In the first week of September, the potatoes in the London market were, to a very considerable extent, found to be unfit for human food. To the eye they did not show any sign of disease, but when boiled and cut its presence was but too evident, by the black, or rather brownish-black mass they presented. The potato fields began to be examined, and the provincial journals soon teemed with accounts of the destructive visitation, with speculations concerning its cause, and suggestions as to probable remedies. The descriptions of the disease given by the English newspapers do not quite agree with the symptoms observed somewhat later in Ireland. "Whatever may have been the cause," says one account, "it is certain that, externally, the disease indicates itself by a fungus or moss producing decomposition of the farinaceous interior."[57] "The disease is very general in this locality," says another, "beginning with a damp spot on some part of the potato."[58] A third observer writes: "The commencement of the attack is generally dated here from Tuesday, the 19th ultimo. A day of the heaviest rain almost ever known. It first appears a bluish speck on the potato, and then spreads rapidly."[59]
Whether it was that, in England, in their anxiety about the tuber, people paid little or no attention to the stems or leaves of the potato; or, that the earlier symptoms differed from the later, matters but little, the disease was certainly the same throughout the United Kingdom. In Ireland it was first observed on the leaves of the plant as brown spots of various shapes and sizes, pretty much as if a dilution of acid had fallen upon them like drops of rain. Sometimes the blight made its appearance near high hedges, or under trees; sometimes portions of a field would be greatly affected with it before other parts were touched at all; and I have sometimes observed the very first symptoms of the disease opposite an open gateway, as if a blighting wind had rushed in, making for some distance a sort of avenue of discoloured leaves and stalks, about the width of the gateway at first, but becoming wider onwards. When the decomposition produced by the blight was in a somewhat advanced stage, the odour from the potato field, which was very offensive, was perceptible at a considerable distance. There may have been cases in this country in which the disease was first observed in the tubers, but they must have been rare. It appeared in Scotland with the same symptoms as in Ireland. A contemporary account says: "In various parts of Scotland the potatoes have suffered fearfully from the blight. The leaves of the plant have, generally speaking, first been affected, and then the root." From this mode of manifesting itself, the potato disease was commonly called in Ireland, as in Scotland, the Potato Blight. It had other names given to it; potato murrain, cholera in the potato, and so on; but Potato Blight in Ireland, at least, was and is its all but universal name. The whole stem soon became affected after the blight had appeared on the leaves, more especially if the weather was damp; and for some time before the period for digging out the crop had arrived, the potato fields showed nothing but rank weeds, with here and there the remains of withered-up stems—bleached skeletons of the green healthy plants of some weeks before.
I have a vivid recollection of the blight as it appeared in the southern portion of Kildare in 1850. The fifteenth of July in that year—St. Swithin's day—was a day of clouds and lightning, of thunder and terrific rain. It was one of those days that strike the timid with alarm and terror: sometimes it was dark as twilight; sometimes a sudden ghastly brightness was produced by the lightning. That the air was charged with electricity to a most unusual extent was felt by everybody. Those who had an intimate knowledge of the various potato blights from '45 said, "This is the beginning of the blight." So it was. It is well known that after the blight of '45 the potatoes in Ireland had scarcely shown any blossom for some years, even those unaffected by the blight, or affected by it only to a small extent; and the few exceptional blossoms which appeared produced no seed. This feebleness of the plant was gradually disappearing, and in 1850 it was remarked as a very hopeful sign that the potatoes blossomed almost as of old. The crop having been sown much earlier than was customary before '45, most of the fields, on this memorable fifteenth of July, were rich with that beautiful and striking sheet of blossom, which they show when the plant is in vigorous health. Next day—a still, oppressive, sultry, electric sort of day—I, in company with some others, visited various potato fields. There was but one symptom that the blight had come; all the blossoms were closed, even at mid-day: this was enough to the experienced eye—the blight had come. Heat, noontide sun, nothing ever opened them again. In some days they began to fall off the stems; in eight or ten days other symptoms appeared, and so began the Potato Blight of 1850, a mild one, but still the true blight. How like this fifteenth of July must have been to the nineteenth of August, 1845, described above by the Cambridge Chronicle.
