escribed the state of the town in
language which it was hard to read with dry eyes. The people were dying
of the unaccustomed food which mocked their prayer for daily bread, and
were carried to the graveyard in a coffin from which the benevolent
strangers who had come to their relief had to drop them, like dead dogs,
that there might be a covering for the next corpse in its turn.

"This place is one mass of famine, disease, and death. The poor
creatures, hitherto trying to exist on one meal a day, are now sinking
under fever and bowel complaints, unable to come for their soup, which
is not fit for them. Rice is what their whole cry is for, but we cannot
manage this well, nor can we get the food carried to the houses, from
dread of infection. I have got a coffin constructed with movable sides,
to convey the bodies to the churchyard, in calico bags prepared, in
which the remains are wrapped up. I have just sent it to bring the
remains of a poor creature to the grave, who having been turned out of
the only shelter she had, a miserable hut, perished the night before
last in a quarry."

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