Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/214

 resisted appealed to the benevolence and statesmanship of the country. An alarm meeting was held in Dublin, where O'Connell in his primal vigour, free from the influence of Whig intrigue and the selfish prompting of his worthless son, the O'Connell of the Catholic struggle, listening only to the instincts of his heart, would probably have said, "This island rears more cattle and corn than will feed all its people. The first claim on the harvest and the herds is the daily bread of those who reared them. We do not ask you to open the ports, but to shut them fast. No food must leave this island till the industrious people are fed—a precaution which has been taken by the legislature in all the self-governed countries in Europe threatened with famine. A national calamity must be met by a national sacrifice. No inordinate proportion of it ought to fall on the landlord. The law can distribute it fairly by and by. But meantime the people must eat. You have a great army and munitions of war, and we are an unarmed multitude; but I warn you, you must kill us before you create a famine by carrying away the food of the people." What he did was to demand remedies which, if he still stood at the head of a united nation able to impose them, would have been totally inadequate. He suggested that the exportation of cereals to foreign countries should be prohibited, that distillation should cease till the famine had disappeared, and that the ports should be opened to foreign corn. To bear the cost of these remedies he thought an income tax ought to be imposed at the rate of 10 per cent, on resident proprietors, and 50 per cent, on absentees. But opening the ports was entirely unnecessary, as the country produced more food than it consumed, and the prohibition against exporting cereals would have been precaution enough, had he not rendered it abortive by the proviso that the prohibition should not extend to England, to which the great bulk of our food supplies was in fact carried. He excused this exception by a statement which nobody but O'Connell could have made with impunity. "I do not mean," he added, "to suggest any prohibition to the exportation of food between England and Ireland; in fact, it is possible we may get more from England than we send there," a statement as marvellous as if he