Yet though the outcry raised by the English Ministry and their friends who had thus been outwitted was loud, the pacific declarations of Palmerston on accepting office, as well as his own part in the late transactions, precluded the possibility of any serious breach between the countries. At the same time the irritation against France, and the condition of England itself, rendered equally impossible any active intervention in favour of Cracow, the absorption of which into the Austrian empire completed the spoliation of Poland. Protests and loud expostulation were the only resources left; and the Ministry in its foreign policy, and therefore in a more especial degree Lord Palmerston, fell with some show of justice under the charge of using strong language but failing when the time for action came; and the impression-a very disastrous one-began to gain ground that under no circumstances would England have recourse

to arms.

But the management of Ireland was the first and most prominent Ireland, the work to be undertaken, for the disaster which had fallen chief difculty. on that country had now become obvious in all its terrible completeness. It was no doubt the apparent approach of famine, the wholesale blight on the potato crop, which had formed the chief factor in the conversion of Peel to free-trade. He had taken several well-considered steps to alleviate the threatened dearth. He had watched it anxiously, and had employed scientific men to inquire into its cause and probable cure. He had attempted to obtain sound seed for the coming year. He had advanced £100,000 from the Treasury for the purpose of drainage and improvement, and had purchased secretly and at the Government risk £100,000 worth of Indian meal. He had trusted to such assistance, small though it was, coupled with the lowered price of grain which he expected from his measures with regard to the Corn Laws, and to the energy of the people themselves, who did not yet despair. Though full of miserable forebodings, the peasantry had exhibited an almost feverish eagerness in planting their potatoes for the coming year. But it was a late and bad season, and towards the end of July almost suddenly the terrible blight swept again over the country, and the air was loaded with the unwholesome smell of the decaying potato-fields. "On the 27th of July," writes Father Matthew, “I passed from Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the 3d of August, I beheld with sorrow one wild waste of putrifying vegetation. Stupor and despair fell upon the people. In many places the

Renewal of the potato blight. Aug. 1846.

1846]

THE IRISH FAMINE

157

wretched men were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands, and wailing bitterly the destruction which had left them foodless." The stories of the miseries undergone are heartrending. The most foul and least nutritious food was sought and devoured. Horses and dogs, seaweed, and even grass, were used to allay the pangs of hunger. By the existing Poor Law outdoor relief did not exist in Ireland, and the lately erected workhouses were objects of universal detestation. They were now besieged by clamorous thousands who lay by the roadside and died waiting for their turn of admission.

Mismanage

ment of the

first efforts to relieve the

famine.

1846.

It was a crisis which moved all parties alike in England; and the English people, who have never been wanting in charity, were eager in their desire to mitigate the terrible scourge. But the management of necessity fell first at least into the hands of Government. It has been the constant error of England to treat the Irish as though they were children, and by undertaking their work for them, by listening to their demands, and giving them concessions, to lead them to trust rather to the Government than to themselves. No doubt such treatment suited well the momentary wish of the Irish. But it fed the weakest part of their character, and fostered that deficiency of self-reliance which it should have been the first object of Government to remove. It was in accordance with precedent that Government, instead of applying a stimulus to independent action in all directions, now itself undertook to encounter the almost incurable evil which had fallen on the country. But at the same time, being under the influence of the strictest sect of political economists, it made a great parade of its non-interference with the ordinary courses of trade. The measure in which the policy of the Government was incorporated is known as the Labour Rate Act. In introducing it, Lord John Russell declared that he would not interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other kinds of grain were brought into Ireland, or with the retail trade. The Bill established relief works. This Sir Robert Peel's Ministry had already done; but those works had been stopped, and nearly 100,000 men who had been at work on them thus added to the number of the unemployed. The present relief works were to be set on foot by the Board of Works at the recommendation of the Grand Juries; and to carry them on, Government agreed to advance money at 3 per cent., to be repaid in ten years. To certain poorer districts £60,000 was to be granted. Thus the Government undertook to employ the people and to pay them, but to leave the supply

of food entirely in private hands. The establishment of relief works upon sound economical principles must always present grave difficulties. To all appearance on the present occasion the well-meant efforts of Government did more harm than good. To fulfil the condition of non-interference with private interests, it was held that the works ought to be useless; road-making was one of the favourite forms of labour, and the roads seldom led anywhere. To organise the relief a very numerous staff of officials was necessary; it was found impossible to avoid gross jobbery in the appointments, or to secure efficiency in the 11,000 men who were employed. Useless and extravagant, the works brought with them even more disastrous results than a highly-paid waste of labour. It was found impossible to enforce good work; the lightness of the labour and the certainty of the wages attracted men from their own necessary work, and the neglect of the tillage of the fields which resulted threatened to render the famine perennial. The ill-considered adherence to the principle of non-interference with the retail trade was equally disastrous. The food of the people having been almost exclusively the potato, grown on their own plot of land, a retail trade scarcely existed; the weary labourer was compelled to walk many miles to procure his food, and as Government had declared in favour of open competition, that food was purchasable only at famine prices. Speculation ran riot, immense fortunes were made, and corn is said to have been shipped and reshipped as many as four times on speculative voyages before it was finally parted with. It is true that certain Government depots of food were established. But again the system of non-interference rendered them of little avail; competition with the retail trader was forbidden, and the food might be sold only at the highest rate. The number of men employed upon the relief works was more than half a million, and the cost to England was about £1,000,000 a month. Meanwhile the curse of famine was bringing with it the still worse curse of disease. A terrible plague, known commonly as the road fever, attacked the people. It found an easy prey in the miserably weakened people worn out by famine, and gave rise to sickening scenes in the overcrowded workhouses and fever hospitals and their immediate neighbourhood. And all this time the land lay uncultivated, and the repetition in the ensuing year of similar scenes of disaster seemed only too certain. The unquestionably good intentions of the Government had resulted in a serious aggravation of the evil.

