Page:Emigration - a paper read at the Burdett Hall, Limehouse.djvu/15

 your scythe, or your sickle, but put it in among the rich corn, for thousands and tens of thousands, in this country, are in a semi-starving state.

The history of Ireland for the last fifty years presents us with a sad illustration of the folly of depending upon merely political changes, for the improvement of the condition of the working classes. The late Daniel O'Connell—styled, in Ireland, the "Liberator"—commenced his career by agitating for Catholic Emancipation, which he carried; but this was a religious, and, to some extent, a social, as well as a political question. He then commenced his agitation for a Repeal of the Legislative Union between England and Ireland. This was to be the top-stone of Irish prosperity; so he continued to agitate, calling off the public mind from great social questions, and especially the grand question of emigration, till his eight or nine millions of people, and his two millions of "fighting men," were overtaken by a famine, as the chariots and horsemen of Pharoah were overtaken by a flood.

I think that famine broke the large heart of Daniel O'Connell. I saw him, for the last time, at a meeting in the County Cork, convened to see what could be done to meet the fearful emergency. He was then as pale as a ghost, for he saw the fell monster, Famine, or Black Death, descending from the mountain-sides of Cork and Kerry, where it first appeared, towards the towns and villages. I was living in the County Cork at this time, and said, more than once, to my family and friends, "I would sooner die than pass through the same scenes of misery again." The people rushed down upon us, like hungry wolves from the mountains; the faces of some of them were black, but the prevailing hue was that of tanned leather. One million of persons died on that occasion of starvation. I have had to step over a green corpse, lying on the threshold, to get at a dying man inside. Sixty dead bodies, after one night, have been carted from the door of the Cork City Union; and, in some districts, the rates rose to double the rental. Valuable land, in the south-west of Ireland, was sold for a mere song. There is a story told, on good authority, of a gentleman who could not sell a small property, at any figure, offering it to a friend for nothing, and of the friend's declining the gift, when he discovered the amount of the poor rates.

Before the famine, the political agitator and the employer of labor were loud in their praise of an overflowing population; but O'Connell lived long enough to discover that the strength in which he boasted was his weakness; that a large, unemployed population is not the strength, but the weakness of any country or state, as a large, unemployed family is a burden, and not a support to the head of that family: and the labor-master discovered that the labor-market may be so full, as to overflow and flood a whole country with