Famines and
plagues will suggest themselves, with their ghastly and repulsive
incidents--the dead mother--the dying infant--the feast of
cannibals--Athens--Jerusalem--Marseilles. But these awful facts stand
forth as dark spots in the illuminated chronicles of time; episodes, it
may be, of some magnificent epoch in a nation's history--tragedies acted
in remote times, or in distant regions--the actors, the inhabitants of
beleaguered cities, or the citizens of a narrow territory. But here the
tragedy is enacted with no narrower limits than the boundaries of a
kingdom, the victims--an entire people,--within our own days, at our own
thresholds."[245]
FOOTNOTES:
[213] Letter from Captain Wynne, Government District Inspector to
Lieutenant-Colonel Jones.--_Commissariat Series, part 1, p_. 438.--The
italics are Captain Wynne's.
[214] Report of Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, pp.
180-2.
[215] Census of Ireland for the Year 1851. Report on tables of deaths.
[216] The circumlocutions had recourse to by relief committees and
Government officials to avoid using the word _Famine_ were so many and
so remarkable, that at one time I was inclined to attempt making a
complete list of them.
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