The Chief Secretary for
Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons that of a hundred
thousand Irishmen who fled to Canada in a year, six thousand one hundred
perished on the voyage, four thousand one hundred on their arrival, five
thousand two hundred in the hospitals, and one thousand nine hundred in
the towns to which they repaired. The Emigrant Society of Montreal
paints the result during the whole period of the famine in language not
easily to be forgotten:
"From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great
river, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of
immigration has extended are to be found one unbroken chain of graves
where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a commingled
heap--no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upward have gone
down to their graves!"
This was the fate which was befalling our race at home and abroad as the
year 1847 closed. There were not many of us who would not have given our
lives cheerfully to arrest this ruin, if we could only see a possible
way--but no way was visible.
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