of the
Government, Lord John Russell replied that the owners of property in
Ireland ought to support the poor born on their estates. It was a
perfectly just proposition if the ratepayers were empowered to determine
the object and method of the expenditure; but prohibiting productive
work, and forcing them to turn strong men into paupers and keep them
sweltering in workhouses instead of laboring to reclaim the waste
lands--this was not justice. The _Times_, commenting on the new policy,
declared that Ireland was as well able to help herself as France or
Belgium, and that the whole earth was doing duty for inhuman Irish
landlords. An unanswerable case, if Ireland, like France and Belgium,
had the power of collecting and applying her own revenue; otherwise not
difficult to answer.

The people fled before the famine to England, America, and the British
colonies. They carried with them the seed of disease and death. In
England a bishop and more than twenty priests died of typhus, caught in
attendance on the sick and dying. The English people clamored against
such an infliction, which it cannot be denied would be altogether
intolerable if these fugitives were not made exiles and paupers by
English law. They were ordered home again, that they might be supported
on the resources of their own country; for though we had no country for
the purpose of self-government and self-protection, we were acknowledged
to have a country when the necessity of bearing burdens arose.

More than a hundred thousand souls fled to the United States and Canada.
The United States maintained sanitary regulations on shipboard which
were effectual to a certain extent. But the emigration to Canada was
left to the individual greed of shipowners, and the emigrant-ships
rivalled the cabins of Mayo or the fever-sheds of Skibbereen. Crowded
and filthy, carrying double the legal number of passengers, who were
ill-fed and imperfectly clothed, and having no doctor on board, the
holds, says an eyewitness, were like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and
deaths occurred in myriads. The survivors, on their arrival in the new
country, continued to die and to scatter death around them.

At Montreal, during nine weeks, eight hundred emigrants perished, and
over nine hundred residents died of diseases caught from emigrants.
During six months the deaths of the new arrivals exceeded three
thousand. No preparations were made by the British Government for the
reception or the e