means abundant
funds would be found to keep the people alive. Let there be got up in
each county machinery for carrying out the relief: let the projected
railways be commenced, and let the people be put to work from one end of
the country to the other, and let them be paid in food. He concluded,
amidst the applause of the gentlemen present, by moving, that a
deputation do wait on His Excellency to lay this plan before him, and to
explain to him the pressing necessity which existed for its adoption.

To the Tory Government of the day, especially to a politician like Lord
Heytesbury, the scheme, in all likelihood, appeared very extravagant,
and yet at this distance of time, and with the history of that terrible
period before us, it was, on the whole, sound, statesmanlike, and
practical.

In accordance with O'Connell's suggestion, a deputation was appointed to
wait on the Lord Lieutenant. He received them at the Phoenix Park, on
Wednesday, the 3rd of November. They were coldly received. This may be
in part accounted for by the fact, that the two or three previous years
were remarkable for the great Repeal agitation; O'Connell himself having
baptized the year 1843, the Repeal year. Then the State trials came, in
which the Repeal leaders fought the Government, inch by inch, putting it
to enormous cost, trouble, and anxiety. To be sure it succeeded, at
last, in securing a verdict, and in sending O'Connell and some four or
five others to Richmond prison; but their imprisonment there, like their
journey to it, was a continuous triumph. Besides, the Government were in
the end defeated by an appeal to the House of Lords, and the State
prisoners set free in the fall of 1844. O'Connell, it was known through
the Press, had propounded a scheme to meet the impending famine, which
was, in substance, the one laid before the Viceroy. It is not much to be
wondered at, that a small politician and narrow party-man, as Lord
Heytesbury was, should think it a victory to make the deputation feel
his high displeasure at the manner in which agitators had been, for so
long a period, bearding the Government to which he belonged.

The deputation was highly respectable, and ought to have been
influential, consisting, as it did, of the Duke of Leinster, Lord
Cloncurry, the Lord Mayor, O'Connell, Henry Grattan, Sir James Murray,
John Augustus O'Neill, and some twenty other gentlemen of position. The
journals of the next morning informed the public th