XLIII. 1846. was much more violent in the western parts of Great CHAP. Britain than the eastern, and in rich and highly cultivated localities, than in those more recently brought into cultivation, or where the soil was poor. From Aberdeen to Inverness, where the soil was in general sandy or 1 Personal gravelly, and great part of it had been newly brought into knowledge; cultivation, the disease was unknown; but in the West Life of Highlands, abreast of this district, it was all but universal, 406. and had almost totally destroyed the crop.1 Disraeli, Bentinck, and alarm What rendered this calamity the more distressing in 32. Ireland and the West Highlands of Scotland was the Deplorable want of any adequate or efficient system of parochial ing state of relief. In both these countries poor-laws had been of the country. recent introduction, and in neither were the administrators of them armed with sufficient power to overcome the stubborn resistance to assessment almost universal among the landed proprietors. In Scotland the Sheriffs could put claimants on the roll, but the Court of Supervision at Edinburgh alone could award them an adequate aliment, which, from the distance of the Hebrides, proved a most inadequate mode of reviewing the decisions of the Parochial Boards, and the able-bodied had no claim for relief. In Ireland matters were much worse. The poor-laws, as established in 1837, had been so defective in power, from providing only for in-door relief, and so strongly resisted, that although the Government commission had reported that in ordinary seasons 2,335,000 people required public relief for nearly half the year, the whole poor-rate levied on a rental of £13,000,000 was £306,000, being about 5d. in the pound on the real rental, a sum which would not maintain the now famishing multitude for one month; and this rate, trifling and inadequate as it was, was only levied with extreme difficulty, and in some cases by armed force.* The rental of Ireland in 1842 was -Order of House of Commons, 3d May 1842. £13,253,825 The assessments for the relief of the poor, and persons relieved in Ireland, XLIII. 1846. CHAP. And the fact that the vast majority of the persons thus suddenly deprived of the produce of their little potatocrofts, their sole means of subsistence during nine months in the year, were without either employment or wages to buy food, afforded a melancholy presage of the devastation which must ensue if Government did not come forward promptly and largely for their relief. The mere furnishing of food was, comparatively speaking, of little importance, for it existed in sufficient quantities in most parts of Nicholls the country, and was even exported to England to a conLaw, 201-siderable extent during the famine; it was employment and wages to above half a million of starving labourers which was the one thing needful!1 Scotch Poor Irish, 315, 316. 33. Govern * In this awful emergency the conduct both of the Government and of Parliament was in the highest degree on the sub courageous and liberal, and such as entitles them to the ment plans ject. lasting admiration of posterity. That some errors should have occurred in the mode of grappling with so dire and unprecedented a calamity was inevitable; but the measures upon the whole were judicious, so far as the relief of destitution went, and conducted on such a scale as mitigated to a very great extent its most agonising features. It is only to be regretted that some more durable and productive form could not have been discovered than merely covering good roads with additional loads of metal in return for the splendid liberality of the British government. It was not the fault of Ministers, however, in the undermentioned years, had been as follows, relief being then administered only in the workhouses : * The grain exported from Ireland to Great Britain, during the year 1847, was 963,000 quarters.- PORTER'S Progress of the Nation, p. 345. XLIII. 1846. that this was the case. A crisis had arrived which de- CHAP. fied all prudential considerations, and set at nought the most sagacious foresight. Notwithstanding their obvious inability even to repay the enormous advances in course of being made by the Treasury, three hundred out of the three hundred and sixty baronies into which Ireland is divided had held presentment sessions, and sanctioned the employment of several millions sterling. The labourers employed on the works, who in September were only 40,000, rapidly increased with the increasing necessities of the country, until, when Parliament met in January, they had reached the enormous number of 570,000, representing with their families at least 2,000,000 human beings. This number swelled in the month of March to the still more appalling figure of 734,000, representing nearly 3,000,000 souls.