aid workers a large number shared the fate of those whom they
assisted. Indeed, it is one of the most singular features of the time
that not only old, or feeble, or specially sensitive people died, but
strong men, heads of houses--not regarded as by any means specially
soft-hearted--raised, too, by circumstances out of reach of actual
hunger, died--just as O'Connell had died--of sheer distress of mind, and
the effort to cope with what was beyond the power of any human being to
cope with. In the single county of Galway the records of the times
show--as may easily be verified--an extraordinary number of deaths of
this type, a fact which alone goes far to disprove those accusations of
heartlessness and indifference which have in some instances been too
lightly flung.

After the famine followed ruin--a ruin which swept high and low alike
into its net. When the poor rate rose to twenty and twenty-five
shillings in the pound it followed that the distinction between rich and
poor vanished, and there were plenty of instances of men, accounted well
off, who had subscribed liberally to others at the beginning of the
famine, who were themselves seeking relief before the end. The result
was a state of things which has left bitterer traces behind it than even
the famine itself. The smaller type of landowners, who for the most part
had kindly relations with their tenants, were swept away like leaves
before the great storm, their properties fell to their creditors, and
were sold by order of the newly established Encumbered Estates Courts.
No proposing purchaser would have anything to say to estates covered
with a crowd of pauper tenants, and the result was a wholesale
clearance, carried out usually by orders given by strangers at a
distance, and executed too often with a disregard of humanity that it is
frightful to read or to think of. Most of the people thus ejected in the
end emigrated, and that emigration was under the circumstances their
best hope few can reasonably doubt. Even here, however, misfortune
pursued them. Sanitary inspection of emigrant ships was at the time all
but unheard of, and statistics show that the densely crowded condition
of the vessels which took them away produced the most terrible mortality
amongst the already enfeebled people who crowded them, a full fifth of
the steerage passengers in many cases, it is said, dying upon the
voyage, and many more immediately after landing. The result of all this
has been