mbered that all this time there was no _famine_ in Ireland.
The potato-crop, indeed, had failed as it had failed in Great Britain,
France, Germany and other countries at the same period, but the corn
crop was fat and abundant. Each year of the so-called famine, food to
maintain double the whole population was raised from the Irish soil. It
was exported to England to feed the English people. Nobody starved in
Germany. The German governments ordered the ports to be closed to the
export of food until the danger had passed. The Irish Confederation
demanded the same measure. "Close the Irish ports," it called to the
British Government, "and no man can die of hunger in Ireland." The
British Government, instead, flung the ports wide open. The great
principle of Free Trade required that the Irish should export their food
freely. Relief ships from foreign countries laden with the food
subscribed by charitable people to succour the starving Irish met
occasionally ships sailing out of the Irish ports laden with food reaped
by the starving Irish. On the quays of Galway the unhappy people wailed
as they saw their harvests borne away from them, and were admonished by
the butt-ends of British muskets, the British Government meantime
passing Relief measures which provided employment for hordes of English
officials and Irish understrappers, and pauper-relief for those who
surrendered their manhood and their property--the cost of this relief,
like the cost of the passage of the Act of Union, being debited to
Ireland--a generous loan in fact.

No doubt a union of the whole Irish people would have rendered all this
impossible. The Irish Confederation worked hard to bring about this
essential union. Directly and indirectly it achieved for a moment a
semblance of national unity. The Irish Council, composed largely of the
resident landlords--who mostly endeavoured to alleviate the
distress--came into being, reasoned with the Government and, when the
Government ignored reason, fell to pieces. George Henry Moore, a young
sporting landlord and a Tory (afterwards, as a result, to become a
Nationalist leader), conceived the design of getting all the Irish
members of the British Parliament to act together against the existing
British Government or any British Government which did not deal honestly
and effectively with the crisis. With the Marquis of Sligo, a nobleman
who did his duty to his tenantry during the Famine, Moore travelled
around Ireland