But although this was so, 1848 was a sufficiently serious time in England. In Ireland the misery of the people had amounted to actual famine, and notwithstanding everything that lavish expenditure and devoted services, both by public servants and private individuals, could do, hundreds of thousands perished from starvation or its attendant pestilence. In the Union of Skibbereen nearly the whole population, 11,000 persons, perished. The shopkeepers of the little Kerry town of Kenmare told the writer of these pages in 1870 that during the worst months of the famine of 1847 they seldom took down their shutters in the morning without finding one or two corpses in the street, poor things who had been living in the mountains and had just had strength to crawl down into Kenmare to die. And what was famine in Ireland was the bitter pinch of scarcity in England and Scotland. In February, 1847, wheat was 102 shillings a quarter; added to this there was a general sense of alarm and absence of security, bringing with it want of capital, want of employment, want of wages. There was hardly a house, rich or poor, that was not suffering loss; but while to the rich the loss meant giving up luxuries which only custom had made seem necessaries, to the poor it meant actual want and privation;[24] when men are low and miserable, and feel they have nothing to lose, is the time when revolutionary propaganda works like wildfire among them. There was an avowedly revolutionary political party in Ireland, always ready to take advantage of any difficulty the Government might be in, foreign or domestic, in order to harass and thwart them. “Refuse us this” (repeal of the Union) O’Connell had said in 1840, when war with France hung in the balance about the Eastern Question, “and then in the day of your weakness dare to go to war with the most insignificant of the powers of Europe.” In 1848, the mantle of O’Connell had fallen on John Mitchel, who, in his paper called _The United Irishman_, gave instructions for the successful carrying on of revolutionary street warfare; he recommended the covering of the streets with broken glass to lame the horses of the soldiery, and suggested that the citizens should provide themselves with missiles to throw from the houses; these, he said, could be used with great effect from the elevation of a top story, especially if forethought had been used to provide “boiling water or grease, or, better, cold vitriol if available. Molten lead is good, but too valuable; it should always be cast in bullets and allowed to cool.” This and a great deal of similar rubbish was poured forth day by day, or week by week, in the rebel papers. It would be harmless enough in an ordinary way; but amid the excitements of 1848, and addressed to such an excitable people, it might have proved a spark in a powder magazine. Mr. Mitchel proclaimed his intention of committing high treason, but he was arrested before he had had an opportunity of doing so.