The blight of 1845 was noticed in Ireland about the middle of September. Like the passage birds, it first appeared on the coast, and, it would seem, first of all on the coast of Wexford. It soon travelled inland, and accounts of its alarming progress began to be published in almost every part of the country. Letters in the daily press from Cork, Tyrone, Meath, Roscommon, and various other places, gave despairing accounts of its extent and rapidity. A Meath peasant writes:—"Awful is our story; I do be striving to blindfold them (the potatoes) in the boiling. I trust in God's mercy no harm will come from them." The Very Rev. Dr. M'Evoy, P.P., writing from Kells, October the 24th, says:—"On my most minute personal inspection of the state of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale, is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction, that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas Day next.... With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our whole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have last night seen no less than fifty dray-loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the soon and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food."
From other places the accounts were more favourable. "I have found no field without the disease," writes Mr. Horace Townsend to the Southern Reporter, "but in great variety of degree; in some at least one-third of the crop is tainted, in others not a tenth, and all the remainder seems sound as ever." From Athy, Kilkenny, Mayo, Carlow, and Newry, the accounts were that the disease was partial, and seemed in some cases arrested. But these hopeful accounts had, almost in every instance, to be contradicted later on. The blight did not appear in all places at once; it travelled mysteriously but steadily, and from districts where the crop was safe a few days before, the gloomiest accounts were unexpectedly received. The special correspondent of a Dublin newspaper, writing from the West, explains this when he says: "The disease appeared suddenly, and the tubers are sometimes rotten in twenty-four hours afterwards."[60]
On the 18th of October, "The Royal Agricultural Improvement Society of Ireland" held a special meeting relative to the disease in the potatoes. They had, some short time before, appointed a sub-committee on the subject, Professor (now Sir Robert) Kane being its Chairman. He stated to the meeting that the sub-committee had sat the two previous days, but were not as yet prepared with anything definite on the subject. They, however, communicated some advice to farmers, under eight heads, founded on experiments. This advice, whether useful or not, was, for the most part, not within the power of small farmers to put in practice; but the sub-committee made one observation that should have aroused all the energies of those who had the lives of the people in their hands. They said that, "on mature consideration of the evidence now before them, it was advisable that the Council should direct the attention of the Irish Government to the now undoubted fact, that a great portion of the potato crop in this country was seriously affected by the disease in question." A cautious, well-weighed sentence, which, coming from such a responsible quarter, was full of portentous meaning for the future. The Dublin Corporation took up the question of the Potato Blight with much and praiseworthy earnestness. They appointed a committee to enquire and report on the subject. A meeting of this committee was held in the City Assembly House on the 28th of October; the Lord Mayor, John L. Arabin, presided, who, from the accounts which had reached him, gave a gloomy picture of the progress of the disease. The late Mr. William Forde, then Town Clerk, in a letter to the committee, said he had recently inspected the produce of eight or ten acres dug and housed in an apparently sound state three weeks before, and that now it was difficult to find a sound potato amongst them. That all might not, however, be gloom, he added that he never saw so much corn safe and thatched in the haggards as he had seen this year.
