ed "rotted in pit and storehouse." The farmers
taxed all their means and energies to secure even a larger crop in 1846,
but the blight of that year was even more fatal than the last. To
pinching want was added discouragement, and the people sat in the shadow
of a frightful catastrophe. In vain the British Government was called
upon to give relief through Parliament, until, in the autumn of 1846,
parliamentary authority was obtained to grant baronial loans. But these
and every local endeavor to mitigate the suffering failed, and the
destructive work of the famine continued, the number of victims
increasing, to the end of that fatal year. The horrors of 1846 were more
than equalled by those of the year that followed, and the woful picture
presented by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, the distinguished Irish patriot,
statesman, and historian, is but too amply justified by the accepted
records of the time.

The condition of Ireland at the opening of the year 1847 is one of the
most painful chapters in the annals of mankind. An industrious and
hospitable race were in the pangs of a devouring famine. Deaths of
individuals, of husband and wife, of entire families, were becoming
common. The potato-blight had spread from the Atlantic to the Caspian;
but there was more suffering in one parish of Mayo than in all the rest
of Europe. From Connaught, where distress was greatest, came batches of
inquests with the horrible verdict "died of starvation." In some
instances the victims were buried "wrapped in a coarse coverlet," a
coffin being too costly a luxury. The living awaited death with a
listlessness that was at once tragic and revolting. Women with dead
children in their arms were seen begging for a coffin to bury them.

Beranger has touched a thousand hearts by the picture of _Pauvre
Jacques_, who, when the tax-gatherer came in the King's name, was
discovered dead on his miserable pallet. But at Skibbereen, in the
fruitful County Cork whose seaports were thronged with vessels laden
with corn, cattle, and butter for England, the rate collector told a
more tragic tale. Some houses he found deserted; the owners had been
carried to their graves. In one cabin there was no other occupant than
three corpses; in a once prosperous home a woman and her children had
lain dead and unburied for a week; in the fields a man was discovered so
fearfully mangled by dogs that identification was impossible. The relief
committee of the Society of Friends d