The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent Part 8

The answer is simple: Eight millions could still exist if the potato crop were a certainty, and if the people were now content to exist as they did then. But to the then existing population--living at best in a light-hearted and hopeful, hand-to-mouth contentment--there was a terrible awakening.

The mysterious blight, which had affected the potato in America in 1844, had not been felt in Ireland, where the harvest for 1845 promised to be singularly abundant. Suddenly, almost without warning, the later crop shrivelled and wasted.

The poor had a terribly hard winter, and the farmers borrowed heavily to have means to till a larger amount of land in 1846.

Once more the early prospects were admirable, and then in a single night whole districts were blighted.

This is how Mr. Steuart Trench described the catastrophe:--

'On August 1, 1846, I was startled by a sudden and strange rumour that all the potato fields in the district were blighted, and that a stench had arisen emanating from their decaying stalk. The report was true, the stalks being withered; and a new, strange stench was to be noticed which became a well-known feature in 'the blight' for years after. On being dug up it was found that the potato was rapidly blackening and melting away. The stench generally was the first indication, the withered leaf following in a day or two.'

The terrible sufferings which ensued were complicated by some blunders of British statesmen.

In 1845 Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister. He imported Indian meal, and established depots in the country, where it was sold to the people at the lowest possible price, thus putting a complete check on private enterprise.

In 1846 Lord John Russell was Premier. He declined to follow the example of Sir Robert Peel, because he considered that it interfered with Free Trade, and, reversing the policy of his predecessor, announced that he left the importation of meal to private enterprise.

But capitalists having been alarmed, meal was not imported in sufficient quant.i.ties, with the result that Indian corn rose to eighteen pounds a ton, when it might have been laid in at the rate of eight pounds a ton.

Had Lord John Russell's policy come first, and that of Sir Robert Peel subsequently, the result would have been very different.

The fight over the Corn Law question in England at the time was decidedly an injury to Ireland, because the Protectionists minimised the danger of famine in the winter of 1845 for fear of the calamity being made a pretext for Free Trade.

Dealing with an unforeseen calamity of such stupendous magnitude at long range from Downing Street entailed delay; and public relief, waiting until official investigation had tardily reported the hards.h.i.+ps, suffered in the truly distressful country.

The state of things round Bantry, of which I had accurate knowledge, was appalling. I knew of twenty-three deaths in the poorhouse in twenty-four hours. Again, on a relief road, two hours after I had pa.s.sed, on my ride home I saw three of the poor fellows stretched corpses on the stones they had been breaking.

The Registrar-General for Ireland, Mr. William Donelly, officially stated that five hundred thousand one-roomed cabins had disappeared between the census before the famine and the one after it.

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

Some superst.i.tion also prevented even the children from eating the myriads of blackberries which ripened on the bushes.

Directly the calamity was comprehended, the English poured money into the country with unbounded generosity, but the management was bad.

The relief works organised by the Government took the form of draining and road-making. This entailed delay, owing to the preliminary surveying, and when employment could be given, the people were too emaciated and feeble to work. All over Ireland unfinished roads leading half way to places of no consequence are to-day gra.s.s-grown memorials of that ghastly effort of State a.s.sistance.

Almost the earliest of the private soup-kitchens for the relief of the sufferers was that opened at Dingle under the joint initiative of Lady Ventry, Mrs. Hickson, my future mother-in-law, and Mrs. Hussey, my mother. So as not to pauperise the people, subscriptions of one penny a week were asked from every house in the town. At ten in the morning those who wanted it could get a pint per head of really excellent soup for themselves and their families. Those who were known to be able to pay had to contribute a penny; the really dest.i.tute had gratuitous relief.

So bad was the famine that people coming in from the country fell in the street never to rise again. One woman was found lying on the outskirts of the town almost dead from starvation, her three children having succ.u.mbed beside her, and had she not been carried to the soup-kitchen she would not have survived them many hours.

My wife well remembers another case. One day her mother emerged from a cabin carrying what looked like a big bundle of clothes. It was the form of an emaciated woman, whose four children and husband had all starved.

My mother-in-law took her to her own house, fed her at first with spoonsful of soup, and kept her there until she had rebuilt her once vigorous const.i.tution.

My wife subsequently recollects her as a hale, buxom, young widow coming to say good-bye before emigrating to America.

Very soon all the coffins had been exhausted, and in many places the dead were taken to the graves and dropped in through the hinged bottom of a trap-coffin.

After soup had been introduced, Indian meal stirabout proved efficacious, and it was distributed from large iron boilers set up by the roadside to the gaunt, cadaverous wretches who scuffled for the sustenance.

