which juries have stood between technically guilty but morally praiseworthy prisoners and the penalty oppressors longed to wreak on them. Many a man in the struggle for English freedom has been saved from a prison by the verdict of a jury, which has acquitted the accused in face of proven facts. But in England when it is seen that the conscience of the people rejects a law, the law is changed. In Ireland, when the conscience of the people revolts against a law, the law is enforced from outside.
Without going beyond the fifty years of Queen Victoria's reign it is easy to see how the agrarian rebellion has been brought about by the landlords, and I can scarcely be said to be appealing to ancient history if I confine myself to the events of the present reign. The famine of 1845 onwards was an artificial famine manufactured by the Irish landlords, who drained the country of its agricultural produce and left the people who raised the produce to starve. The exorbitant demands of this odious class drove the people to exist on poorer and poorer kinds of food, until they became dependent almost wholly on potatoes, and when the blight destroyed these nought was left. In 1845 the oat crop was exceptionally good, but it was exported to pay rent, although the potato blight had appeared. From September to Christmas, 1845, five hundred and fifteen deaths from starvation were registered, and three million two hundred and fifty thousand quarters of wheat, besides herds of cattle, were shipped to England during the same time. After a while, the country having been drained of its own food supply, Indian meal was sent to it as charity. In 1847, the value of the agricultural produce was £44,958,120; during 1847, 21,770 persons died of starvation, and 250,000 of fever consequent on starvation.
During and after the famine the landlords used their power of eviction remorselessly against this starving and patient tenantry. Hundreds of thousands were driven from the land of their birth, and left Ireland with a burning hatred in their hearts against their oppressors and against the England that enabled them to carry out their tyrannical will. The result of this famine caused wholesale emigration, and was the building up of an Ireland beyond the seas, a New Ireland which gazed ever lovingly and longingly on the Old, ever wrathfully and revengefully on England. At first the Irish emigrants sent money across the Atlantic to their relatives at home for the payment of the landlords' exactions, and the landlords lived for awhile on the funds supplied by the American Irish.
