The condition of Ireland at the opening of the year 1847 is one of the most painful chapters in the annals of mankind.  An industrious and hospitable race were in the pangs of a devouring famine.  Deaths of individuals, of husband and wife, of entire families, were becoming common.  The potato-blight had spread from the Atlantic to the Caspian; but there was more suffering in one parish of Mayo than in all the rest of Europe.  From Connaught, where distress was greatest, came batches of inquests with the horrible verdict “died of starvation.”  In some instances the victims were buried “wrapped in a coarse coverlet,” a coffin being too costly a luxury.  The living awaited death with a listlessness that was at once tragic and revolting.  Women with dead children in their arms were seen begging for a coffin to bury them.

Beranger has touched a thousand hearts by the picture of Pauvre Jacques, who, when the tax-gatherer came in the King’s name, was discovered dead on his miserable pallet.  But at Skibbereen, in the fruitful County Cork whose seaports were thronged with vessels laden with corn, cattle, and butter for England, the rate collector told a more tragic tale.  Some houses he found deserted; the owners had been carried to their graves.  In one cabin there was no other occupant than three corpses; in a once prosperous home a woman and her children had lain dead and unburied for a week; in the fields a man was discovered so fearfully mangled by dogs that identification was impossible.  The relief committee of the Society of Friends described the state of the town in language which it was hard to read with dry eyes.  The people were dying of the unaccustomed food which mocked their prayer for daily bread, and were carried to the graveyard in a coffin from which the benevolent strangers who had come to their relief had to drop them, like dead dogs, that there might be a covering for the next corpse in its turn.

“This place is one mass of famine, disease, and death.  The poor creatures, hitherto trying to exist on one meal a day, are now sinking under fever and bowel complaints, unable to come for their soup, which is not fit for them.  Rice is what their whole cry is for, but we cannot manage this well, nor can we get the food carried to the houses, from dread of infection.  I have got a coffin constructed with movable sides, to convey the bodies to the churchyard, in calico bags prepared, in which the remains are wrapped up.  I have just sent it to bring the remains of a poor creature to the grave, who having been turned out of the only shelter she had, a miserable hut, perished the night before last in a quarry.”