A Committee appointed by the Aldermen of New York in 1846
visited one of those institutions, and thus reported upon it: "The
Committee discovered in one apartment, 50 feet square, 100 sick and
dying emigrants lying on straw; and among them, in their midst, the
bodies of two who had died four or five days before, but who had been
left for that time without burial! They found in the course of their
inquiry that decayed vegetables, bad flour, and putrid meat, were
specially purchased and provided for the use of the strangers! Such as
had strength to escape from these slaughter-houses fled from them as
from a plague, and roamed through the city, exciting the
compassion--perhaps the horror--of the passers by. Those who were too
ill to escape had to take their chance--such chance as poisonous food,
infected air, and bad treatment afforded them of ultimate
recovery."[293]
It may be fairly assumed that the mortality amongst the emigrants who
went to the United States was at least as great as amongst those who
went to British America. The emigration from Ireland for the above six
years was, as already stated, 1,180,409, seventeen per cent. of whom
will give us 200,668, which, being added to 1,039,552, the calculated
number of deaths at home, we have ONE MILLION, TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY
THOUSAND DEATHS resulting directly from the Irish Famine, and the
pestilence which followed in its track.
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