"Just as the country was thoroughly exhausted from the effects of
the famine, the whole financial policy adopted towards Ireland
changed, and Irish taxation began to be rapidly assimilated to
British at a time when great prosperity had come to Great Britain,
and the reverse to Ireland. The repeal of the Corn Laws had
stimulated the commercial prosperity of Britain; large cities were
expanding, railways were developing, and the foreign trade of the
country was increasing by leaps and bounds. But Ireland had just
passed through the awful ordeal of famine: her population had
suddenly diminished by one fourth, there had been a universal
decline in Irish manufactures, the repeal of the Corn Laws had
begun the destruction of the Irish export trade in cereals, and
the extension of the Poor Law system to Ireland had greatly
increased the local rates. Just as the famine subsided the results
of free trade began to take effect. Wheat-growing decayed; local
industries were destroyed by the competition of large
manufacturing towns in Great Britain; every class of Irish
producers saw ruin staring him in the face, while landlords and
farmers were further impoverished by the huge poor-rates, which
sometimes reached 20_s._ in the £. The misery and poverty of the
country could hardly have been greater, and to us at the present
day it seems extraordinary that just at this inopportune time the
Government should have thought fit to go back from the
conciliatory fiscal policy which had existed since 1817."
It is not to be wondered at that Gladstonian finance was ever after
looked at with well-grounded suspicion in Ireland.
Another circumstance that has had a serious and lasting effect on Irish
population has still to be mentioned. At first the emigration movement
was largely a flight from starvation, a movement that would have come to
an end under normal circumstances with the end of the famine crisis. But
as we have seen, the conditions were not normal; the crisis was
artificially protracted by injurious financial legislation. And, in
addition, although many of them perished by the way owing to the
abominably insanitary conditions of the coffin ships employed for the
journey, the emigrants arriving at New York or Boston soon found
conditions unexpectedly favourable for the class of labour which they
were best qualified to supply. America was just then opening up and
turning to the new West, and the demand for unskilled labour for railway
work was unlimited. 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.