Above : Picture Of Poverty At The Time

It has already been mentioned that during the earlier part of the nineteenth century a large proportion of the Irish people lived habitually on the verge of destitution. The food of about one-third of the population was almost exclusively potatoes, with which the better-off drank milk.

As the people thus depended for their subsistence on one crop alone it may well be conceived with what dismay the appearance of a strange disease amongst the potatoes was observed in 1845. Within a few days fields which had been filled with promising green plants showed nothing but withered stalks, and under them roots reduced to a black and rotten mass. Luckily, the early crop had been raised before the disease appeared, so that the distress, although great, was less than it would otherwise have been.

When again the time for digging drew near, the peasants watched their little potato gardens with anxious eyes, dreading to see the withering of the leaves, and to notice the sickly smell which heralded the approach of the scourge. They had but too much reason for their fears. The potato crop of 1846 was practically a total failure ; the blight was nearly everywhere ; potatoes to the value of £16,000,000 were destroyed. The despairing people saw themselves menaced with the most terrible of all fates—death by hunger.

Patience of the People: Their Sufferings.It is true that the country produced that year a supply of food far more than sufficient to feed the population, but it was sold and exported. Ships coming into the ports of Ireland laden with meal and flour, given by the charity of foreign nations to maintain life and barely life in the starving peasants, met other ships bearing from her shores the corn which these very peasantry had sown and cultivated and reaped ; the cattle which they had fed and tended. Lord John Russell, the English Minister, refused to close the ports.

The starving people submitted and they died. Through villages where men, women and children were perishing of hunger went lines of carts laden with sacks of grain, but there was attempt to seize them. The famine grew and extended, affecting, first the labourers who have work; the cottiers who had no savings. Then came the small farmers, who had relied on their patches of potatoes to feed themselves and their families, and on their corn and their few of cattle to pay the rent. The shopkeepers lost their customers ; serVants were turned adrift by employers unable any longer to maintain them.

By the roadside the people lay down and died. Neighbours, entering a cabin, sometimes found within the corpses of all those who had dwelt there. Starving crowds made their way to the newly-built Workhouses, where the iron discipline parted husband from wife, parent from child; often to meet no more on earth, for, in the overcrowded buildings tha ” famine fever ” raged, and every morning a cart-load of corpses was conveyed to the great pit dug in the churchyard to receive them. Soon the Workhouses were full; admission had to be refused to the numbers who clamoured for it.

Those who could in any way collect the needed passage-money, fled in thousands across the Atlantic. The wretched emigrants were crowded, men, women and children, into vessels, many of which were old and unseaworthy, so that not a few foundered in mid-ocean, and crews and passengers perished.

Amongst those who came on board were generally some already stricken with fever, and the disease spread like wildfire. In some instances more than a hundred corpses were flung overboard in the course of the voyage. The survivors carried the disease with them when they landed, and the hospitals of New York, Montreal, and many other American cities were soon crowded with cases, very large numbers of which proved fatal.