Ireland's Black Death

THE GREAT HUNGER (510 pp.)--Cecil Woodham-Smith--Harper & Row ($6.95).

Between the Black Death and Buchenwald, Europe saw nothing like it west of Russia. In the five years of Ireland's Potato Famine (1845-49), 1,500,000 of the Irish perished--most of them starved to death. They wandered the road and died in ditches. Beggars could get nothing when all were beggars and there was nothing worth the begging. Typhus appeared. Whole villages became rotten cemeteries. The blind windows of the huts stared from their whitewashed walls like eyes in so many skulls.

There was no revolt worth recording. The Irish went in a terrible quietness. Weak and listless, the people were good only for a brief and feeble riot or two. Besides, the Act of Union of 1801 had made Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom, with 100,000 troops to go with it. and a good many of them (well-fed Irishmen mostly) were still around to see that the Irish starved without breaking any laws.

Articulate Bones. Half buried by history or in the long memory the Irish have for wrongs others have succeeded in forgetting, the famine has been disinterred and its statistical bones made articulate by a master of creative research. British Historian Cecil Woodham-Smith. In The Reason Why (TIME, May 10. 1954) she sketched the Light Brigade's famed charge in a gorgeous battle piece that was also a study of one of war's grand follies. Now she paints in somber tones the squalid miseries of peace. If there is no simple single reason why a nation had to starve and die. she makes clear that there was more to it than the fact that tubers in a wet climate make for a chancy crop.

When the blight struck in 1845. the eponymous Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister, the heir of nearly 700 years of British domination, which had left more than 8,000,000 Irish living like pigs--and sometimes with them under the same sod roof. A visiting Frenchman found in Ireland "the extreme of human misery, worse than the Negro in his chains." Why this savage squalor in a fertile land? "All this wretchedness and misery.'' says Woodham-Smith. can be "traced to a single source--the system under which land had come to be occupied and owned in Ireland, a system produced by centuries of successive conquests, rebellions, confiscations and punitive legislation.'' The system involved the absentee and irresponsible landlord, the rack-renting agent, and a tenantry driven onto smaller and smaller patches of land, until whole families existed on one or even half an acre of soil.

The potato had failed before. There had been 20 minor failures since 1728, but the potato was so cheap and easy that the Irish continued to gamble their lives on it. What else could they do? In 1845-49 the Irish lost the gamble.

Free Trade in Death. Cecil Woodham-Smith has composed a bitter and terrible narrative of this catalogue of horror. The British behaved well by their lights. Government funds of -L-8,000,000 sterling (more than half the rent of all Irish land) were advanced to feed the starving. Successive British Cabinets consisted of high-principled men of good will--Peel, the best of the lot, Lord John Russell, who succeeded him, and Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury, who worried about money and the Irish in that order.

The trouble lay in the rigidity of their principles. Educated Englishmen, Whig or Tory, believed in laissez faire, the classic economic theory of a free economy. But this mercantile theory led to absurdities when applied to Ireland's pre-mercantile economy. "The fanatical faith ... in the operation of natural causes," says Woodham-Smith, "was carried to such a length that in the midst of one of the major famines of history, the government was perpetually nervous of being too good to Ireland and of corrupting the Irish people by kindness, and so stifling the virtues of self-reliance and industry." As applied by bumbling bureaucrats, the doctrine meant that food (Indian corn mostly) should only be distributed by private agencies. Private traders (though few existed) should import the stuff. Exporters should on no account be hindered in their natural economic function. As a result, oats were carried to the docks for export past starving men.

Sin of Ignorance. The Irish famine does not come under the head of genocide, as British Historian A.J.P. Taylor provocatively has put it. The gas ovens of Auschwitz were the weapons of a deliberate crime. The Irish tragedy was a more confused thing, in which ignorant good will was not the least fatal element. But it is hardly surprising that the Irish blamed the British and that 1,000,000 Irish who somehow managed to escape to Canada, the U.S., England or Australia carried with them as their only inalienable possession--hatred. Only the statute of limitations, which rules the reading of history, has made it possible for the two nations still to speak to each other.

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