, if adopted by Parliament, may
tend to raise the great mass of the people in comfort, to promote
agriculture, and to lessen the pressure of that competition for the
occupation of land, which has been the fruitful source of crime and
misery."

In the House of Lords, the debate on the address in reply to the Queen's
speech was not very remarkable. All the speakers admitted that which it
was impossible to deny, the terrible reality of the famine, unequalled,
as Lord Hatherton said he believed it to be, in past history, and
certainly not to be paralleled in the history of modern times. Lord
Brougham made a joke and raised a laugh at the expense of the Irish
landlords. He inclined, he said, to the opinion that Parliament ought to
have been called together sooner, but it was objected that such a course
would have the effect of bringing the Irish proprietors to England at a
time when their presence at home was much needed. "God forbid,"
exclaimed his lordship, "that I should be instrumental in bringing the
Irish proprietors over to this country."[192] He further said, in one of
those involved sentences of his, "that he held it to be impossible
that, when the cry of hunger prevailed over the land--when there was a
melancholy substance as well as the cry--when the country was distracted
from day to day by accounts of the most heartrending spectacles he had
ever seen, heard, or read of--that at a time when there was deep misery
and distress prevailing, and proved in Ireland--rendered only the more
heartrending, because the more touching, by the patience--the admirable
and almost inimitable patience--with which it seemed to be borne--that
at a time when that great calamity existed--when there were scenes
enacted all over those districts, which they could find nothing existing
in the page of disease and death and pestilence, ever following in the
train of famine--to which nothing existing was to be found in the page
of Josephus, or on the canvas of Poussin, or in the dismal chant of
Dante ... that they should be in circumstances like these, and yet be
able calmly and temperately to take up questions of permanent policy, he
held to be absolutely and necessarily impossible."

More to the point were some of the remarks made by Lord Stanley, then in
opposition. With regard to the awful visitation which afflicted the
sister island from one end to the other, he said he believed that no
exaggeration could, in many instances, exceed the