, when the emergency should arise.

Most people thought it had arisen already.

On the 8th of December, a full fortnight after this interview, a set of
queries, similar to those issued months before by the Mansion House
Committee, were printed and circulated by the new Commissioners, asking
for information that had already come in from every part of the country
--even to superabundance.

On the 10th of December the Corporation of Dublin agreed to an address
to the Queen, calling her Majesty's attention to the potato blight, and
the impending famine consequent upon it. In their address they
respectfully bring before her two facts then lately elicited, or rather
confirmed, by the Devon Commission--namely, that four millions of the
labouring population of Ireland "are more wretched than any people in
Europe--their only food the potato, their only drink water." They add,
that even these facts do not convey to her Majesty an adequate idea of
the destitution by which the Irish people are threatened, or of the
numbers who shall suffer by the failure of the potato crop; facts
related of the inhabitants of a country which, of late years, may be
justly styled the granary of England, exporting annually from the midst
of a starving people food of the best kind in sufficient abundance for
treble its own inhabitants. They assure her Majesty that fully one-third
of their only support for one year is destroyed by the potato blight,
which involves a state of destitution for four months of a great
majority of her Majesty's Irish subjects. They say, with respectful
dignity, that they ask no alms; they only ask for public works of
utility; they ask that the national treasury should be "poured out to
give employment to the people at remunerative wages." Finally they pray
her Majesty to summon Parliament for an early day.

The Corporation did not get an opportunity of presenting their address
to the Queen until the 3rd of January following--four-and-twenty days
after it was agreed to. This delay, no doubt chiefly arose from the
resignation of the Peel ministry on the 5th of December; the failure of
Lord John Russell to form a Government, and the consequent return of
Sir Robert Peel to office on the 20th of the same month, after a
fortnight's interregnum.

In the Queen's reply to the Dublin address she deplores the poverty of a
portion of her Irish subjects, their welfare and prosperity being
objects of her constant care; she has, she sa