Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/271

JOHN E. REDMOND state of peace, the homes of the people have been leveled, the population of our country has been largely exterminated or expatriated, and our fair and smiling fields have been laid waste and desolate. People sometimes speak of famine as an act of God—an impious phrase, in my opinion, never true in any time or country, but in Ireland the phrase is absolute blasphemy. The Irish famine has been the direct result of English misgovernment. After all, Ireland, taken as a whole, is a rich and fertile island. With a proper distribution of the population, and with the fostering care of a native government, a population of many millions more than the present ought to live in our land in comfort and happiness. And yet it has marked every part of the rule of Ireland by the English Parliament. In one great visitation half a century ago a million and a quarter of our people died by starvation in the midst of a country which was actually at that time exporting food and grain to the English markets, and which was all the time paying exorbitant rates to maintain the glory and the power of the British Empire. In 1849 there was a Parliamentary return issued, from which it appears that during the three famine years ending in January, 1849, Ireland paid in taxes to the British exchequer £13,293,681—and her starving people perished of starvation in hundreds and thousands by the roadside—exported to England 500,000 head of cattle, 1,000,000 sheep, 500,000 pigs, 1,000,000 261