the urgency
of the occasion. This was exemplified in many ways. The peasantry were
unwilling to bestow a fair amount of labour upon works of acknowledged
utility, although paid nearly double the ordinary rates of wages; they
lazily preferred public works, so that there was a scarcity of hands to
gather in the imperfect harvest until the government partially withdrew
its competition from the labour market. Considerable numbers of farmers,
some of whom held as many as sixty acres of land, applied for tickets
from the relief committees, and were placed upon the public works, thus
drawing off the money from the legitimate objects of aid. Small farmers
in numbers received gratuities of Indian corn and other food, whose
means were such as ought in common decency and common honesty to
have prevented such an application. The local committees acted with
partiality and injustice, and numbers of the peasantry perished of
starvation, while the greedy, who were not necessitous, preyed upon the
public charity. In the county Clare, five thousand persons were struck
off the lists of those who were employed by the labour rate, and who, it
is scarcely necessary to add, rendered no return for the money they had
received, for the ostensible labour was in these cases a sham. The most
scandalous of all the exhibitions of want of probity which the crisis
developed was the revival of efforts to procure arms. The peasantry,
farmers, town-population--all of every rank--sought to possess
themselves of weapons of war, especially firearms. The demand for powder
and percussion-caps was as eager as for weapons. Birmingham was kept
busy; every hand in the gun-making trades there was employed; Sheffield
was also labouring at sword cutlery, and in the manufacture of daggers
and bayonets; while the smithies of Ireland were extensively engaged in
the manufacture of pike heads. The money expended by benevolent persons
and by the government on the vast scale which the emergency and a
noble compassion dictated, was employed to procure arms which those who
purchased them intended to turn upon the hands that fed them as soon
as opportunity allowed. Whatever thanks might be felt by the peasantry
towards those who on the spot gave of their private store to mitigate
the pangs of the sufferers, no gratitude was entertained to the British
public or to the government. Starving Ireland armed to strike down her
benefactors with weapons procured by the misuse of the boo