repeal of the laws which
prevented the free use of the St. Lawrence by ships of all nations.
But the most important subject with which the government was called
upon to deal was one which stifled all political rivalry and national
prejudices, and demanded the earnest consideration of all parties.
Canada, like the rest of the world, had heard of an unhappy land
smitten with a hideous plague, of its crops lying in pestilential
heaps and of its peasantry dying above them, of fathers, mothers, and
children ghastly in their rags or nakedness, of dead unburied, and the
living flying in terror, as it were, from a stricken battlefield. This
dreadful Irish famine forced to Canada upwards of 100,000 persons, the
greater number of whom were totally destitute and must have starved to
death had they not received public or private charity. The miseries of
these unhappy immigrants were aggravated to an inconceivable degree by
the outbreak of disease of a most malignant character, stimulated by
the wretched physical condition and by the disgraceful state of the
pest ships in which they were brought across the ocean. In those days
there was no effective inspection or other means taken to protect from
infection the unhappy families who were driven from their old homes by
poverty and misery. From Grosse Isle, the quarantine station on the
Lower St. Lawrence, to the most distant towns in the western province,
many thousands died in awful suffering, and left helpless orphans to
evoke the aid and sympathy of pitying Canadians everywhere. Canada was
in no sense responsible for this unfortunate state of things. The
imperial government had allowed this Irish immigration to go on
without making any effort whatever to prevent the evils that followed
it from Ireland to the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes.
It was a heavy burden which Canada should never have been called upon
to bear at a time when money was scarce and trade was paralyzed by the
action of the imperial parliament itself. Lord Elgin was fully alive
to the weighty responsibility which the situation entailed upon the
British government, and at the same time did full justice to the
exertions of the Canadian people to cope with this sad crisis. The
legislature voted a sum of money to relieve the distress among the
immigrants, but it was soon found entirely inadequate to meet the
emergency.

Lord Elgin did not fail to point out to the colonial secretary "the
severe strain"