THE FIRST CLOSED DIVING HELMET.
Invented by A. Siebe, 1839. Now in the Patents Museum. South Kensington.
THE condition of affairs in Ireland, with which it had fallen to the Russell Ministry to deal on entering office in 1846, had become truly appalling. Nearly a million of money had been expended by Peel’s Government in relief of the distress caused by the failure of the potato crop in 1845, and the disease had reappeared with greater intensity in the following season. |The Irish Famine.| Further measures of relief were brought forward by the Prime Minister; charitable subscriptions poured in from every town in England and Scotland; nearly every country in Europe, including even Turkey, contributed help in the hour of need, and the United States Government freighted some of their war vessels with grain for their starving cousins.
J. Doyle (“H. B.”).] [Political Sketches, 1847.
AN INTERESTING GROUP; OR, “MISFORTUNE MAKES STRANGE BEDFELLOWS.”
Lord Lincoln, Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Goulbourne, Mr. Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck, and Mr. O’Brien.
Lord George Bentinck’s plan of relief works for Ireland, which mainly took the form of railway extension, was at first opposed by the Government, but afterwards adopted by them, thus bringing this “interesting group” of men into line.
Nevertheless, the situation was one of extraordinary perplexity. In the footprints of famine stalked sedition. Agrarian murders rose to a frightful figure; secret societies grew apace; midnight drilling went on in almost every county; and that very peasantry whose destitution had touched the hearts of the whole civilised world, proved themselves able to buy enormous quantities of arms and ammunition. In Clonmel alone, 1,138 stand of arms were sold in a few days, and everywhere, to quote a letter written at the time, “the peasantry are armed or are arming almost to a man. The stores of the armourer are more frequently exhausted than the provision stores.” So brisk was the demand as to cause a revival of the gun trade in Birmingham, where the existing stock of small arms was entirely cleared out. But there could be no doubt of the reality and severity of the distress. It was worst in the south and west; famine and famine-fever carried off thousands, and the population of Ireland, which had stood at eight millions in 1845, could only be reckoned at six millions in 1848. The difference, however, was not entirely due to deaths by starvation or disease. The westward stream of emigration had set in, and tens of thousands of Irish families sought and found the means of better existence in the land of plenty beyond the Atlantic.
