The people saw the harvest they had reared carried away to another country without an effort, for the most part, to retain it.  The sole food of the distressed class was Indian-meal, which had paid freight and storage in England, and had been obtained in exchange for English manufactures.  Under a recent law a peasant who accepted public relief forfeited his holding, and thousands were ejected under this cruel provision.  But landowners were not content with one process alone; they closed on the people with ejectments, turned them out on the roads, and plucked down their rooftrees.  In more than one county rents falling due in November for land that no longer yielded food to the cultivator, were enforced in January.  In the southwest the peasantry had made some frantic efforts to clutch their harvest and to retaliate for their sufferings in blind vengeance, but the law carried a sharp sword.  Eight counties, or parts of counties, were proclaimed, and a special commission, after a brief sitting in Clare and Limerick, left eleven peasants for the gallows.  Chief Justice Blackburn took occasion to note that “The state of things in 1847 was exactly that described by an act passed in 1776.”  The disease was permanent, so were the symptoms.  One well-head of Irish discontent was English prejudice, which refuses to listen to any complaint till it threatens to become dangerous.

It was a fearful time for men who loved their country, not only with deep affection, but with a wise and forecasting interest.  A revolution of the worst type was in progress.  Not the present alone, but the future, was being laid waste.  The marvellous reform accomplished by Father Mathew, the self-reliance which had grown up in the era of monster meetings, and the moral teachings of Davis and his friends were being fast swallowed up by this calamity.  The youth and manhood of the middle classes were scrambling for pauper places from the Board of Works, and the peasants were being transformed into mendicants by process of law.  These calamities, related of a distant and savage tribe, would move a generous heart; but seeing them befall our own people, the children of the same mother, and foreseeing all the black, unfathomable misery they foreshadowed, it was hard to preserve the sober rule of reason.

The gentry, who were responsible in the first place for the protection of the people from whom they drew their income, insisted that the calamity was an imperial one and ought to be borne out of the exchequer of the empire.  It was an equitable claim.  If there was no irresistible title of brotherhood, at lowest the stronger nation had snatched away from the weaker the power of helping itself, and still drew away during this terrible era half a million pounds every month in the shape of absentee rents.  The demand was put aside contemptuously.  The claim of the Nationalists to reenter on the management of their own affairs, since it was plain England could not manage them successfully, was treated as sedition.  We were proffered, instead of our own resources, which were ample—­