104	ENGLISH    SAGA
drag out the corpse of her child, a girl of about twelve
perfectly naked, and leave it half covered with stones. In
another house within 500 yards of the cavalry station at
Skibbereen the dispensary doctor found seven wretches
lying, unable to move, under the same cloak—one had been
dead many hours, but the others were unable to move
themselves or the corpse."^1
The English, who since the days of Lillibullero had never
been able to take the Irish seriously, did not see themselves as
responsible for these sufferings, though with their habitual
humanity they subscribed liberally to charities to relieve them.
Greville in his gossiping pages reported that the state of Ireland
was deplorable, but set it down to the people themselves, whom
he described as "besotted with obstinacy and indolence, reckless
and savage." He thought them secretly well off, stated that
they had money in their pockets and used it to buy arms instead
of food. Punch, then a humanitarian journal, depicted the ragged
Irishman impudently begging John Bull to spare a trifle "for
a poor lad to buy a bit of a blunderbus with." And when Disraeli
and his die-hard friends of the Fat Cattle Opposition put forward
a project for a Treasury grant of sixteen million to build Irish
railways, it asked with amusement:
"Who would ever travel on an Irish railway? . . . Who
does not see that an Irish Great Western would run due
east—a Midland counties along the coast? A passenger
booked for Dublin would infallibly find himself at Cork.
... The whistle would never be sounded till after the collision
... the coals would be put in the boiler and the water under-
neath it, and when the train came to at standstill, the engineer
would thrash the engine with his shillelagh. If the Irish
could afford to travel by them, they would certainly reduce
the population.**
In the course of one terrible winter it was believed that over
a quarter of a million Irish peasants died of starvation. The very
repeal of the Corn Laws, which had been undertaken with
the object of aiding Ireland, had the contrary effect, since
by depriving her of her preferential position in the British corn
^1W. 0. O'JBrien, The Great Famine, 78,