dered as a local calamity, or was it to be considered as a
national calamity? If the Irish members were legislating in an Irish
parliament, it would be considered by them as a national calamity, and
all classes--the fund holder, the office holder, the mortgagee, the
annuitant, would be called on to contribute to the general exertion to
alleviate distress. He wished to learn whether the House considered this
as an Imperial calamity or not; and whilst he, for his own part,
refrained from any supplication to the Imperial treasury, he could
assure the House, that there were millions in Ireland, who did not
consider the Union a union in which all the advantages ought to be on
the part of England. England had the advantage of the Irish absentee
rents, and the advantage of applying all the resources of Ireland; and
the Irish people did not consider that it ought to be looked upon as a
union for the advantage of England alone, and no union when it was for
the interests of Ireland. Nothing, he thought, could be more outrageous
than that one class, who suffered most from the disasters which had
taken place--namely, the landlords of Ireland--should be called upon to
bear the whole burthen of this calamity.

Smith O'Brien was quite right in saying it was most unreasonable that
the Irish landlords should be called upon to bear the whole expense of
the Famine, but it is equally true, that, as a body, they made no effort
worth the name to stay or mitigate the Famine, until it had knocked at
their own hall doors in the shape of rates, present and prospective,
that threatened them with the confiscation of their properties.

Mr. Labouchere, the Irish Chief Secretary, as was to be expected, was
put up to defend the Government, and to foreshadow the future measures
of relief. His line of defence was a strange one for an English minister
to adopt. It was, that the agricultural population of Ireland, vast in
its numbers, were always on the brink of starvation; so that when the
potato blight swept the country from sea to sea, it was impossible for
the Government to meet the disaster fully. An English journal of high
repute,[193] whose words have been already quoted in these pages, truly
said, that for five hundred years Ireland had been completely in the
hands of England, to mould and fashion her as she pleased; and now at
the end of those five centuries, a British statesman does not blush to
urge, as an argument in favour of the Government o