"The great scarcity of corn," says Hely Hutchinson, "had been so universal in this kingdom in the years 1728 and 1729 as to expose thousands of families to the utmost necessities, and even to the danger of famine, many artificers and housekeepers having been obliged to beg for bread in the streets of Dublin."[105] This is probably the distress to which Swift, writing in 1729, alludes: "Our present calamities are not to be represented. You can have no notion of them without beholding them. Numbers of miserable objects crowd our doors, begging us to take their wares at any price to prevent their families from immediate starving."[106] "In twenty years," says Mr. Lecky, "there were at least three or four of absolute famine."[107] The writer of a pamphlet entitled "The Groans of Ireland in a Letter to a Member of Parliament," published in Dublin in 1741, thus begins:-- "I have been absent from this country for some years, and on my return to it last summer found it the most miserable scene of universal distress that I ever read of in history. "Want and misery in every face, the rich unable, almost as they were unwilling, to relieve the poor; the roads spread with dead and dying bodies; mankind of the colour of the docks and nettles which they fed on; two or three, sometimes more, on a car going to the grave for want of bearers, to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished. This universal scarcity was ensued by malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts; whole villages were laid waste by want and sickness and death in various shapes, and scarce a house in the whole island escaped from tears and mourning. "It were to be wished, Sir, that some curious enquirer had made a calculation of the numbers lost in this terrible calamity. If one for every house in the kingdom died (and that is very probable, when we consider that whole families and villages were swept off in many parts together), the loss must have been upwards of 400,000 souls. If but one for every other house (and it was certainly more), 200,000 perished--a loss too great for this ill-peopled country to bear and the more grievous as the loss was mostly of the grown-up part of the working people." The writer then proceeds to emphasise the fact to which Swift had previously directed attention: that Irish famines are _artificial_. "Sir,--When a stranger travels through this country and beholds its wide extended and fertile plains, its great flocks of sheep and black cattle, and all its natural wealth and conveniences for tillage, manufactures, and trade, he must be astonished that such misery and want could possibly be felt by its inhabitants; but you, who know the Constitution and are acquainted with its weaknesses, can easily see the reason."[108]