* The pay weekly distributed to these labourers in October was £200,000 by the hands of 500 pay-clerks; there were 74 inspectors, 36 engineers, 385 assistant surveyors, 3000 check-clerks, and 7000 overseers! The men got from 1s. 4d. to 1s. 10d. a-day after task-work was introduced, which at first met with the most strenuous resistance, but at length was everywhere established. As these wages were more than double of what the people had ever been accustomed to, there was a prodigious run upon them, and farmers holding thirty and forty acres were to be seen on the roads breaking stones like common labourers. As might be The greatest number of persons employed on public works to 15th August 1846, had been 97,000, and the sum distributed was £820,372 to that date.Ibid. 313. XLIII. 1846. CHAP supposed in so extreme a case, great abuses crept in, and no inconsiderable part of the magnificent advances of the British government were wasted on unworthy objects. The tendency to misapply public funds to private purposes, strong in all, but especially so in Ireland, broke forth in the most remarkable manner; numbers received Government pay who did not require it, and great part of those who did, loitered about doing nothing; all the efforts of the overseers were unable to keep the huge swarms of idlers in active operation. Worse still, the attraction of much pay for little work proved an irresistible magnet which drew men from all other employments; the Board of Works became the centre of a colossal organisation which threatened soon to absorb all the labour of the country in unproductive work; the fields were deserted, while the roads were covered with. metal, and the foundation of another still more terrible famine was rapidly being laid in the means adopted to allay the first.1 1 Nicholls' Irish Poor Law, 312, 315; Ann. Reg. 1847, 2, 3. 34. Yet great as were the efforts made by the British Enormous government, largely aided by splendid subscriptions the distress. from every part of Great Britain, which soon reached extent of £470,000, and were admirably administered by a Central Board, the magnitude of the distress even exceeded them, and seemed to baffle all the efforts of humanity for its relief. So sudden was the calamity, so appalling its universality in some districts of the country, especially in the south and west, that before any measures of relief could reach them, or they could reach the public works set on foot by Government or the local authorities, great numbers of persons of both sexes and all ages perished. Parochial relief was as yet only afforded in the workhouses, and the aversion of the people was at first extreme to entering these gloomy abodes; but stern famine ere long broke down all these feelings, and their doors were besieged from morning to night by crowds beseeching to be taken in, XLIII. 1846. whose wan cheeks and sunken eyes revealed too clearly CHAP. the extremities of hunger they had already endured. All the orders, and they were most stringent, issued by the Poor-Law Commissioners to limit the number of admissions, so as to avoid overcrowding, were overpowered, as barriers often are in a dense crowd, by the pressure of the starving multitude, and numbers who got in brought with them the seeds of contagious disorders, which, spreading with frightful rapidity, again thinned the workhouses by the stern hand of death. Yet, with all these dangers before their eyes, the crowds at the doors of the workhouses were immense, and everywhere increasing. The description given by the admirable Chief Commissioner, Mr Nicholls, was universally applicable. "Possessed of a workhouse capable of containing only a few hundred inmates, the guardians are looked to with hope by thousands of famishing persons, and are called on to exercise the mournful task of selection from the distressed objects who present themselves for admission as the last refuge from death. It was no longer a question whether the applicants were fit objects for relief, but which of them would be rejected and which admitted, with the least risk of sacrificing 324, 323. life."1 pens 1 Nicholls, scenes in All that the imagination of Dante has figured, all that 35. the of Thucydides or Boccaccio have described, all Woeful that the pencil of Reynolds has pictured of the terrible the counand the pathetic, was realised, and more than realised, try. in that scene of unutterable woe. Often, when a cottage was observed to be deserted, and the wonted smoke no longer seen to issue from its roof-when the anxious neighbours opened the door, they found the whole family lying dead in a circle, with the new-born infant still locked in its mother's arms, having drained the last drop of nutriment in the dying embrace. Numbers of peasants dropped down on the wayside from pure exhaustion, when striving to reach the workhouse or the nearest government works. |