Even more terrible than those privations was the fever which supervened.

Apart from the lack of food, a great cause of mortality lay in the change of diet. Potatoes form a bulky article of food, and stirabout, unless very carefully made, used to swell after it was consumed. Many, too, ate raw turnips from sheer dest.i.tution, and these also caused swelling of the stomach as well as a dysentery almost always fatal in a few days.

Numbers of starving Catholics had gone to Protestant clergymen and offered to become converts in return for food, and when some of these sickened with the fever, the priests declared it was a judgment on them, and religious hostility became intensified.

At Dingle Lady Ventry and her helpers were denounced from the pulpits as 'benevolent sisters bent on superising the poor'--to superise being the improvised verb for Protestantising, a thing they decidedly did not attempt.

A very early instance of the open-air cure never before recorded took place at Lismore. When every possible place in the hospital had been filled with fever patients, a number had to be lodged in a disused quarry near the Blackwater, and of the latter not a single sufferer died, though the mortality within doors was excessive.

I remember one rather quaint incident.

A large amount of sea biscuit was brought into a house for distribution by a benevolent gentleman. His daughter, aged seven, surrept.i.tiously stole a biscuit for the purpose of eating it. But at the first attempt to bite the tough thing, out came a loose tooth. She howled with fright, thinking it a judgment on her for her misdeed, and went in tears to tell her mother.

I have always hoped the latter had enough sense of humour to laugh at the incident, but my shrewd suspicion is that she improved the occasion--an error for which there is always temptation, and on which there is often the retribution of the few words having the opposite effect to that intended.

The conduct of the landlords during the famine and fever has been much discussed and variously represented. But many of the Nationalists themselves have declared that the diatribes of their comrades have been thoroughly undeserved. Absenteeism apart--for which no excuse need be attempted--the Irish landlords did their best, gave of their substance, and imperilled their own lives for the sake of the sufferers. Mr.

Richard White of Inchiclogh, near Bantry, fell a victim to the fever.

Two other landlords who gave their lives for others were Mr. Richard Martin, M.P., and Mr. Nolan of Ballinderry. The conditions of tenure did not admit of lavish financial generosity, but as one of their sharpest critics in later times admitted, the vast majority 'went down with the s.h.i.+p.'

The survivors of this terrible time numbered heroes drawn from all cla.s.ses of life; and it would have been well if the lesson of universal charity then practically demonstrated had been allowed to sink into all hearts.

Instead I will quote the following extract from John Mitchel's _History of Ireland_, a thick, paper-bound volume, which, at the price of eighteenpence, has circulated enormously among the Irish, not only at home, but in Glasgow and America.

On page 243:--'That million and a half of men, women, and children were carefully, prudently, and peacefully _slain_' [the italics are those of Mitchel] 'by the English Government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own hands created; and it is quite immaterial to distinguish those who perished in the agonies of famine itself from those who died by typhus fever, which in Ireland is always caused by famine.

'Further, this was strictly an _artificial_ famine--that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call that famine a dispensation of Providence, and ascribe it entirely to the blight of the potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.'

Such pestilential perversion of truth is freely circulated and firmly believed, for contradiction never penetrates to those gulled by these lies. In America the gutter press section of journalism is esteemed at its true worth, and is as harmless as a few squibs. In Ireland what is seen in bad print is always believed, and is corroborated by the lower cla.s.s of priest. When I say so much I am simply indicating a national sore, but it needs a wiser physician than myself to apply a successful remedy.

Perhaps with the spread of education may arise the same power to discriminate between the true and false published in the papers that is a characteristic of both the English and Scottish. As it is, the Irishman believes whatever he reads in print; and in most cases the solitary paper that he reads is one full of treason and untruths.

When the famine took place, the Irish fled as from a plague to America, and when they landed there both men and women were the prey of every blackguard without a single person to advise or protect them.

Had the Government taken the movement in hand and employed agents at New York to provide for them until they obtained employment, and to direct them where to apply for it, England would to-day probably have had a grateful nation on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, we have a hostile mult.i.tude which neglects no opportunity of voting for any politician hostile to Great Britain; and this disaffection sadly militates against that union of Anglo-Saxon hearts, which is so freely accepted by journalists and politicians as a sort of millennium.

Miss Cobbe related a story about a steady-going girl who had received money from her sister who was doing well in New York to pay her pa.s.sage money out.

She told Miss Cobbe how she had been to an emigration office and booked her pa.s.sage.

'Direct to New York, of course.'

'Well no, Miss. But to some place close by, New something else.'

'New something else near New York?'

'Yes; I disremember what it was, but he said it was quite handy for New York.'

'Not New Orleans, surely?'