The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor Read Free Book Online

tens and hundreds of thousands while we ask ourselves interestingly complicated questions. Quarter of a million have died this year alone. More than the combined entire populations of Florida, Iowa and Delaware.
    Everything about the Famine is indeed complicated. Everything except the agonies of those who are its victims: the old, the young, the defenseless and the poor. Their labors have supplied a gracious leisure to the gentry of Ireland, who like their siblings in England languish in bed half the day. Their Lordships and Ladyships are so understandably weary. A look though the Illustrated London News for the last several years will reveal how hunts, balls, and other fatiguing diversions of elegant country living have merrily continued in disaster-struck Ireland, while the hungry have the temerity to die on the roadside.
    To where might they turn for assistance now, these people cruelly abandoned by those who had squeezed them dry? To our esteemed colleagues in the British Fourth Estate, perhaps. Here is a recent editorial from the London Times (a publication in which Lord Kingscourt holds considerable shares): “We regard the potato blight as a blessing. When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi, they must become carnivorous. With the taste of meats will grow the appetite for them. With this will come steadiness, regularity and perseverance.”
    An enforced scheme of mass emigration had been advocated in a recent number of the journal Punch (an anti-American rag whose editor has been a frequent guest in Lord Kingscourt’s own home). “We are confident, if this scheme was properly carried out, it would be the greatest boon to Ireland since SAINT PATRICK drove out the vermin.”
    The exodus is indeed being undertaken now. Within the next thirty years, more Irish will live among us in America than live in the cruelly inequitable place where they were born to be regarded as an infestation.
    It is not a calculated act of national murder, the distorted teachings of some notwithstanding. This is another matter on which Lord Kingscourt is quite correct. (Profound the consolation to a mother watching her children starve that their starvations havenot been calculated.) Neither has the Famine been brought upon the victims by idleness and stupidity (not their own, at any rate), despite the flagrantly hateful claims to that effect often made in the London newspapers now. Mr Punch is far from the only leering puppet to have likened the Irish to beasts and thugs. And such imbecilities are being repeated on all sides. Many an Irish clergyman is already tutoring his flock that an Englishman by definition is a godless degenerate, devoid of civilization, a bloodthirsty Pagan. Others are also girding for battle, a little more secretly if no less dangerously. A member of a revolutionary society in rural Galway (an evicted tenant of Lord Kingscourt himself) recently remarked to the present reporter:
    “I despise the English as I despise Satan. They are filth. They were savages and idolaters when our people were saints. There will be a holy war in this country to put them out. All of them. I do not care tuppence how many centuries they are here, this is not their country; they have it by torture alone. They will be sent scurrying back to the cesspit they came from, the mongrel dogs and their bitches with them. Every one of the pack I slaughter, I will count as a blessing on my name.”
    Many of us have true friends in Great Britain and Ireland, and all of us owe those countries a deal of our heritage. It is thus imperative that America exert whatever influence she may wield upon the London government at this terrible time. Otherwise the Famine will poison relations between the decent and moderate peoples of those islands for a century to come.
    A million will surely die as a result of this Famine. If something is not urgently done to help the poor, thousands more will die in its hideous aftermath: by the blade, the bomb, the bayonet, and