A crazy fact is that a higher percentage of Irish died in the Great Famine (well over 10% of the population) than in the Bengal famine in India in 1943 (about 3.5%).
This is a fascinating point:
> In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”
This is a fascinating point:
> In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”