orrow. To say the people were dying by the
thousand of sheer starvation conveys no idea of their sufferings; the
expression is too general to move our feelings. To think that even one
human creature should, in a rich and a Christian land, die for want of
a little bread, is a dreadful reflection; and yet, writes an English
traveller in Ireland, the thing is happening before my eyes every day,
within a few hours of London, the Capital of the Empire, and the richest
city in the world.

O'Brien's Bridge is a small town on the borders of Limerick, but in the
County Clare. The accounts received from this place during the first
half of October were, that nothing could restrain the people from rising
_en masse_ but an immediate supply of food. On one of the admission
days, one hundred and thirty persons were taken into the Scariff
Workhouse, out of six thousand applicants! Scariff is the union in which
O'Brien's Bridge and Killaloe are situate. Of Killaloe, the Rev. Dr.
Vaughan, afterwards Bishop of the Diocese, wrote, about the same time,
that there was some promise of fifty or sixty being employed out of six
hundred. The Relief Committee, of which he was a member, had to borrow
money on the stones broken by the poor labourers for macadamizing the
roads, in order to pay them their wages. Being paid, they were
dismissed, as the Committee could not, in any way, get funds to employ
them further. "We are a pretty Relief Committee," exclaims the reverend
gentleman, "not having a quart of meal, or the price of it, at our
disposal." He adds, with somewhat of sorrow and vexation of spirit:
"When those starving creatures ask us for bread, we could give them
stones, if they were not already mortgaged."

Employment was not, and, with the appliances in the hands of the Board
of Works, perhaps, could not be given rapidly and extensively enough for
the vast and instant wants of the people. Hunger is impatient, and the
cry of all men--loudest from the South and West--was one of despair,
mingled with denunciations of the Government and the Board of Works for
their slowness in providing work, and, if possible, still more, for
their refusal to open the food depots. "I am sorry to tell you," writes
the correspondent of a local print, "that this town [Tuam] is, I may
say, in open rebellion. They are taking away cattle in the open day, in
spite of people and police.... They cannot help it; even if they had
money, they could not get bread to buy."