In the closing years of the 1870s, Irish ‘prosperity’ disappeared. Although the population was always diminishing for some years those who were left had enjoyed a little more comfort. The tenant farmers, for instance, had, many of them, got into the extravagant habit of drinking tea twice a day. In one year, 1877 I think, an actual increase of the population was estimated, and in 1878 captains of Atlantic liners said there were as many emigrants going one way as the other This return of emigrants was probably caused by the increase of ‘hard times’ in the United States than by improvement in Ireland, however. These ‘hard times’ and the great fall of prices in Ireland's staple products, with a year or two of bad harvests in succession, all contributed to bring Ireland face to face with actual famine — with a repetition of the events of 1846-47.
Even to persons who were not in existence when they occurred, the horrors of these years had a vividness almost as great as actual experience of them could produce, but in that page of history there was something more difficult to realise than its horrors, and that was the way they came about. I take it for granted that all who read this will know the history of the Irish famine which began in 1846; if any do not, it is beyond the scope of this work to furnish it except by recapitulation of the points which had a governing influence in the history of 1879 and 1880. It is well known that Irish famines are different from famines in other countries, which are caused by failure in the food supply, either local or general. There was plenty of food in Ireland, both locally and generally, throughout the nineteenth century.
There was enough food to maintain the large population of 1847 just as there was enough for the small one of 1880, and even where there was least, there were still only few who had much too little. But the failure of one crop, the potato, in 1846, was enough to sweep away all that tenants had left to maintain themselves on after having paid their rents. In 1879, a downright bad harvest, the sudden fall in prices, and the great falling off in the contributions from the self-sacrificing young people who were working themselves to death in America to keep their relations at home alive, all happening at the same time, swept away the living margin of the majority of the tenants, as well as that of all who were in any way dependent on the farmers, such as the men they employed as labourers who had no land, called ‘poor men’ in Ireland, and the semi-rural shopkeepers whose customers were the farmers.
In 1846 the tenants sold all they had to pay the landlords and then lay down to die, making their wives and children do the same. The question naturally arises, why, with the food actually in their own hands, the cultivators of the soil did not feed themselves first? It seems a hard question to answer, and yet there is more than one answer to it. If they had not paid their rent they would have been evicted, and then would have perished of cold, exposure, and starvation combined. For the workhouses in Ireland could only meet the demands made on them in ‘prosperous times’, in times of distress there is no succour to be had from them, for the ratepayers are mostly in need of it themselves. But the Irish then numbered nearly nine millions, and it does not seem possible that even the English government could prevent three, four or five millions of people from holding onto a good part of the food, fuel and miserable hovels they were in possession of; when roads were much fewer than in 1879, and there were no railways to speak of.
The armed man, besides, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was very much less-armed than the armed man of 30 years later, not to mention the present day. But if the Irish choose to do anything of which the English disapprove, such as eating, for instance, when they are intended to starve, they must face the prospect of wholesale massacre and though it may seem that a chance of massacre ought to be better than the certainty of starvation, those who have not had to face both alternatives are not in the best position to judge their respective charms. It is possible, also, that the Irish looked to charity to pull them through. If so, their judgement, to a certain extent, was correct, for the peoples of the world subscribed more than enough to cope with the famine. But with some trivial exceptions, this provision proved useless, as most of the money found its way into the hands of the English government, and never found it out again.
Thus, in spite of money and food both in plenty, the famine and the diseases bred of it ran riot — unchecked for years. Not all its victims breathed their last in Ireland. Quantities of those who fled across the Atlantic only did so to die on the American shore, while others only survived to die from the climate and the conditions of work they had to accept if they wished for even a chance of life. And there were others who sailed for the western continent, but never reached it either to live or die. The spectacle presented to other countries of these perpetual shiploads of living skeletons discharged at Castle Garden, was not one the English found quite agreeable; it touched their one vulnerable spot, their dislike of other foreigners seeing too much of their little methods. So, they found a remedy by diminishing the numbers of the famine stricken who arrived at the States, though not the number who started for that destination.
Ship after ship sailed with the captain under orders to scuttle her at night and get away with himself and crew. In the histories of England that still have to be written Palmerston’s coffin ships will be familiar words, though they are not spoken of in those already in existence. There were whispers of famine in the summer of 1879. In the autumn it had become a certainty, and all the events just described seemed on the point of reproducing themselves, with the difference, that the United States could not this time absorb refugees as it had done 30 years earlier. And if history should repeat itself after the model of 1846-47, then one certain consequence stood out with great clearness and distinctness; neither the Home Rule League nor any party or policy whatever, in or out of parliament, could have the smallest expectation of accomplishing anything but failures, futilities and disgraces, until the generation which had suffered the enactment of such history under its eyes should have passed away.