In the middle years of the last century more than two million men, women and children abandoned the British Isles. The Irish were shovelled out by absentee landlords and famine. The English went west to escape poverty and slums. Sea-sick, homesick, herded like cattle, dying like flies, they poured across the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York. They were swindled, robbed, insulted and terrorized at every stage.