Identifier: ridpathshistoryo07ridp (find matches)
Title: Ridpath's history of the world: being an account of the principal events in the career of the human race from the beginnings of civilization to the present time, comprising the development of social institutions and the story of all nations
Year: 1907 (1900s)
Authors: Ridpath, John Clark, 1840-1900
Subjects: World history
Publisher: Cincinnati, Ohio : Jones Brothers
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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ts resources. It will surprise the American working man to know that, in 1845, not a few of the Irish peasants, but all of them, lived, not principally or in the main, but wholly, exclusivley, on the potato. Such a thing as meat, or of the more concentrated forms of human food, was absolutely unknown in the Irish-mans home. His meal was of the potatoonly. All of his meals were so. He had nothing else. His children grew to manhood and womanhood, and then to old age, without ever having once in their lives known the taste of meat-food. In such a condition, what shall we say of the terror which the gloomy, wet summer of 1845, and the spread, ever-increasing and widening, of the potato-rot must have inspired among the crowded populations of the ill-omened island? The cry was soon heard across the channel. At first the country squires of England, satisfied in their abundance, were disposed to deny the story of the famine, to put it off as a scare, as a hobgoblin conjured up by the Opposition
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The Irish Famine - Scene at the gate of the Work-house
The Irish Famine: Scene at the Gate of a Workhouse. Illustration from The People's History of England (Cassell Petter & Galpin, c 1890).
(also, as here) page 310 UNIVERSAL HISTORY.-THE MODERN WORLD.
and the Free Traders; but the specter would not down, and the shadow thereof soon fell across the obdurate and conservative conscience of Great Britain. Such was the condition of affairs that John Bright, speaking of the crisis afterwards, declared that Famine itself had joined the Free-Trade cause. But why the cause of Free Trade? For the reason that the grains which all the world stood ready to pour into the harbors of starving Ireland were excluded therefrom by the Corn Laws of Great Britain. Even if not excluded, the price was so exorbitantly high as to be beyond the reach of the Irish peasantry. The Corn Law thus stood, like the tree of Tantalus, with its boughs hanging low and laden with abundance over the heads of the Irish people, but ever beyond their reach. Grain must take the place of the potato, or the Irish must starve. But grain can not be substituted as the food of the people so long as the present prices are main-t

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