1822--Government grants--Charitable collections--High price of
Potatoes--Skibbereen in 1822--Half of the superficies of the Island
visited by this Famine--Strange apathy of Statesmen and Landowners
with regard to the ever-increasing culture of the Potato--Supposed
conquest of Ireland--Ireland kept poor lest she should rebel--The
English colony always regarded as the Irish nation--The Natives
ignored--They lived in the bogs and mountains, and cultivated the
Potato, the only food that would grow in such places--No recorded
Potato blight before 1729--The probable reason--Poverty of the
English colony--jealousy of England of its progress and
prosperity--Commercial jealousy--Destruction of the Woollen
manufacture--Its immediate effect--"William the Third's
Declaration--Absenteeism--Mr. M'Cullagh's arguments--See _Note_ in
Appendix--Apparently low rents--Not really so--No capital--Little
skill--No good Agricultural Implements--Swift's opinion--Arthur
Young's opinion--Acts of Parliament--The Catholics permitted to be
loyal--Act for reclaiming Bogs--Pension to Apostate Priests
increased--Catholic Petition in 1792--The Belief Act of
1793--Population of Ireland at this time--The Forty-shilling
Freeholders--Why they were created--Why they were abolished--The cry
of over-population.


The great Irish Famine, which reached its height in 1847, was, in many
of its features, the most striking and most deplorable known to history.
The deaths resulting from it, and the emigration which it caused, were
so vast, that, at one time, it seemed as if America and the grave were
about to absorb the whole population of this country between them. The
cause of the calamity was almost as wonderful as the result. It arose
from the failure of a root which, by degrees, had become the staple food