perhaps the history of the world does not give an instance of the emigration of six millions of people. Notwithstanding the treatment that Ireland has received from England, which may be designated as a crime of three hundred years, the Irish still love Ireland. All the despotism in the world will never crush out of the Irish heart the love of home—the adoration of the old sod. The negroes of the South have certainly suffered enough to drive them into other countries ”

“ The Irish emigrant seldom or never takes to the land when he goes to America, and navvy work just suited him. To a man accustomed to sixpence a day the wages offered seemed to represent unbounded wealth, and as the news spread in Ireland the move to America, which at the first seemed hopeless exile, presented itself as a highly desirable step towards social betterment. Emigration is now the result of attraction from America rather than of repulsion from Ireland, a fact which explains the failure of more than one well-meant attempt to check the movement by action on this side of the Atlantic. ”

“ We cannot exercise much direct influence upon the desire to emigrate beyond spreading knowledge as to the real conditions of life in America, for which home life in Ireland is often ignorantly bartered. [5] We cannot isolate the phenomenon of emigration and find a cure for it apart from the rest of the Irish Question. We must recognise that emigration is but the chief symptom of a low national vitality, and that the first result of our efforts to stay the tide may increase the outflow. We cannot fit the people to stay without fitting them to go. ”

“ In all parts of the world similar processes are occurring, and it is absurd to talk of Ireland, as the only country from which an extensive emigration has proceeded. From Germany alone, and principally from the North and West of Germany, as many as 250,000 persons have emigrated in a single year, [20] while between 1851 and 1861, even from
Great Britain, the emigration has averaged as high as 74,000 a year. ”

“ But if, instead of the reduced numbers at present left in this false position, the hundreds of thousands who have emigrated had remained at home to breed and stagnate on the overburdened soil, is it not evident that a state of things would now exist in Ireland such as no man can think of without a shudder? ”

“ Even those who most deplore emigration would not recommend a resubdivision for their benefit of holdings whose size at this moment is perhaps below the desirable average: [18] the labour market is only too amply supplied: agitation has succeeded in burking everywhere, except in Ulster, our nascent manufacturing enterprise; [19] what other alternative have you to offer, if you shut up their path across the sea? During the last five or six years, the emigration from Ireland has been a little over 90,000 a year ”

“ From this time a considerable number among the English Liberals carried the sad state of Ireland upon their heart and conscience. Another result of the famine which was to exercise enduring influence upon Irish politics was the emigration to America. The hundreds of thousands who came to the free republic at this time soon made it the asylum of Irish patriots, the hot-bed of anti-English conspiracies, and the source of a swelling stream of revenue for the Irish nationalist treasury. ”

“ Wherever it has been liberated from the English yoke, has not, on the contrary, the Irish race displayed abundant energy, activity, genius? Do not the Irish hold the first rank in the United States, in Canada, in Southern America, in Australia, wherever emigration has carried them. In England even are they not at the head of all liberal professions, letters, the daily press, the bar, science? Those who have seen and closely studied that nation, crushed under its secular burden, ground under the heel of the conqueror, cannot but feel surprised at the bare fact that it survives ”