FAMINE AND FEVER
It is now necessary to revert to that terrible page of Irish history,
the famine, which culminated in what is still known as 'the black
forty-seven.'
I have often been asked, 'How is it that Ireland could formerly support
a population of eight millions as compared with only five now?'
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
quantities, 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 hardships,
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 passed, 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 superstition 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 grass-grown memorials of
that ghastly effort of State assistance.
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 destitute 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
succumbed 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 constitution.
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 destitution, 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, surreptitiously
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
ship.'
The survivors of this terrible time numbered heroes drawn from all
classes 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
class 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 multitude 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 passage
money out.
She told Miss Cobbe how she had been to an emigration office and booked
her passage.
'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?'
'Yes, Miss, that was it, New Orleans, quite near New York,' he said.
The scoundrelly agent had taken her passage money and sent her off
absolutely friendless to New Orleans, where she died of a fever in less
than a year.
Many of the three million emigrants after the famine must have been as
easily duped.
A considerable time ago (but if I were in Kerry I could give the date
from my diary, because I met the man at a dinner given at the St.
James's Club by Lord Kenmare's son-in-law, Mr. Douglas) one of the big
New World railway companies sent over an emissary to the British
Government.
He was charged to offer to take every distressed man in Ireland, with
his priest--if he would go--piper, cat, wife, sister, mother, and
children, to the land through which the great railway ran. Each man was
to be given a log-house with three rooms, one hundred and sixty acres,
ten of them under cultivation, and no residence was to be more than ten
miles from a railway station. All that was asked in return was a loan
for ten years without interest to cover the expenses of transportation.
I rather think Mr. Chichester Fortescue was the Chief Secretary. Anyhow,
whoever occupied that post urged the Cabinet to accept the offer. The
conclave wavered, but Mr. Gladstone firmly vetoed the idea. He was
afraid the plan would be unpopular with the priests, who would see
themselves bereft of the favourite members of their congregations.
Instead of this admirable scheme, we have ever since had the pitiable
sight of the parents, the sisters, and the sweetheart crooning over the
emigration of the best able-bodied young men from Ireland.
No one who has heard the keening and wailing, say at Limerick Junction,
over Paddy going over the water will forget the appealing sorrow of the
scene, the sound of which rings long in one's ears after the train has
gone out of sight.
The emigrant has been the theme of song and story. He has also been one
of the finest recruits of the United States, whilst he is a stigma on
English politics, and a drain on the land which in all Europe can least
afford to spare him.
Mr. Wyndham's new Act will not arrest emigration, indeed it will
probably increase it.
At present the landlord is often able to put pressure on his tenants to
give employment to respectable men. But the small farmer is certain to
use as few men as possible. You can see the analogy in contemporary
France. Therefore more families will see the pride of their cabins
starting for the New World.
Perhaps what I am proudest of, was being called in an address in Kerry
'the poor man's friend,' for it is what I have always striven to be.
But if I were to be a young man to-morrow, instead of a day older than I
am to-day, I should be powerless to merit such a title in years to come.
And the reason, as I have just indicated, is the fault of the
Government.
I sometimes think the canniest man of whom I ever heard was the old
Scottish minister who was accustomed to preface his extempore petition
with the words:--
'My britheren, let us noo pray that the High Court of Parliament winna
do ony harm.'