Elihu Burritt

“ Women with their red, swollen feet partially swathed in old rags, some in men's coats, with their arms or skirts torn off, were sitting by the road-side, breaking stone. It was painful to see human labour and life struggling among the lowest interests of society. Men, once athletic labourers, were trying to eke out a few miserable days to their existence, by toiling upon these works. Poor creatures! Many of them are already famine-stricken. ”

“ There being no window, nor aperture to admit the light, in these wretched cabins, except the door, we found ourselves often in almost total darkness for the first moment of our entrance. But a faint glimmering of a handful of burning straw in one end would soon reveal to us the indistinct images of wan-faced children grouped together, with their large, plaintive, still eyes looking out at us, like the sick young of wild beasts in their dens. ”

“ And then, interspersed with these earnest entreaties, others louder still would be raised for bread. In every hovel we entered, we found the dying or the dead. In one of these straw-roofed burrows, eight persons had died in the last fortnight, and five more were lying upon the fetid, pestiferous straw, upon which their predecessors to the grave had been consumed by the wasting fever of famine. ”

“ Seeing a man's legs protruding from the straw, he moved them slightly with his foot; when a husky voice asked for water. In another part of the cabin, on removing a piece of canvas, he discovered three dead bodies, which had lain there unburied for the fortnight; and hard against one of these, and almost embraced in the arms of death, lay a young person far gone with fever. ”

“ To the neglect of these measures and that of giving the cultivators of the soil a proper security for the labour and expense which they bestow upon it, is mainly to be attributed the fact that a country possessing some of the finest natural advantages in the world, and which could be rendered capable of supporting in comfort at least three times its present population, is now overspread with such extreme human misery that the awful scenes portrayed in the following pages cease to excite a thrill of horror. ”

“ As the two started for the grave-yard to bury their own dead, we pursued our walk still further on, and entered another cabin where we encountered the climax of human misery. Surely thought I, while regarding this new phenomenon of suffering, there can be no lower deep than this between us and the bottom of the grave. On asking after the condition of the inmates, the woman to whom we addressed [14] the question answered by taking out of the straw three breathing skeletons, ranging from two to three feet in height and entirely naked. And these human beings were alive! ”

“ And into this noisome sepulchre living men, women, and children went down to die; to pillow upon the rotten straw, the grave clothes vacated by preceding victims and festering with their fever. Here they lay as closely to each other as if crowded side by side on the bottom of one grave. Six persons had been found in this fetid sepulchre at one time, and with one only able to crawl to the door to ask for water. Removing a board from the entrance of this black hole of pestilence, we found it crammed with wan [8] victims of famine, ready and willing to perish. ”

“ It was already walled round on the outside with an embankment of graves, half way to the eaves. The aperture of this horrible den of death would scarcely admit of the entrance of a common sized person. ”

“ Life was worth the last struggle of [6] nature, and the miserable skeleton of a father had fastened his youngest child to his back, and with four more by his side, had staggered up to the door, just as we entered the bread department of the establishment. ”

“ Among the attenuated apparitions of humanity that thronged this gate of stinted charity, one poor man presented himself under circumstances that even distinguished his case from the rest. He lived several miles from the centre of the town, in one of the rural districts, where he found himself on the eve of perishing with his family of seven small children. ”

“ There are many noble instances of individual sacrifices by personal attention to the sufferers, and other efforts for their relief, but nothing short of a law to give the poor of Ireland the right to claim support from the owners of the soil, before they are reduced to starvation, will effectually meet the evil, or be any security against its recurrence. ”

“ Some one is often kept at home, and prevented from earning this pittance, by the fear that some one of their family will die before their return. The first habitation we entered in the Castle-haven district was literally a hole in the wall, occupied by what might be called in America, a squatter, or a man who had burrowed a place for himself and family in the acute angle of two dilapidated walls by the road-side, where he lived rent free. We entered this stinted den by an aperture about three feet high, and found one or two children lying asleep with [12] their eyes open in the straw. ”