The famine in Ireland.
The chief problem which the Liberal cabinet found to trouble them when they took office was an Irish one. In 1845 there had been a partial failure of the potato-crop, the staple food of the Irish peasantry; this was followed in 1846, just after Lord John Russell came into power, by a far more dreadful disaster of the same kind. In August the whole potato harvest of Southern and Western Ireland was struck down by a sudden blight, such as had never been seen before or since, and 4,000,000 persons were suddenly brought to the verge of starvation. The disaster was aggravated by the hopeless state of the rural population. For the last half-century the population of Ireland had been advancing with disastrous rapidity; it had swelled from 5,000,000 to 8,000,000, yet there had been no corresponding increase either of improved cultivation, or of land taken under tillage. The improvident landlords had allowed the still more improvident tenantry to divide their farms into smaller and smaller fractions, till the land only fed its population in years of exceptional fertility. The greater part of Ireland was cut up into miserable slips of a few acres, where the cottier paid intermittently as much as he could of a rent which was rated at a higher amount than the wretched little farm could ever produce. The unexampled disaster of two successive years of blight brought the whole of the miserable peasantry to the edge of the grave. The workhouses were soon crammed, all local funds used up, and yet the people were dying by thousands from famine, or from the fevers which were bred by insufficient nourishment. The government paltered with the evil by establishing relief works, and refused for some time to face the fact that nothing but wholesale distribution of food would keep the wretched peasantry alive. It was not till 1847 that they faced the full horror of the problem, and established soup-kitchens and depôts for free food all over the land. By this time scores of thousands had died, and the bitterest feelings of wrath had been bred in the Irish mind at the neglect or incompetence of the cabinet.
Evictions and emigration.
When the famine was over, it was generally recognized that the worst of the disaster had been owing to the congested state of the population, who were trying to live on smaller farms than could really support them. This led to wholesale evictions by the landlords, who, half ruined by the famine themselves, wished to avoid another such experience by thinning off the pauperized cottiers, and throwing several farms into one. In many cases these evictions were carried out with ruthless haste and cruelty, for the proprietors—often absentees who did not know their tenants by sight—had no sympathy for the wretched peasants, and only wanted to be rid of them. The unwilling emigrants were driven out of Ireland by the hundred thousand, and retired for the most part to America, carrying away a fanatical hatred for the Anglo-Irish landholding classes who had evicted them, and for the English government which had sanctioned their expulsion.
Smith O'Brien's insurrection.
With such class rancour in the air, it was no wonder that troubles broke out in Ireland in 1848, the year after the famine was over. The chiefs of the "Young Ireland" party [62] thought that the times were ripe for open insurrection, and, seeing revolutions rife all over Europe, and the Chartist riots stirring again in England, resolved to strike at once. Their leader, Smith O'Brien, after using threatening language in the House of Commons, went over to Ireland and called the discontented to arms. But he proved a very incapable chief when he essayed the part of Catiline. Gathering together some hundreds of armed followers, he attacked fifty constables on Bonlagh common, in Tipperary. His men scattered after a few volleys, and he and his chief adherents fled to the hills, where they were soon caught (July, 1848). They were tried for treason and condemned, but the government commuted their punishment to exile, and a few years later they were given a free pardon.
Revolutionary agitation abroad.
This abortive revolt in Ireland was one of the least noteworthy events of 1848, the most turbulent year of the nineteenth century. The whole continent was ablaze with insurrections in favour of liberal ideas and national rights. The French drove out Louis Philippe, because he had grown reactionary in his old age, and refused to grant universal suffrage; on his expulsion they established a republic. Another great insurrection arose in Hungary, when the people tried to wrest a constitution by force of arms from their king Ferdinand, the Austrian Emperor. In the same year a great rising in Italy strove to win national unity by expelling the Austrians from Lombardy and Venetia, and making an end of the petty dukes and kings of Central and Southern Italy. Germany was at the same time convulsed by popular agitation, which demanded constitutional liberty from its many rulers, while the diet at Frankfort declared in favour of unifying the land on a republican basis.
End of the Chartist agitation.