Public Opinion, Which They Control, Seems To Have
Absolutely No Sympathy With The Common People When They Were Behind In
Their Rents, Although They Were Emerging From A Period Of Agricultural
Distress, Culminating In Absolute Famine.
I watched the papers, I took
good heed to the conversation that went on around me, and saw or heard
no expression of sympathy when events took place which, I had thought,
impossible under British law.
When Mrs. Whittington, of Malin, was put out in the wild March weather,
with a child three days old in her arms and a flock of six around her, I
looked for some one to raise a voice of protest, but there was not a
whisper. When a landlord's official forced his way past husband, doctor
and nurse, to the bedside of Mrs. Stewart, to order her to get out of
bed to go to the workhouse, bringing on fits that caused the death of
her babe and nearly cost her her life, I watched eagerly for some voice
to say this should not have been done, but there was none. I have heard
of retreating armies stopping and hazarding battle, rather than forsake
a childing woman in her extremity, in countries not boasting of so
enlightened a government as our own. I had so gloried in the British
Constitution, its justice, its mercy! I waited to see what the law would
do in this case. All the facts were admitted in court, yet this man, who
forgot that he, too, was born of a woman, was triumphantly acquitted and
not one word of disapproval appeared in any public print that I saw.
I have often come home after seeing that on the side of the oppressor
was power - the power of bayonets - and that the poor had no helper, until
I could not sleep for pain and could only cry to our Father - theirs and
mine - How long, Lord, how long!
A friend described to me quite gaily a scene at the Castlebar workhouse
during the last famine, when the starving creatures coming for relief
surged round the workhouse gate and pressed and hustled and trampled
down one another, how the police standing ankle deep in mud had to lay
about them with their batons, and the poor creatures were sent home
again, and yet again, until they would learn to keep order - keep order -
and they were starving!
A lady in Clones, who was talking to me on Sabbath School work and
missionary enterprise in a highly edifying manner, could only express
her surprise about the poor of her own people who were doomed to the
poor house, that they did not go in at once without struggle or fuss.
And yet she had been a mother, and must have known what parting with
children meant to a mother's heart. For my part I sympathized with that
mother of whom I read in the papers, who was taken before a magistrate
and sentenced for making a disturbance in the workhouse when she heard
the master beating her child.
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