re remnants of families,
crowded together in one cabin; orphaned little relatives taken in by
the equally destitute, and even strangers--for these poor people are
kind to each other, even to the end. In one cabin was a sister, just
dying, lying beside her little brother, just dead. I have worse than
this to relate; but it is useless to multiply details, and they are,
in fact, unfit.'

In December, 1846, Father Mathew wrote to Mr. Trevelyan, then
secretary of the treasury, that men, women, and children
were gradually wasting away. They filled their stomachs with
cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops, &c., to appease the cravings of hunger.
There were then more than 5,000 half-starved wretches from the country
begging in the streets of Cork. When utterly exhausted, they crawled
to the workhouse to die. The average of deaths in that union was then
over a hundred a week.

From December 27, in 1846, to the middle of April, in 1847, the number
of human beings that died in the Cork workhouse was 2,130! And in the
third week of the following month the free interments in the Mathew
cemetery had risen to 277--as many as sixty-seven having been buried
in one day. The destruction of human life in other workhouses of
Ireland kept pace with the appalling mortality in the Cork workhouse.
According to official returns, it had reached in April the weekly
average of twenty-five per 1,000 inmates; the actual number of deaths
being 2,706 for the week ending April 3, and 2,613 in the following
week. Yet the number of inmates in the Irish workhouses was but
104,455 on April 10.

The size of the unions was a great impediment to the working of
the poor law. They were three times the extent of the corresponding
divisions in England. In Munster and Connaught, where there was the
greatest amount of destitution, and the least amount of local agency
available for its relief, the unions were much larger than in the
more favoured provinces of Ulster and Leinster. The union of Ballina
comprised a region of upwards of half a million acres, and within
its desert tracts the famine assumed its most appalling form, the
workhouse being more than forty miles distant from some of the
sufferers. As a measure of precaution, the Government had secretly
imported and stored a large quantity of Indian corn, as a cheap
substitute for the potato, which would have served the purpose much
better had the people been instructed in the best modes of cooking it.
It was placed i