s not Mr
Galsworthy in this instance also lacking in imagination? Had he read
Irish history he would have learned a little about the "suffering to
innocent and helpless creatures" that logically flows from the denial
of a country's right to self-government. I will give the classic
example. In the late forties of the nineteenth century, the Irish
potato crop failed. The crops of corn were abundant, cattle were
abundant, but the potatoes everywhere rotted in the fields under a
mysterious blight. As the potato was the staple food of the people,
this would have been sufficiently disastrous, even in a self-governed
country. But, if Ireland had had self-government in 1847, does any one
believe that her Ministers would have allowed corn and cattle to go on
being exported from the country while the people were starving? Right
through the Famine Ireland went on exporting grain and cattle to the
value of seventeen million pounds a year so that rents might be paid.
Many leading Irishmen urged the Government to pass a temporary measure
prohibiting the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while the Famine
lasted. This step had been taken by the Governments of Belgium and
Portugal in similar circumstances. Had it been taken in Ireland--as it
is incredible that it would not if the Union had not been in
existence--between half a million and a million men, women, and
children would have been saved from the torture of death by starvation
and typhus fever. Not only this, but does not Mr Galsworthy also
overlook those multiplied agonies of exile, eviction, and agrarian
crime, which living creatures in Ireland would have been spared--in
great measure, at least--if the country had possessed self-government?
It may be doubted, whether all the wild song-birds that have ever
existed since the Garden of Eden have endured among them such an
excess of misery as fell to the lot of the Irish people in the half
century following the Famine--much of it preventable by a simple
change in the machinery of the constitution. Nor can one easily
measure the amount of suffering in England indirectly due to the fact
that the political intellect of the country was so occupied with the
Irish question that it had not the time or the energy left to tackle
scores of pressing English questions. Housing, poor law reform,
half-time--these and a host of other matters have been thrust out of
the way till statesmen, released from the woes of Ireland, might have
time to cons
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