ury and means of the
country are ready to be used, as it is our bounden duty to use them, and
will, whenever they can be usefully applied, be so disposed as to avert
famine, and to maintain the people of Ireland; and that we are now
disposed to take advantage of the unfortunate spread of this disease
among the potatoes, to establish public works which may be of permanent
utility. I trust, sir, that the present state of things will have that
counterbalancing advantage in the midst of many misfortunes and evil
consequences."[119]

The 15th of August was fixed for the cessation of the Government works,
as well as the Government relief, because it was considered that relief
extended beyond that time would be, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer
said, in reply to a question from O'Connell, "an evil of great
magnitude." When the relief was withdrawn, and the blight had manifested
itself in such giant proportions, the friends of the people saw nothing
but famine with all its attendant horrors at their doors. At this time I
find the Secretary of the Mallow Relief Committee, the Rev. C.B. Gibson,
calling the urgent attention of the Commissioners of Relief, in Dublin
Castle, to the state of his district, and his facts may be taken as a
fair specimen of the state of a great portion of the country at the
moment. He had just made a house-to-house visitation of the portion of
the country over which the operations of his committee extended, and he
says, the people were already starving, their only food being potatoes
no larger than marbles, the blight having stopped their growth. He took
some of the best of those potatoes to his house, and found that twelve
of them weighed just four ounces and a-half--merely the weight of one
very ordinary sized full-grown potato. They sickened the people instead
of satisfying their hunger. In many places the children were kept in bed
for want of clothing, as also to enable them to silence, to some extent,
the pangs of hunger; some of them had not had any food for a day and
a-half. And such beds as those starving children had! Of many he
describes one. It consisted of a heap of stones built up like a
blacksmith's fire-place, (these are his words), with a little hay spread
over it; bed clothes there were none. One of the children of this family
had died of starvation a fortnight before. The people in every house
were pallid and sickly, and to all appearance dying slowly for want of
sufficient nourishmen