The weekly returns of the dead were like the bulletins of a fierce campaign.  As the end of the year approached, villages and rural districts, which had been prosperous and populous a year before, were desolate.  In some places the loss amounted to half the resident population.  Even the poorhouses shut up, and paupers did not escape.  More than one in six perished of the unaccustomed food.  The people did not everywhere consent to die patiently.  In Armagh and Down groups of men went from house to house in the rural districts and insisted on being fed.  In Tipperary and Waterford corn stores and bakers’ shops were sacked.  In Donegal the people seized upon a flour-mill and pillaged it.  In Limerick five thousand men assembled on Tory Hill and declared that they would not starve.  A local clergyman restrained them by the promise of speedy relief.  “If the Government did not act promptly, he himself would show them where food could be had.”  In a few cases crops were carried away from farms.

The offences which spring from suffering and fear were heard of in many districts, but they were encountered with instant resistance.  There were thirty thousand men in red jackets, carefully fed, clothed, and lodged, ready to maintain the law.  Four prisoners were convicted at the Galway assizes of stealing a filly, which they killed and ate to preserve their own lives.  In Enniskillen two boys under twelve years of age were convicted of stealing one pint of Indian-meal cooked into “stirabout,” and Chief Justice Blackburn vindicated the outraged law by transporting them for seven years.  Other children committed larcenies that they might be sent to jail where there was still daily bread to be had.  In Mayo the people were eating carrion wherever it could be procured, and the coroner could not keep pace with the inquests; for the law sometimes spent more to ascertain the cause of a pauper’s death than would suffice to preserve his life.

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.