while another was crawling along the floor to reach some relief to the third, who was lying with her in the same bed. Four died altogether out of this family; two before I saw them, and two afterwards. This is one case only out of many that I could mention equally deplorable.'

The same witness says, that though the poor in his district do not often die of actual starvation, through the aid mutually afforded to each other in extremity, death constantly ensues from complaints induced by insufficient or unwholesome food-owing to this, and the want of sufficient clothing, either by day or night, they are subject to complaints that at the age of forty inflict on them all the infirmities of sixty.'-pp. 290, 291.

Another medical witness (and we dwell upon such evidence as being not only the most experienced and enlightened, but the most impartial of all), Dr. Powell, says:

I am quite sure many scores of sick perish every year for want of proper sustenance. Our diseases themselves are evidently caused by cold, and hunger, and nakedness! The poor man regaining his appetite on recovering finds nothing to eat a little food would restore him, but he sinks for want of it.'-p. 296.

The dispensary-surgeons all unite in declaring that the larger proportion of the cases they attend are diseases of the stomach, scorbutic, dropsical, or pulmonary, brought on solely by insufficient or unwholesome food, and want of clothing and shelter from the weather. Dropsy from these causes is frequent among the

young.

'Only last week,' says Dr. Longhead, 'I performed the operation of tapping on a girl of seventeen, whose disease was in my opinion solely occasioned by the long-continued want of a diet sufficiently nutritive; and some time since I tapped a man and his wife within the same hour, under similar circumstances. Indeed I scarcely know how to convey any adequate idea of the extreme destitution of the sick poor of this neighbourhood. In cases that I have attended as a midwife that required the use of the forceps, it has been no uncommon thing to be obliged to borrow the door of some neighbouring cabin, overlaying it with some little straw, as the only means (in the absence of anything like a bed) to raise the patient from the floor. I am at present attending the family of a poor labourer of the name of John Denison, whose sole means of subsistence are derived from the produce of one acre of bad rocky ground, for which (with the hovel they live in) he pays a rent of 17. Ss. 6d., and certainly has not more than an average of 1s. 6d. a week wages. He has a wife and eight children, and every one of the latter are now sick in scarlet fever.'-p. 297.

'Often,' say the medical men examined, one and all, do we administer medicine to the sick, when we well know that food and clothing are the real remedies wanted to rescue them from the

grave '—

grave'-remedies indispensable, but not to be procured! Dr. Walsh says:

In many instances when I have spoken of gruel as necessary for the patient, I have been told I might as well order them claret, because they had neither the materials nor the turf to boil it.' I have frequently found the sick lying on the bare damp ground, and without any covering, straw being considered a luxury which the pig only, who pays the rent, has the right to enjoy.'—p. 303.

The assistant commissioners visited some of the poor of Naas, county Kildare:

"The first cabin entered was that of a woman who was labouring under the disease of water in the chest. She appeared as if she had but a short time to live, and stated, "I have only this morning been able to rise from that straw. I felt a sort of gnawing about my heart, and thought I could manage to eat a bit. The only thing I had was these few potatoes" (pointing to some on the ground between her and a little girl, who had, a few days before, recovered from the small-pox). "You see, Sir," she continued, "they are rotten the most of them, and all are wet; I tried, and find I can't eat them; and even if I was well I think it would be the same thing."'—p. 303.

In some few places there are charitable loan-funds for relief of the sick, but with very scanty and inadequate funds the gentry and landlords seldom subscribing. In others there are dispensaries supported partly by a rate, partly by voluntary subscription. But the dispensary-doctors, as mentioned above, can only distribute medicine, while the first thing wanted is generally food.

A short sickness is almost certain ruin to a labourer or a small farmer. He seldom gets over it. All his little goods, his cow, his pig, even his tools, are sold for food and medicine. He gets into arrear with his rent; and of this ejectment (which is but another word for annihilation) is the certain consequence.

