Under the Code, and through the extreme poverty produced thereby, substantially all the land of Ireland passed out of the hands of the people.  They became mere serfs upon the soil.  Their tribute was paid through a rapacious agent to a foreign landlord.  The improvement of the land by the labor of the tenant brought increase of rent.  There was no fixity of tenure of the land.  It was held at the will of the agent, reflecting the rapacity of the non-resident landlord.  Upon these holdings the principal crop was the potato.  A failure of this crop was a failure to pay rent, eviction on the roadside, and starvation.  The results, after the enactment of the Penal Code, and during the greater part of the eighteenth century, are thus described by Goldwin Smith:  “On such a scene of misery as the abodes of the Irish cotters the sun has rarely looked down.  Their homes were the most miserable hovels, chimneyless, filthy.  Of decent clothing they were destitute.  Their food was the potato; sometimes they bled their cattle and mixed the blood with sorrel.  The old and sick were everywhere dying by cold and hunger, and rotting amidst filth and vermin.  When the potato failed, as it often did, came famine, with disease in its train.  Want and misery were in every face, the roads were spread with dead and dying, there was sometimes none to bear the dead to the grave, and they were buried in the fields and ditches where they perished.  Fluxes and malignant fevers followed, laying these villages waste.  ‘I have seen,’ says a contemporaneous witness, ’the laborer endeavoring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food and forced to quit it.  I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection.  And I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired parent.’”

All these are not only the horrors of a hundred or two hundred years ago; they were repeated in ten thousand forms in the awful famine days of 1847.  In 1841 the population of Ireland was 8,796,545 persons.  In 1851, after four years of famine, the population was 6,551,970, leaving 2,244,575 persons to be accounted for, and taking no account of the natural increase of the population during the ten years.  Not less than a million and a half of these died of starvation and the fevers brought on by famine.  The remainder emigrated to foreign lands.

In this account of the Sorrows of Ireland nothing has been said of the vast emigrations, thousands upon thousands of persons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leaving Ireland under forced deportations, in a practical selling into slavery.  The sum total of this loss to Ireland cannot be less than 5,000,000 souls.  The earlier deportations were carried out under the most atrocious circumstances.  Families were broken up and scattered to distant and separate colonies, such as Barbados, the New England States, and later to the South Pacific.