Note 157 — Chapter XXIII · FALL OF LORD BEACONSFIELD.

Nobody knew better than Lord Beaconsfield, from his experiences of 1846, that the potato is the barometer of Famine in Ireland, and it is impossible to suppose that he would have been satisfied with Mr. Lowther’s Bill if he had looked into the facts. For these all pointed to a dreadful failure of the potato crop. In 1876 its value was £12,464,382. In 1878 it was only £7,579,512. In 1879 it fell to £3,341,028. In England a crisis like this would have compelled the Government to take strong measures of relief, and yet in England such a state of affairs is always eased by the landlords abating or wiping out rent. But the distress in Ireland was aggravated because the worse it grew the fiercer became the demand of the landlords for rent. “Evictions,” writes Mr. J. Huntley McCarthy, “had increased from 463 families in 1877 to 980 in 1878, to 1,238 in 1879; and they were still on the increase, as was shown at the end of 1880, when it was found that 2,110 families were evicted.” Moreover, the Irish peasantry paid part of their rent out of wages earned as migratory labourers during part of the year in England and Scotland. But English and Scottish farmers were themselves cutting down their labour bills, and the loss to the Irish on migratory labour alone in 1877 was £250,000 (Hancock). See Healy’s “Why is there a Land Question?” pp. 71, 72; O’Connor’s “Parnell Movement,” pp. 166-7. J. H. McCarthy’s “England under Gladstone,” p. 103.