During the Famine-emigration period this excess became most remarkable and alarming.  The deaths on the voyage to Canada rose from five in the thousand (the ordinary rate) to about sixty in the thousand; and the deaths whilst the ships were in quarantine rose from one to forty in the thousand.  So that instead of six emigrants in the thousand dying on the voyage and during quarantine, one hundred died.  Subtracting six from one hundred, we have ninety-four emigrants in the thousand dying of the Famine as certainly as if they had died at home.  Furthermore, great numbers of those who were able to reach the interior died off almost immediately.  Sir Charles Trevelyan, the Government official, from whose Irish Crisis I take the above figures, adds these remarkable words:  “besides still larger numbers who died at Quebec, Montreal, and elsewhere in the interior."[291]

89,738 emigrants embarked for Canada in 1847.  One in every three of those who arrived were received into hospital, and the deaths on the passage or soon after arriving were 15,330, or rather more than seventeen per cent.  As the deaths amongst emigrants, in ordinary times, were about 3/4 per cent., at least sixteen per cent. of those deaths may be set down as being occasioned by the Famine.  But seventeen per cent., high as it seems, does not fully represent the mortality amongst the Famine emigrants.  Speaking of those who went to Canada in 1847, Dr. Stratten says:  “Up to the 1st of November, one emigrant in every seven had died; and during November and December there have been many deaths in the different emigrant hospitals; so that it is understating the mortality to say that one person in every five was dead by the end of the year."[292]

This would give us twenty per cent. of deaths up to the end of 1847; but the mortality consequent upon the Famine-emigration did not stop short at the end of December; it must have gone on through the remainder of the winter and spring, so that, everything considered, twenty-five per cent. does not seem too high a rate at which to fix it for that year.  It is, however, to be taken into account, that the mortality amongst Irish emigrants in 1847 was exceptionally great, so, in an average for the six years from 1846 to 1851 we must strike below it.  Seventeen per cent does not seem too high an average for those six years.

We have not such full information about those who emigrated to the United States as we have of those who went to Canada; the Canadian emigrants had certainly some advantages on their side; for, until the year 1847 there was no protection for emigrants who landed at New York.  In that year the Legislature of the State of New York passed a law, establishing a permanent Commission for the relief and protection of emigrants, which, in due time, when it got into working order, did a world of good.  Previous to this, private hospitals were established by the shipbrokers (the creatures of the shipowners), in the