It was at this meeting O'Connell first brought forward his plan for dealing with the impending famine, a plan which met with no favour from those in power, there not having been a single suggestion put forward in it which was taken up by them. The crisis, he said, was one of terrible importance; the lives of the people were at stake; the calamity was all but universal; something must be done, and done immediately, to meet it. Private subscriptions would not be sufficient; they might meet a local, but not a national calamity like the present. By a merciful dispensation of Providence there was one of the best oat crops that we ever have had in the country, but that crop was passing out of Ireland day by day. Then, quoting from the Mark Lane Express, he said, sixteen thousand quarters of oats were imported from Ireland to London alone in one week. His proposal was, that a deputation should be appointed to wait on the Lord Lieutenant (Lord Heytesbury) to urge certain measures on the Government, in order to mitigate the calamitous state of the country. 1. The first measure he proposed was the immediate stoppage of distillation and brewing, 2. Next, that the export of provisions of every kind to foreign countries should be immediately prohibited, and our own ports open to receive provisions from all countries. From this prohibition he, strangely enough, excepted England, although he had just shown that it was England which was carrying away our provisions with the most alarming rapidity. He probably made this exception to induce the Government to lend a more willing ear to his other propositions. He adduced the example of Belgium, Holland, and even of Russia and Turkey, in support of this view; all these countries having closed their ports against the exportation of provisions, under analagous circumstances. 3. But all this, he said, was not enough; the Government must be called on to assist the country in buying provisions—called on, not in a spirit of begging or alms-seeking—but called on to supply from the resources of Ireland itself money for this purpose. Let our own money be applied to it. The proceeds of the Woods and Forests in this country are, he said, £74,000 a year; money, which instead of being applied to Irish purposes, had gone to improve Windsor and Trafalgar Square—two millions of Irish money having been already expended in this manner. This is no time to be bungling at trivial remedies; let a loan of a million and a half be raised on this £74,000 a year, which, at four per cent., would leave a portion of it for a sinking fund; let absentees be taxed fifty per cent., and every resident ten per cent. By these means abundant funds would be found to keep the people alive. Let there be got up in each county machinery for carrying out the relief: let the projected railways be commenced, and let the people be put to work from one end of the country to the other, and let them be paid in food. He concluded, amidst the applause of the gentlemen present, by moving, that a deputation do wait on His Excellency to lay this plan before him, and to explain to him the pressing necessity which existed for its adoption.
To the Tory Government of the day, especially to a politician like Lord Heytesbury, the scheme, in all likelihood, appeared very extravagant, and yet at this distance of time, and with the history of that terrible period before us, it was, on the whole, sound, statesmanlike, and practical.
In accordance with O'Connell's suggestion, a deputation was appointed to wait on the Lord Lieutenant. He received them at the Phoenix Park, on Wednesday, the 3rd of November. They were coldly received. This may be in part accounted for by the fact, that the two or three previous years were remarkable for the great Repeal agitation; O'Connell himself having baptized the year 1843, the Repeal year. Then the State trials came, in which the Repeal leaders fought the Government, inch by inch, putting it to enormous cost, trouble, and anxiety. To be sure it succeeded, at last, in securing a verdict, and in sending O'Connell and some four or five others to Richmond prison; but their imprisonment there, like their journey to it, was a continuous triumph. Besides, the Government were in the end defeated by an appeal to the House of Lords, and the State prisoners set free in the fall of 1844. O'Connell, it was known through the Press, had propounded a scheme to meet the impending famine, which was, in substance, the one laid before the Viceroy. It is not much to be wondered at, that a small politician and narrow party-man, as Lord Heytesbury was, should think it a victory to make the deputation feel his high displeasure at the manner in which agitators had been, for so long a period, bearding the Government to which he belonged.
The deputation was highly respectable, and ought to have been influential, consisting, as it did, of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, the Lord Mayor, O'Connell, Henry Grattan, Sir James Murray, John Augustus O'Neill, and some twenty other gentlemen of position. The journals of the next morning informed the public that the deputation was "most formally" received. The Lord Mayor read to His Excellency the resolutions drawn up by the committee by which the deputation was appointed. They stated—(1), That famine and pestilence were immediately imminent, unless the Government took prompt measures against them; (2), That this could be best done by employing the people in works of national utility; (3), That the ports ought to be closed against the exportation of corn; (4), That public granaries ought to be established in various parts of the country, the corn to be sold to the people at moderate prices; and (5), That the use of grain for distillation ought to be stopped.