On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 10:28:25 PM UTC+1, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

I suggest a simple test for the morality of the situation. If you
lived in Ireland during the 1740 famine, and were offered a free ride
to America in trade for some vaguely non-specific work situation,
would you take it when the only alternatives were starvation or
cannibalism? No need to answer, just think about it.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

It's not quite that simple, Jeff. For instance you make the assumption that all these starving families could be reached to make the offer of indenture equitably to all of them. It just doesn't answer to the realities. But it is an easy and common error, widely also made by professionals:

Years ago there was a conference of economic historians here and I was tasked with part of their hosting because I knew so many of them. I took them down into the Gap of Dunloe, south of Killarney, took them halfway up a hillside so that on the opposite hillside they could see some squares of land marked out by fallen stones. Then I took them across the valley and into the stones. "Pace out the squares, if you please. No, not you, not the agricultural economists. You already know what I'm going to say." Behind me a lady who was a leading light of co-op history said, "Oh, ****." She knew all right. Each square, thirty by thirty paces, had to support an entire family. One of my favourite teachers was by then an Israeli pol, a deputy minister. "An average family with thirteen surviving children?" he said to me. "It's an impossibility." He wrote to me to offer me a consulting job a few years later and added in his own hand a postscript at the bottom of the official letter: "A single Gap of Dunloe example will shock the complacent out of their torpor." The problem is that Killarney itself was a couple of hundred miles of atrocious roads from Dublin, and probably a difficult two-day ride from Cork, which has a sheltered harbour, plus another day of hard travel to reach the Gap (which today is a few minutes in a comfortable car on a blacktop road away, a tourist attraction,). The Gap itself, which I've walked through in May, sometimes in mud up to my hips, is impassable in a bad winter. Most of the victims of the famine were that hard to reach, and starving people, who even in good years were outside the cash economy, didn't have money for newspapers, even though the Irish peasants were likely more literate than those in other nations. I think it is fair to conclude that most of those who indentured signed the papers in the bigger coastal towns, all of which have harbours which at that time would have taken the size of ship that crossed the Atlantic. There's a graveyard of famine victims we often stop at on our rides. We'd ride up beside the River Bandon from its estuary (the watersports marina on the estuary being the halfway point of our ride) a few miles to a hulk of a North Sea or Baltic trader about 75ft long, and there turn inland. We know, from the placement of mills and distilleries and tales of how the monstrous church bells of a village well inland were rafted upriver, that the river once was routinely navigated by substantial ships. Yet this famine graveyard is only a couple of hundred yards up the road after we turn away from the river. In fact, we're riding across a bow of the river, and will return to it at the starting point of our circular ride; there is nowhere in ireland where you can get further than a day on foot from a navigable river.

So here's another mystery for you: Consider that Ireland is an island, that there are fishing harbours without number every few miles around the coast, -- then ask why didn't they substitute fish in their diet for the now-absent potatoes?

I don't want you to think I don't take your point -- that a starving peasant doesn't have the energy to consider the moral distinction between actual slavery and indented servitude. The case I'm making is different: that in most cases he wasn't offered the opportunity or even the knowledge that just up the road the opportunity existed.

Andre Jute
People don't always do what is logical