Britain’s Inadequate Response

Today’s installment concludes Great Potato Famine in Ireland,
our selection from Four Years of Irish History by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy published in 1883.

If you have journeyed through the installments of this series so far, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of three thousand words. Congratulations! For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Great Potato Famine in Ireland.

Time: 1847

The social disorganization was a spectacle as afflicting as the waste of life; it was the waste of whatever makes life worth possessing. All the institutions which civilize and elevate the people were disappearing, one after another. The churches were half empty; the temperance reading-rooms were shut up; the Mechanics’ Institute no longer got support; only the jails and the poorhouses were crowded. A new generation, born in disease and reared in destitution, pitiless and imbecile, threatened to drag down the nation to hopeless slavery. Trade was paralyzed; no one bought anything which was not indispensable at the hour. The loss of the farmers in potatoes was estimated at more than twenty millions sterling; and with the potatoes the pigs, which fed on them, disappeared. The seed, procured at a high price in spring, again failed; time, money, and labor were lost, and another year of famine was certain. All who depended on the farmer had sunk with him; shopkeepers were beggared; tradesmen were starving; the priests living on voluntary offerings were sometimes in fearful distress when the people had no longer anything to offer.

The poor-rate was quite inadequate to support the burden thrown upon it by the suspension of public works, but there was another claim upon it which could not wait. When the elections were over and the Government majority secure, the Treasury called on the poor-law guardians to levy immediately a special rate for the repayment of a million and a quarter lent by the State in a previous year. They were warned that, if they refused, their boards would be dissolved and the rates levied by the authority of the Commissioners. The guardians in many districts declared that an additional rate could not be collected. All that could be got would be too little to support the distressed class. But the Treasury would listen to no excuse, and a dozen boards were dissolved and paid guardians put in their place. The Treasury had lent seven millions sterling in 1846; five millions of it had been spent in making roads which were not needed nor desired, and one million was diverted from the wages fund to purchase land for this experiment. The aid which the stronger country proposed to give to the weaker, from the Treasury to which both contributed, was the remission of one-third of this debt. A blunder in foreign policy, the escapade of an ambitious minister in India or Africa, has cost the British taxpayer more in a month than he spent to save millions of fellow-subjects beyond the Irish Sea.

When the increased mortality was pressed on the attention of the Government, Lord John Russell replied that the owners of property in Ireland ought to support the poor born on their estates. It was a perfectly just proposition if the ratepayers were empowered to determine the object and method of the expenditure; but prohibiting productive work, and forcing them to turn strong men into paupers and keep them sweltering in workhouses instead of laboring to reclaim the waste lands — this was not justice. The Times, commenting on the new policy, declared that Ireland was as well able to help herself as France or Belgium, and that the whole earth was doing duty for inhuman Irish landlords. An unanswerable case, if Ireland, like France and Belgium, had the power of collecting and applying her own revenue; otherwise not difficult to answer.

The people fled before the famine to England, America, and the British colonies. They carried with them the seed of disease and death. In England a bishop and more than twenty priests died of typhus, caught in attendance on the sick and dying. The English people clamored against such an infliction, which it cannot be denied would be altogether intolerable if these fugitives were not made exiles and paupers by English law. They were ordered home again, that they might be supported on the resources of their own country; for though we had no country for the purpose of self-government and self-protection, we were acknowledged to have a country when the necessity of bearing burdens arose.

More than a hundred thousand souls fled to the United States and Canada. The United States maintained sanitary regulations on shipboard which were effectual to a certain extent. But the emigration to Canada was left to the individual greed of shipowners, and the emigrant-ships rivalled the cabins of Mayo or the fever-sheds of Skibbereen. Crowded and filthy, carrying double the legal number of passengers, who were ill-fed and imperfectly clothed, and having no doctor on board, the holds, says an eyewitness, were like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and deaths occurred in myriads. The survivors, on their arrival in the new country, continued to die and to scatter death around them.

At Montreal, during nine weeks, eight hundred emigrants perished, and over nine hundred residents died of diseases caught from emigrants. During six months the deaths of the new arrivals exceeded three thousand. No preparations were made by the British Government for the reception or the employment of these helpless multitudes. The Times pronounced the neglect to be an eternal disgrace to the British name. Ships carrying German emigrants and English emigrants arrived in Canada at the same time in a perfectly healthy state. The Chief Secretary for Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons that of a hundred thousand Irishmen who fled to Canada in a year, six thousand one hundred perished on the voyage, four thousand one hundred on their arrival, five thousand two hundred in the hospitals, and one thousand nine hundred in the towns to which they repaired. The Emigrant Society of Montreal paints the result during the whole period of the famine in language not easily to be forgotten:

From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great river, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of immigration has extended are to be found one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a commingled heap — no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upward have gone down to their graves!”

This was the fate which was befalling our race at home and abroad as the year 1847 closed. There were not many of us who would not have given our lives cheerfully to arrest this ruin, if we could only see a possible way — but no way was visible.

This ends our series of passages on Great Potato Famine in Ireland by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy from his book Four Years of Irish History published in 1883. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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