Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/159

 withstanding everything that lavish expenditure and devoted services, both by public servants and private individuals, could do, hundreds of thousands perished from starvation or its attendant pestilence. In the Union of Skibbereen nearly the whole population, 11,000 persons, perished. The shopkeepers of the little Kerry town of Kenmare told the writer of these pages in 1870 that during the worst months of the famine in 1847 they seldom took down their shutters in the morning without finding one or two corpses in the street, poor things who had been living in the mountains and had just had strength to crawl down into Kenmare to die. And what was famine in Ireland was the bitter pinch of scarcity in England and Scotland. In February, 1847, wheat was 102 shillings a quarter; added to this there was a general sense of alarm and absence of security, bringing with it want of capital, want of employment, want of wages. There was hardly a house, rich or poor, that was not suffering loss; but while to the rich the loss meant giving up luxuries which only custom had made seem necessaries, to the poor it meant actual want and privation; when men are low and miserable, and feel they have nothing to lose, is the time when revolutionary propaganda works like wildfire among them. There was an avowedly revolutionary political party in Ireland, always ready to take advantage of any difficulty the Government might be in, foreign or domestic, in order to harass and thwart them. "Refuse us this" (repeal of the Union) O'Connell had said in 1840, when war with France hung in the