g Ireland. T. P. O'Connor, who took an active part in the
distribution of these humane gifts, said on the floor of the House of
Commons that more than one instance had come to his notice where the
Irish peasants had availed themselves of flour and meal, but the pork
given them was taken by the landlords' agents, "because many Irish
families had never acquired a taste for meat, the pigs they raised being
sold to pay the rent."

Just here, lest any tender-hearted reader be tempted to tears on behalf
of the Irish tenantry, I will quote an Irishman, a vegetarian first by
force and then by habit, George Bernard Shaw:

The person to pity is the landlord and his incompetent family, and
not the peasantry. In Ireland, the absentee landlord is bitterly
reproached for not administering his estate in person. It is pointed
out, truly enough, that the absentee is a pure parasite upon the
industry of his country. The indispensable minimum of attention to
his estate is paid by the agent or solicitor, whose resistance to
his purely parasitic activity is fortified by the fact that the
estates belong most to the mortgagees, and that the nominal landlord
is so ignorant of his own affairs that he can do nothing but send
begging letters to his agent.

On these estates generations of peasants (and agents) live hard but
bearable lives; whilst off them generations of ladies and gentlemen
of good breeding and natural capacity are corrupted into drifters,
wasters, drinkers, waiters-for-dead-men's-shoes, poor relations and
social wreckage of all sorts, living aimless lives, and often dying
squalid and tragic deaths.

* * * * *

In County Wicklow, Ireland, in Eighteen Hundred Forty-six, Charles
Stewart Parnell was born. In that year there was starvation in Ireland.
Thousands died from lack of food, just as they died in that other
English possession, India, in Nineteen Hundred One. Famished babes,
sucking at the withered breasts of dying mothers, were common sights on
the public highways.

Iowa and Illinois had not then got a-going; the cable was to come, and
the heart of Christian England was unpricked by public opinion. And all
the time while famine was in progress, sheep, pigs and cattle were being
shipped across the Channel to England. It was the famine of Eighteen
Hundred Forty-six that started the immense tide of Irish immigration to
America.