It was in the midst of the excitement which these terrible events

1847]

MEASURES of RELIEF

159

Measures of relief proposed

in Parliament.

Jan. 1847.

had roused in the people of England that the Parliament met for its last session on January 19, 1847. As a matter of course the main topic of the Queen's Speech-the main topic of thought in all men's minds-was Ireland. And no sooner were the necessary preliminaries got through than, on the 25th of January, the Prime Minister introduced the subject in the Lower House. After a description of the miserable condition of the country and of the efforts already made for its alleviation, he stated his intention of producing certain measures, some of a temporary character to meet the immediate evil, others, as he hoped, of a more permanent character, to prevent its recurrence. He used language— and he was not alone in using it—which seemed to imply that he regarded the time to have arrived for a reconstitution of Irish society. A crisis had indeed arrived, and a state of things existed which, however it had arisen, was an indelible disgrace to the English Government. It is strange, after the speeches of Lord John Russell and Lord Grey in the summer of 1846, in which they clearly pointed out that the inherent evil in Ireland was the existing land system-the competition for land, the tenure at will, and the frequency of arbitrary evictions-that they should not have made use of the present opportunity for at least attempting to touch this part of the national disease. Probably the immediate horrors of the famine made them for the moment forget what had given the famine its peculiar virulence, and induced them, like unskilful surgeons, to treat the symptoms instead of the cause of the illness. All the measures which they intended to be of permanent utility were directed to a greater production of food and a greater employment of labour. The state of society was left entirely untouched; the relations between landlord and tenant remained in the same unsatisfactory condition; and the reconstitution of Ireland-which should have been the work of the Government after the most careful and long-sighted deliberation-was left to the landlords, who, taking advantage of the unutterable misery of the people, carried it out to suit their own interests, with a haste which was little short of barbarous. For their immediate purpose the propositions of the Government were not ill considered. The Labour Rate Act had proved a distinct failure. It was proposed now, setting aside the rules of political economy, to proceed in the way of direct charity. Relief committees were to be formed to receive subscriptions and donations from Government, and to levy With the money thus obtained soup-kitchens Soup-kitchens. were to be established, and food given to the famishing

rates.

inhaoitants either freely or for some small payment. The donations from the Government were to be advanced by way of loan, but although the form of a loan was preserved, the repayment was to be largely remitted. It was also proposed to advance £50,000 to the proprietors of Ireland to purchase seed. In fact the Government proposed that England should, in the midst of a calamity so extensive, support the famine-stricken Irish. These propositions of the Prime Minister were accepted and acted upon with the best results. There was still some mismanagement, for the discontinuance of the relief works, which was to have gone hand in hand with the new system of relief, was carried out so suddenly that when on the 1st of May the works altogether ceased very few of the soup-kitchens were in working order. But as soon as the relief committees were thoroughly organised actual death from starvation seems to have ceased.

Permanent

measures proposed.

The more permanent measures suggested were greater facilities in the advance of money from the Treasury for drainage and improvement of estates; the application of £1,000,000 to the reclamation of waste lands, to be divided into twenty-five acre lots to be ultimately sold to the tenants; the modification of the Poor Law, so as to allow of outdoor relief; encouragement afforded to the fisheries and to emigration; and finally, a Bill for facilitating the sale of encumbered estates. Of these Bills, the temporary measures, which assumed the form of a Bill for indemnifying Government for its past proceedings in Ireland and a Bill under the title of "The Destitute Persons (Ireland) Bill,” were after some discussion carried. It was naturally objected that the Government was in fact charging England with the support of Ireland and pauperising the country; while by more than one speaker in the House the feeling that the landlords of Ireland were not doing their duty was very strongly expressed. But it was probably a fair answer to these objections that the crisis was one of a wholly exceptional character, and that there was no possibility of allowing the slowly working principles of political economy to come into play; the necessity was immediate, and the remedy must be applied at once. On these grounds the House allowed the Chancellor of the Exchequer to raise a loan of £8,000,000, which, with the £2,000,000 already advanced, would be required to meet the necessities of the case. As a reasonable and almost necessary consequence of the evident necessity of increasing the supply of food in Ireland, and of the determination of Government to allow the supply to be introduced by private enterprise, it

The temporary measures carried.