VICTORIA. 



749 



would not interfere with the slave trade indicated 

 to the Government that he did not intend to carry 

 out his instructions. 



At length, in August, a relief expedition was 

 planned, and reached Egypt, under Lord Wolseley, 

 Sept. 9; but it was a long time before they ar- 

 rived at the scene of action. An advance body 

 under Gen. Stewart was attacked, Jan. 17 and 19, 

 1885, and suffered terrible loss. Gen. Stewart was 

 killed, and the force went on under command of 

 Sir Charles Wilson, who came in sight of Khar- 

 toum Jan. 28. The flagstaff still stood on the 

 Government house, but Gen. Gordon's flag was 

 .gone. Sir Charles therefore returned without go- 

 in^' to Khartoum; he was told that the place had 

 fallen through treachery, and that Gordon had 

 been killed. The Mahdi was reported to have died 

 the following June. Subsequent reports showed 

 that there was great suffering during the siege 

 from famine, and that the fall of the city was 

 followed by horrible scenes of pillage and murder. 

 The English expedition, having failed in its mis- 

 sion, was withdrawn. The disorders in the Soudan 

 continued, and it was not until 1899 that the 

 power of Mahdism was finally broken by the de- 

 feat of the Arab forces by the army under Lord 

 Kitchener at Omdurman. 



Gradually the finances of Egypt have been 

 placed on a better basis, judicial and other reforms 

 have been introduced, and some engineering works 

 of great benefit to the country have been under- 

 taken, and in part carried out. 



Affairs of Ireland. In 1838 the collection of 

 tithes in Ireland, which had been a fruitful source 

 of discontent and had led to frequent severities 

 on the part of the authorities and almost cease- 

 less struggles on the part of the people, was at 

 length abolished and a tax upon the land was 

 substituted. Daniel O'Connell was the leader of 

 a movement for the repeal of the act of union 

 between Great Britain and Ireland. Great mass 

 meetings were held at various places. " The year 

 1843," said O'Connell, " is and shall be the great 

 repeal year." A meeting intended to surpass all 

 previous gatherings was appointed to take place at 

 Clontarf, near Dublin, Oct. 8, 1843. The Lord 

 Lieutenant forbade the meeting. O'Connell, who 

 was opposed to violence, yielded, much to the dis- 

 gust of those of his followers who were prepared 

 to go to greater lengths and make the movement 

 something more than a peaceable pi-otest. O'Con- 

 nell and some other leaders were tried and found 

 guilty of conspiring to excite disaffection. They 

 were sentenced to imprisonment for a year, and 

 heavy fines were imposed upon several of them. 

 The sentence was not carried out, the House of 

 Lords, on appeal, having reversed the judgment; 

 but the repeal agitation was ended. 



The failure of the potato crop in 1845-'46 

 brought on the great famine in Ireland, in conse- 

 quence of which the population was reduced by 

 starvation and emigration by about 2,000,000, and 

 the country received a blow from which it never 

 lias recovered. It is doubtful if the repeal of the 

 corn laws, which was hastened by the supposed 

 necessity for opening the ports to foreign grain 

 as a relief measure, did not really militate against 

 the prosperity of Ireland, since it was and is 

 mainly an agricultural country, and the protection 

 afforded by the corn laws formed something of an 

 offset to the other disadvantages under which it 

 labored. Be that as it may, some excesses and 

 outbreaks took place about this time, so that Sir 

 Robert Peel thought it necessary to propose an- 

 other coercion act at the time when the free-trade 

 bill was before Parliament. The latter passed, but 

 the protectionists joined with the Irish party and 



the Radicals against the coercion bill ; the minister 

 was defeated, and three days later resigned his 

 office and was succeeded by Lord John Russell. 



The awful disaster in Ireland famine and the 

 diseases that came in its train naturally dis- 

 turbed the quiet of the country, and the old device 

 of coercion measures was resorted to. The Young 

 Ireland party, which had been in existence for 

 some years, came forward in 1848, and under the 

 leadership of John Mitchel, who edited the United 

 Irishman, attempted to raise an insurrection. The 

 Government brought in a bill, which was passed, 

 making it a felony, punishable with transporta- 

 ti^n, to publish any incitement to insurrection or 

 to offer any resistance to the enforcement of law. 

 Under its provisions Mitehel was arrested and 

 his paper suppressed. He was tried, convicted, 

 and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. 

 The habeas corpus act was suspended in Ireland; 

 warrants were issued for the arrest of other lead- 

 ers; they came into collision with the police at 

 Ballingarry, in Tipperary, where, after a slight re- 

 sistance, they were arrested. They were tried be- 

 fore a special commission; Smith O'Brien and 

 Thomas F. Meagher were sentenced to be hanged, 

 beheaded, and quartered, the punishment for high 

 treason, but the sentence was commuted to im- 

 prisonment for life, and all the convicts were 

 transported to Australia. 



The Fenian uprising in 1866 was the next chap- 

 ter in the revolt of Ireland against English rule. 

 The invasion of Canada from the United States 

 was checked by our Government. In March, 1867, 

 a general uprising in Ireland was planned; but a 

 heavy snowstorm interfered with the gatherings 

 of the people, and the attempt failed. A scheme 

 to seize Chester Castle, take possession of the arms 

 there, and invade Ireland with such steamers as 

 could be taken in the port had been betrayed, 

 and the fiasco in Ireland ended the struggle. Large 

 numbers of men were arrested and sentenced to 

 prison. Three men who tried to rescue some pris- 

 oners in Manchester were hanged a policeman 

 having been killed during the attempt though 

 John Bright and John Stuart Mill, with others, 

 tried hard to save their lives. Another man was 

 hanged for an attempt to blow up Clerkenwell 

 prison for the rescue of some Fenians. The crime 

 failed of its object, but some innocent persons were 

 killed. The habeas corpus act was suspended in 

 Ireland till March 1, 1869. The Fenians made 

 two other feeble attempts upon Canada, and then 

 the movement went to pieces. 



One great source of the misery of Ireland and 

 the discontent there was the tenure by which land 

 was held. Farming was the only dependence of 

 the peasantry. The land was owned largely by 

 absentee landlords, who employed agents to collect 

 the rents, and the agents were expected to wring 

 from the tenants the very utmost possible. Hence 

 the rack-rent, and when it failed the eviction. 

 If a tenant improved his land or buildings, the 

 result was that he must pay a higher rent or give 

 up the holding to a tenant who would bid more, 

 and there was no redress. " The greatest conces- 

 sion," says a historian of Ireland, " that Govern- 

 ment made for many generations to the misery 

 of the Irish tenant was to pass an act prohibiting 

 evictions on Christmas Day and Good Friday, and 

 enacting that the roof of a tenant's house should 

 not be pulled off until the inmates had left." He 

 says again that from 1829 to 1880 "the country 

 has been governed by the ordinary law for scarce- 

 ly a single year. Arms acts, suspension of habeas 

 corpiis, changes of venue, peace preservation acts, 

 and coercive measures of all kinds succeed, accom- 

 pany, and overlap each other with melancholy per- 



