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.
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