of emigrant ships was at the time all but unheard of, and statistics show that the densely crowded condition of the vessels which took them away produced the most terrible mortality amongst the already enfeebled people who crowded them, a full fifth of the steerage passengers in many cases, it is said, dying upon the voyage, and many more immediately after landing.  The result of all this has been 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 interest in it.  In 1850 an attempt at a union of North and South was