Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/219

 she had—a miserable hut—perished the night before last in a quarry."

"The people saw the harvest they had reared carried away to another country without an effort, for the most part, to retain it. The sole food of the distressed class was Indian meal, which had paid freight and storage in England, and had been obtained in exchange for English manufactures. Under a recent law, framed with malice propense, a peasant who accepted public relief forfeited his holding; and thousands were ejected under this cruel provision. But landowners were not content with one process alone; they closed on the people with ejectments, turned them on the roads, and plucked down their roof-trees. In more than one county rents falling due in November for land, which no longer yielded food to the cultivator, were enforced in January. In the South-West the peasantry had made some frantic efforts to clutch their harvest and to retaliate for their sufferings in blind vengeance—but the law carried a sharp sword. Eight counties or parts of counties were proclaimed, and a Special Commission, after a brief sitting in Clare and Limerick, left eleven peasants for the gallows."

The Nation insisted on the duty of retaining the food in the country, and reiterated its conviction that if the National organisation was still strong and unbroken they could, and ought, to forbid exportation if Parliament would not. The philosophy of our duty was, it seemed to me, very simple. If Ireland was an integral part of the Empire, the resources of the Empire ought to be freely applied to her protection; if she was only a conquered province, she owed the same fidelity to the Empire that a prisoner owes to his jailor. But the young men were impeded at every step by the base falsehood which represented them as agents of anarchy, and Conciliation Hall was ready on the first alarm to point them out as dabbling in the blood of the people. The Parliament and the Government, the people were assured, would protect them, and Repeal could not be far distant if only they turned a deaf ear to these tempters. The young men exhausted all