duct of one man who traps
and binds another, and then calmly cuts him about with a knife. The
conduct during the Famine was quite simply the conduct of the first man
if he entertained the later moments of the second man, by remarking in a
chatty manner on the very hopeful chances of his bleeding to death. The
British Prime Minister publicly refused to stop the Famine by the use of
English ships. The British Prime Minister positively spread the Famine,
by making the half-starved populations of Ireland pay for the starved
ones. The common verdict of a coroner's jury upon some emaciated wretch
was "Wilful murder by Lord John Russell": and that verdict was not only
the verdict of Irish public opinion, but is the verdict of history. But
there were those in influential positions in England who were not
content with publicly approving the act, but publicly proclaimed the
motive. The _Times_, which had then a national authority and
respectability which gave its words a weight unknown in modern
journalism, openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden Age when the kind
of Irishman native to Ireland would be "as rare on the banks of the
Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Manhattan." It seems
sufficiently frantic that such a thing should have been said by one
European of another, or even of a Red Indian, if Red Indians had
occupied anything like the place of the Irish then and since; if there
were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice and a Red Indian
Commander-in-Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress, containing
first-rate orators and fashionable novelists, could have turned
Presidents in and out; if half the best troops of the country were
trained with the tomahawk and half the best journalism of the capital
written in picture-writing, if later, by general consent, the Chief
known as Pine in the Twilight, was the best living poet, or the Chief
Thin Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist. If that were realised, the
English critic probably would not say anything scornful of red men;
or certainly would be sorry he said it. But the extraordinary avowal
does mark what was most peculiar in the position. This has not been the
common case of misgovernment. It is not merely that the institutions we
set up were indefensible; though the curious mark of them is that they
were literally indefensible; from Wood's Halfpence to the Irish Church
Establishment. There can be no more excuse for the method used by Pitt
than for the method used b