hronic tithe-war in Ireland,
which it is said has cost a million of lives? But in 1839, in the
second year of Queen Victoria's reign, Parliament gave relief, in the
following ingenious way. The burden was placed upon the _land_; the
landlord must pay the tithe, not the people! The exasperation which
followed took a form with which we are all more or less familiar. With
the increase in rents which, of course, ensued, there commenced an
anti-rent agitation which has never ceased. A repeal of the Union was
the only remedy, and to this O'Connell devoted all his energies.

In 1845, in one black night, a blight fell upon the potato-crop.
Carlyle says "a famine presupposes much." What must be the economic
condition of a people when there is only one such frail barrier between
them and starvation! The famine was the hideous child of centuries.
There is no need to dwell upon its details. Its name expresses all the
horror of those two years, when Europe and {242} America strove in vain
to relieve the famishing nation, even those who had food, dying, it is
said, from the mental anguish produced by witnessing so much suffering
which they could not assuage. The great O'Connell himself died of a
broken heart in beholding this national tragedy. When it was over,
Ireland had lost two millions of its population. Thousands had
perished and thousands more had emigrated from the doomed land to
America, there to keep alive, in the hearts of their children, the
memory of their wrongs.

Out of this wreck and ruin there arose the party of "Young Ireland,"
led, with more or less wisdom, by Mitchell, Smith O'Brien (descended
from Brian Boru), Dillon, and Meagher. Mitchell was soon transported,
and later O'Brien and Meagher were under sentence of death, which was
afterward commuted, Meagher surviving to lay down his life for the
North in the civil war in America. It is not strange that these men
were driven to futile insurrections, maddened as they were by the sight
of their countrymen, not yet emerged from the horrors of famine, forced
in droves out of the shelter of their {243} miserable cabins, for
non-payment of rent. It has been told in foregoing pages how it came
about that absentee English landlords owned a great part of Ireland.
From this had arisen the custom of subletting; and when it is known
that sometimes four people stood between the tenant and the landlord,
it will be realized how difficult it was to place responsibi