'They are often heard to cry "They are tired of life, and don't care how soon death seizes them.' A man in this situation becomes reckless and desperate. Mr. Townsend, chief constable of police in county Longford, gives his opinion that many are driven by destitution to become the ready instruments of political excesses in the hands of the disaffected.' He goes on,

6

'The other night my police went to execute a warrant against a man for Whitefootism, and on entering the house they found twelve children and four women lying on some straw, scattered on a wet floor, with no covering but an old tarpaulin thrown over the sixteen persons.'p. 304.

Whitefootism, indeed! Ye who, full fed with every luxury, and reclining on silk-encased plumes, lift up your eyes and hands with indignation at the atrocity of the Whitefeet, say what would be

your

your feelings, what your conduct, if your share of the blessings conferred by civilization, order, and a paternal government, amounted to no more than a leaky shed for shelter, rotten straw to lie on, a tarpaulin for a covering to you and fifteen others, and what dry potatoes you could beg or steal to stave off the gnawings of famine? The wonder, surely, is not that men become monsters under such circumstances-that they make war upon the world and the world's law, which neglects and oppresses them-that, being left to the destitution of the savage, they exhibit his disposition, adopt his system of self-preservation, and disregard the first principles of society-No!-the wonder is, that philosophers are found audacious enough to maintain that sufferings such as those we have related should remain unrelieved, in order to keep up the charitable sympathies of the poor for each other, and to preserve a wholesome moral feeling among them, uncontaminated by the odious interferences' of a legal provision for the destitute; or British senators who, like Lord Westmeath (p. 308), declare that a poor-law can in no shape be levied in Ireland without an atrocious violation of the rights of property! What are his lordship's notions of the rights of life? are they protected by the law of Ireland? or are they so subordinate to the rights of property, that hundreds must be tortured out of existence to enable a single peer to levy the last farthing of his extortionate rental ?

6. Able-bodied out of work.-Throughout the whole of Ireland it appears that employment is not only scarce, but is hardly to be obtained by any for a part of the year varying from four to six months being the interval between the last sowing and the gathering in of the crops, or from June to August, and again from December to February. Thus, in the parish of Boyle, county Roscommon,—

6 There are 188 resident labourers in the town and suburbs, out of whom only 11 are in constant employment!' " The labourers are frequently, during the summer months, reduced to one meal a-day, and that of dry potatoes, and no milk.'-p. 388.

In the parish of Ballymont, county Sligo, John Scanlan says:

I live in a village in which there are 19 farmers. There are 23 families besides, who have no ground, and are dependent on the wages they can get from us. We cannot give them more than four weeks' work in the year. They strive to have some con-acre besides.'—p. 391.

Con-acre is the usual resource of the labouring man, whose earnings would not in general support him and his family for a third of the year. By this term is meant the obtaining permission from the farmer to take a crop of potatoes off a few perches of land, which the poor man either manures himself with the dung of his pig, or rents at an exorbitant price, varying from eight to twelve guineas per acre.

'The

'The sort of potato generally used is the "lumper," as it grows more abundantly, and requires less manure than other descriptions. Doyle says, "If it were not for the plentiful produce of this potato, the scarcity of the summer that has just passed would have been starvation. The poverty of the people is bringing it into general use. It is of a soft, watery quality, and is both unwholesome and unpalatable food; pigs will not thrive upon it." Mr. Stoney, Mr. Hughes, Captain Stewart, &c. agree "That in ordinary seasons there is one-fifth of the population who have not a sufficiency even of this unwholesome food; and years of scarcity are so frequent, that they must enter largely into any calculation of the general condition of the people." Mr. Hughes says, "In the year 1831, a cargo of potatoes arrived in this port (Burrishoole, county Mayo). On opening the hatches, the stench proceeding from them was so great, and evinced such a state of decay, that they were thrown overboard as unfit for use. The people crowded to the beach, and plunged up to their middle in the water to gather them, and the rottenness might be seen oozing through the sacks in which they carried them away. Numbers were taken sick from using them, and I have been told that even the fowls that ate them died. This was mere hunger, and I cannot give you a better idea of the want that prevailed here this year (1834), when it was not heard of beyond our parish, than by telling you I am confident that numbers would have been glad to have had the same opportunity of procuring such food again.' John Cornfield (a small farmer) says: "I knew last summer (1834), in my village, a family of nine to be trusting to eight stone of potatoes for the week;-[if not stinted they would consume upwards of three stone in the day]-and it is not of one family or one village that I speak; but I know 60 families in the same state."-p. 373. "I think one-half of the landholders and labourers are supported by the other half during the scanty season."-p. 355. "I have often gone into a labourer's house, and saw the children crying for food; the father was there, but had nothing to give them, and could get no work." p. 408. "I am certain," says the Rev. Mr. O'Kean, "that very many die of bad food, cold at night, and hardships. I knew two landholders of three acres each, who, last year, had but one meal of potatoes a day for the whole summer.". -p. 529. Many a man has cut his only blanket in two, and sold one-half of it for food, rather than beg."—p. 376. "Half the labourers have no bedstead, but lie on straw spread on the ground." And they find great difficulty in getting enough of this for occasional change. "As to bed-clothes, in many houses the inmates have nothing to cover them at night beyond the garments which they have worn by day, and many must lie down in their day-clothes, although they should be dripping wet."

