An unusual disease on land, scurvy, appeared during the Famine.  The Commissioners of Health attribute its appearance (1) to the want of variety of food:  the potato being gone, they say, the people did not understand the necessity for variety, and men, such as railway porters, who had wages enough to buy food, took scurvy for want of this variety, coffee and white bread being their common dietary. (2) Another cause was the eating of what was called “potato flour,” got from rotten potatoes; it was not flour at all, and did not contain the elements of the potato, but consisted wholly of starch as foecula. (3) The use of raw or badly cooked food also brought on scurvy; and the Commissioners of Health, therefore, strongly recommended the giving of food in a cooked form.[276]

Emigration played a very leading part in the terrible drama of the Irish Famine of 1847; indeed, it was the potato failure of 1822, and the consequent famine of 1823, which first gave emigration official importance in this country.  A Parliamentary Committee was appointed in the latter year, before which Mr. Wilmot Horton, the Under Secretary of State, explained in detail a plan of emigration from Ireland, then under the consideration of Government, and which was afterwards carried into effect.  The emigrants were sent to Canada; and Peterborough, at the time a very insignificant place, was fixed upon as their head quarters.  On two subsequent occasions, Mr. Horton stated this emigration to have been eminently successful, which was fully corroborated by the evidence of Captain Rubidge, before the Lords’ Committee of 1847, on “Colonization from Ireland.”  But this emigration, as well as that of 1825, both of which were superintended by the Hon. Peter Robinson, was on a very limited scale.  The number taken out to Canada in the first emigration was only 568 persons, men, women, and children.  The Government supported them for eighteen months after their landing, which very much increased the expense; each of those emigrants having cost the country L22 before they were finally settled.  In 1825 Mr. Robinson took out 2,024 emigrants under the same conditions, but in this instance the expense was slightly diminished, the cost of each person being L21 10s.  These emigrants also prospered, but the money outlay in each case was so considerable, that the experiment could not be extended, nor, in fact, repeated.[277]

From this period, committees continued to sit on the subject of emigration, almost year after year; emigration from Ireland, even in the absence of famine, being considered of the highest importance—­and why?  Chiefly, because Irish labourers were lowering the rate of wages in the English labour market—­so it is stated in the report of the Select Committee of 1826, in the following words:—­“The question of emigration from Ireland is decided by the population itself; and that which remains for the legislature to decide is, whether it shall be turned