552 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution

homeland between 1835 and 1850 (and somewhere between 1 and 2 million
people died of hunger on the Emerald Isle), particularly during the potato
famine in the 1840s. An Irish migrant to London remembered:

I had a bit o’ land, yer honor, in County Limerick. ... It was about an

acre, and the taties was well known to be good. But the sore times

came, and the taties was afflicted, and the wife and me—I have no

children—hadn’t a bit nor a sup, but wather to live on, and an igg or

two. I filt the famine a-comin’. I saw people a-feedin’ on the wild green

things.... The wife and me walked to Dublin... and we got to Liver­

pool. Then sorrow’s the taste of worruk could I git, beyant oncete 3

[shillings] for two days of harrud porthering, that broke my back half in

two. I was tould, I’d do betther in London, and so Glory be to God!

I have—perhaps I have.

Following the Irish, Germans were the next largest group of emigrants. After

1820, Norway sent more emigrants to the United States than the number of

people living in the country in that year. At the same time, hundreds of thou­

sands of Russian migrants pushed toward the eastern reaches of the empire

in the quest for land.

Improvements in transportation expanded the distance people could travel

to find work. Seasonal migration took men greater distances to work in towns

This British cartoon from 1850 depicts the expectations of migrants.