,
as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its
most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine.
Now the singular thing about this famine is that during it there was no
scarcity of food in Ireland; there was only a shortage of potatoes.

"In 1847 alone," writes Mr Michael Davitt in his "Fall of
Feudalism," "food to the value of L44,958,000 sterling was grown in
Ireland according to the statistical returns for that year. But a
million of people died for want of food all the same."

The explanation is obvious: the peasants grew potatoes to feed
themselves, they raised corn to pay their rents. A temporary suspension
of rent-payments and the closing of the ports would have saved the great
body of the people. But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines. The
government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to
pay. At the same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised
the police on its present basis to ensure that rents should be paid. To
the wisdom of this policy, history is able to call witnesses by the
million--unhappily however it has to call them from famine graveyards,
and the waste womb of the Atlantic.

This essential wrongness of Unionism, so amply illustrated in every
year of its working, continues. But at least, our bluff Englishman
urges, the dead past can be suffered to bury those crimes and blunders
of Unionism which you have enumerated. Let us start with a clean slate.
Now, as will have been gathered from a previous chapter, we recognise in
this invitation an accent of soundness. We modern Home Rulers desire
above all to be loyal to the century in which we live. We are sick of
that caricature which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a sort of
perpetual suttee, in which all the interests of the present are
immolated on the funeral-pyre of the past. But let us come closer to
things. How do you clean a slate except by liquidating the debts of
which it keeps the record? The late Vicomte de Vogue wrote an admirable
novel, "Les Morts qui Parlent." The dead are always speaking; you cannot
stop their strong eloquence with a mouthful of clay. The "business man"
thinks no doubt that the Napoleonic War is no more than Hecuba to him,
or he to Hecuba. But he pays annual tribute to it, for he has to make
annual provision for the L600,000,000 which it added to the National
Debt. And just as Mr Pitt's foreign policy is in t