Hugh O'Malley was examined by the commissioners in Ennis, county Mayo. His case presents a fair specimen, they say, of that great class which is part landholder and part labourer. He says:

I have a wife and four children. I hold three-quarters of an acre of land, for which I pay 17. taken out in labour. This generally gives

me

I get

me and my family potatoes for five or six months of the year. an occasional day's labour. I have often taken 3d. a day rather than sit idle. My wife may earn 14d. on a day she is employed to spin; but if she is employed one day, she may not be employed again for a month. She has been sickly for the last seven years.' [Mr. Lyons says her complaint is one of those that are common here, arising from the nature of the food used by the poor, which is such, that if a person used to wholesome diet were reduced to subsist on it, he would not be alive in a month.] During the past summer I had not enough, nor anything like enough, of potatoes for myself and my family. It will be worse next summer. My potato crop has failed this year. The cause was that I had no proper seed. My crop used to last till May -now I am bare in November. I have got a month's stock of potatoes. When these are gone, as I expect no employment, I do not know how we are to live afterwards, but go upon God.' ..... 'My family never begged but twice, once for three weeks, and again for a month; but I will not be able to keep them from it this winter. . . . . I have not worn shoes for ten years. I have had no stockings but such as you see; the legs of stockings a neighbour gave me when he had worn out the feet of them. I have not got a new coat this five years. This is an old one a neighbour gave me six months ago; you see it is nothing but rags. There is a son of mine (putting forward a half-naked boy about eleven or twelve years old), he never wore breeches, he never had one; this is a borrowed coat he has on him (a man's coat all rags, dangling and trailing about him). You see he has nothing else covering him but his shirt. That shirt is the only stitch of clothing he has of his own. . . . . We lie on straw that we get from some neighbour in charity; we do not change it; we do not part with it at all, but as it wastes away the neighbours give us a wisp to add to it. (O'Donoghoe says, "When persons of his class cannot procure straw, they pull the rushes that grow on the sand-banks, and shake the sand from the roots, and spread them as a bed for themselves, just as they would litter pigs.") All the bed-clothes we have is the single fold of a blanket and a sheet. My wife and I use the blanket; the children all lie together, and have no covering but the sheet. There are numbers in the parish as badly or worse off than I am.

Mr. Lyons adds- That man is as fair a sample of his class as could be produced to you, or rather a favourable sample, as he is an honest fellow, well known, and befriended by his neighbours.'-p. 395. He continues According to a census which I made two years ago, there were then in this parish 751 men who had no shoes, and were unable to procure them; out of a population of 9000 there were 3136 persons, male and female, who within five years had not purchased any important article of clothing, as a gown, a coat, &c. As to night covering, of 1618 families, the entire population, 1011 have only one blanket each, such as it is; 299 families have no blanket at all. Until I made this census, I had no idea that there were families in the parish who lay without a blanket; and even when on inquiry I was told they had

none,