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For two million Irish men and women, for whom it was just too exhausting to go on fighting the uphill battle against hunger, opportunist landlords and the stony heartlessness of the government,
两百多万爱尔兰人民，他们早已精疲力竭，只能屈服于饥饿，无力反抗投机的地主和铁石心肠的政府，
there was one more place to trudge to, the ports, which would carry them away to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, they hoped to God, a better chance, a better life.
他们只能跋涉到港口，坐船离开故土，到美国、加拿大、澳大利亚、新西兰，诚心祈求上帝能赐给他们更好的生活。
It would be many generations before Ireland's population would recover to the numbers before the potato blight struck.
要历经数代人，爱尔兰的人口才能恢复到马铃薯疫病大爆发之前。
And in the memory bank of the Irish Diaspora, in Boston, New York or Sydney, the great emptying of western Ireland was above all a British make that an English-plot, little short of genocide.
流浪在波士顿、纽约和悉尼的爱尔兰子孙的记忆中，爱尔兰西部的大逃亡就是不列颠人试图将其英国化，甚至有种族灭绝的倾向。
It certainly wasn't that. Many of the cruelties were acts Irishmen inflicted on each other, just as the Highland clearances had been horrors committed by Scots against other Scots.
当然事实并非如此。许多恶行都源于爱尔兰人的自相残杀，就像是高地肃清运动，也正是苏格兰人自己的罪行。
But Trevelyan and men like him did subscribe to the "Blessing in disguise" theory, in which, as in India, the road to modernity in overcrowded, unproductive rural economies would always be paved with the ruin of villages.
但是像屈威廉这样的人却套用了"因祸得福"这一理论，就像在印度，农村经济负担过多人口且生产率低下，要在这里实现现代化，必定伴随着无数村庄的毁灭。
This is how a contemporary English newspaper summarised it.
一份当时的英语报纸对此作了如下总结。
The truth is, these evictions are not merely illegal, but a natural process, and, however much we may deplore the misery from which they spring,
事实是，这些驱逐行为虽说是非法的，却也是自然而然的，不管我们怎么谴责这一行为造成的不幸，
we cannot compel the Irish proprietors to continue in their miserable holdings the wretched swarms of people who pay no rent and who prevent improvement the property as long as they remain on it.
我们也不能强制土地持有人将土地交给那些可怜兮兮交不起租金的佃户，只要佃户还占有土地，土地就不可能获得高收益。
For many Irish on both sides of the Atlantic, Trevelyan was to blame.
对大西洋两岸漂泊的爱尔兰人来说，屈威廉的确是罪魁祸首。
John Mitchell, a journalist and the most eloquently bitter of the Anglophobes, wrote:
约翰·米切尔，一名记者同时也是一名雄辩的反英者，写道：
I saw Trevelyan's claw in the vitals of those children. His red tape would draw them to death.
在这些孩子身上我都能看到屈威廉的魔爪。他的恶行最终将会逼死他们。
The price of this religious devotion to the Victorian bible of free trade was a million dead and another two million uprooted as emigrants, more than a third of the total population of Ireland.
此次维多利亚式的自由贸易，代价是百万人的死亡和两百万人背井离乡移民他国，人数超过了当时爱尔兰总人口的三分之一。
It was perhaps the greatest peacetime calamity in all of 19th-century European history.
这应该是十九世纪整个欧洲历史上和平时期最大的灾难。
And it happened, not just on the doorstep of the richest country in the world, but inside our own house.
对于当时最富裕的国家来说，这不仅发生在我们身边，简直就是在自家后院。
Ireland, after all, had been part of the kingdom since 1801, and this, nationalists would say for generations afterwards, was the bitter fruit of the union.
毕竟自1801年起，爱尔兰就是王国的一部分，此后上百年，民族主义者都认为这都是统一酿成的恶果。
