The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Illustrated Edition) - Robert Thomas Wilson

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friends, that Free Trade caused the Irish Famine. Perhaps the true view is, that in manufacturing districts, where the mass of the people did not live by selling produce from the soil, the fall in the price of grain which followed Free Trade was a boon. To a country like Ireland, on the other hand, where the mass of the people lived on the profits of tillage on a small scale, Free Trade came as a disaster. Coupled with the failure of the potato crop, it meant famine in 1847.

      Literally, the great mass of the Irish people were by this time starving. Their savings were gone, and as for economising, it was hopeless. A nation that lives on potatoes alone—the cheapest and worst form of human food the earth can yield—has already lowered its standard of comfort to zero. Beggary is the only alternative to a potato diet: for potato-feeders, as Mr. J. S. Mill has observed, “retrenchment is impossible.” Public works were therefore started for the relief of the people, and to these tottering skeletons dragged themselves in despair, often to die almost as soon as they began their task. A few ounces of oatmeal were reckoned a day’s ration for a family, and those who survived cold and hunger were swept away by typhus. The scenes in the overcrowded workhouses recalled the horrors that are immortalised in Defoe’s “History of the Plague.” In the towns the sufferings of the people were not less keen and cruel. “Daily in the street,” writes Mr. A. M. Sullivan in “New Ireland,” “and on the footway, some poor creature lay down as if to sleep, and presently was still and stark. In one district it was a common occurrence to find, on opening the front door in the early morning, leaning against it the corpse of some victim who in the night had ‘rested’ in its shelter. We raised a public subscription and employed two men with horse and cart to go round each day to gather up the dead. One by one they were taken to Ardrahahair Abbey, and dropped through the hinged bottom of a ‘trap coffin’ into a common grave below. In the rural districts even this rude sepulchre was impossible. In the fields and by the ditches the victims lay as they fell, till some charitable hand was found to cover them with the adjacent soil.” And yet during this time, as Lord George Bentinck said, the food exports of Ireland were greater than those of any other country in the world, not merely relatively but absolutely in proportion to people or area. As Mr. Henry George observes,66 “grain and meal and butter were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving, and past trenches into which the dead were piled.”

      During the preceding autumn the Government had quite under-estimated the gravity of the situation in Ireland. They had given a pledge that they would not disturb the food market, and they relied on the ordinary capital of the nation to obtain supplies for a starving country, in the greater part of which there was by this time neither capital nor commerce. They imagined

      THE IRISH FAMINE: INTERIOR OF A PEASANT’S HUT.

      that the law of supply and demand would feed the people, and that whenever hunger smote them in a desolate district, there merchants and retailers of food would spring up as if by magic. Meetings of the Cabinet Council were

      LORD BROUGHAM, 1850. (From a Sketch of the Period.)

      held, it is true; and a glimpse at their deliberations is afforded us by Lord Campbell, who says he was summoned to attend a meeting of the Cabinet on the 20th October, at which the impending aggravation of the calamity was discussed. He adds:—“Lord John Russell has been severely blamed for not having immediately made an Order in Council to open the ports for the introduction of corn duty free. He actually proposed this measure, but was overruled, his colleagues being almost unanimously against him. In our then state of knowledge I think we were right not to tamper with the law as it had been recently settled, particularly as an Order in Council of this nature would have induced a necessity for the immediate meeting of Parliament, which, on account of the state of Ireland, was universally deprecated. The course we adopted was applauded till the accounts of Irish destitution became daily more appalling. We employed ourselves in considering the Bills which were to be brought forward at the meeting of Parliament, and Committees of the Cabinet were appointed to prepare them. Cabinet dinners were given once a week, and we were still in good spirits, hoping that the scarcity of this winter would not be more severe than that of the preceding.”67 Ministers were painfully undeceived.

      When the Session of Parliament opened on the 19th of January, 1847, the Queen, in reading her speech, seemed downcast and sorrowful, and her voice is said to have trembled and fallen low as she spoke of the sufferings of the Celtic population, and commended the patience and exemplary resignation with which their hardships were borne. And well might her voice and heart sink, for at that time the newspapers teemed with descriptions of scenes of suffering in Ireland, more harrowing than any which the most lurid pages of history record—scenes in which pestilence dogged the track of famine, and perishing wretches fought with each other like wild beasts for carrion. They were more dreadful even than those that live for ever in the ghastly narrative of Josephus, and, as Lord Brougham said in the Upper House, they recalled the canvas of Poussin and the dismal chant of Dante.68

      Lord John Russell explained, on the 25th of January, the plans of the Government. Some £2,000,000 were advanced to feed the Irish people on doles of Indian meal, and to give them work and wages. A new Irish Poor Law, based on the English principle that property must support pauperism, was introduced, much to the disgust of the Irish landlords. The Corn Law and Navigation Acts were to be temporarily suspended. The Tories, not to seem laggards in the race of philanthropy, through Lord George Bentinck brought in a Bill to raise £16,000,000 for the construction of new railways in Ireland, so that employment might be given to the poor. His plan was that for every £100 expended on a line, £200 should be lent to its promoters by the Government at the same rate of interest at which it had been borrowed, and it was significant that in drafting his measure Lord George had been guided by Mr. Hudson, “the Railway King,” who made railways, and Mr. Alderman Thompson, who supplied materials for their construction. The House rejected the project as one designed to invest the money of the taxpayers in speculative enterprises for the benefit of financial “rings,” who had duped the Protectionist leader. Ministers, however, to the surprise of the House, followed up this rejected measure with a Bill of their own on the 26th of April, providing for advancing Treasury Loans, amounting in all to £620,000, repayable at 5 per cent. interest, to Irish railways, 50 per cent. of whose capital was paid up. In fact, it was the fag end of Lord George Bentinck’s proposal, and, as Sir Robert Peel said, if the Government had saved money on the expenditure in relief works, it would have been wiser to increase the Treasury balances than subsidise private speculators in Ireland. On the other hand, there was a popular feeling that some aid should be given to Irish railway enterprise, which might lead to an absorption of unemployed labour, and the objections to Lord George Bentinck’s gigantic scheme—namely, its interference with the ordinary operations of trade, and the absence of adequate administrative machinery—did not lie against a proposal to assist great arterial lines of railway already under construction.

      During the discussions on these measures, Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Restriction Act of 1844 was continually attacked by the Protectionists as the cause of the prevailing financial distress. The object of that Act was to insure the convertibility of paper currency into gold, so that the holder of a bank-note might always be certain that he could get an equivalent in coin for it on demand. The country was suffering from a scarcity of money to trade with, and this scarcity was traced to the restriction of the Bank’s paper issues. On the contrary, it was really due (1) to failure of the food crops, which involved a loss of £16,000,000 sterling of capital; (2) to the rise in the price of cattle, due to a failure of crops; (3) to a loss of £16,000,000 in gambling speculations during the railway mania of 1845-46.

      This mania, which produced such monstrous schemes during the close of 1845, began to bear evil fruits when holders of scrip, in face of falling markets, were haunted with visions of bankruptcy. A return was issued, by order of the House of Commons, containing the names of the unhappy individuals who, during the Session of 1845, had subscribed towards railways in England, Scotland, and Ireland, for sums of less than £2,000. It is a huge catalogue, extending over 540 folio pages, and forms the oddest jumble of “all sorts and conditions of men.” Vicars and vice-admirals

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