All the while there was a considerable export of corn from Ireland. In the beginning of 1730, two ships laden with barley were stopped at Drogheda by a fierce mob and were compelled to unload[438].
The interval between those years of epidemic typhus in Ireland and the next, 1740-41, was filled, we may be sure, with at least an average amount of the endemial fever. Rutty specially mentions it in Dublin in the autumn and winter of 1734-35: “We had the low fever, called nervous (and sometimes petechial from the spots that frequently attended, although probably not essential).” He then adds: “It is no new thing with us for this low kind of fever to prevail in the winter season;” and gives figures from the Dublin Bills of Mortality for forty years. He mentions the petechial fever as being frequent next in January and February, 1736, corresponding to a bad time of it in Huxham’s Plymouth annals. In 1738 and 1739 the type of the Dublin fever was relapsing, in part at least, the same type having been seen at Edinburgh shortly before.
The economics of Ireland, at this time, gave occasion to Berkeley’s Querist, a series of weekly essays written in 1737 and 1738, and collected in 1740, on the eve of the next great famine and mortality[439]. A few of the bishop’s sarcasms, in the form of queries, will serve to show how anomalous was the economic condition of the country, and how easily a crisis of famine and pestilence could arise.
“169. Whether it is possible the country should be well improved while our beef is exported, and our labourers live upon potatoes?
“173. Whether the quantities of beef, butter, wool and leather, exported from this island, can be reckoned the superfluities of a country, where there are so many natives naked and famished?
“174. Whether it would not be wise so to order our trade as to export manufactures rather than provisions, and of those such as employ most hands?
“466. Whether our exports do not consist of such necessaries as other countries cannot well be without?
“353. Whether hearty food and warm clothing would not enable and encourage the lower sort to labour?
“354. Whether in such a soil as ours, if there was industry, there would be want?