rental of
L83,000 a-year, only subscribed L83.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Right Hon. Charles Wood), defended
the absentees, but was severe upon local proprietors. He held that the
occupiers of land, and not the absentee landlords, were mainly
chargeable with the neglect of their duties to the people in this trying
crisis. Many of the absentees, he said, were most exemplary in their
conduct in alleviating the present distress, amongst whom he named
Colonel Wyndham, who was furnishing daily rations to ten thousand
people.

I wonder how many more such absentees could the Chancellor of the
Exchequer name.

The speakers who were supporters of the Government, and indeed almost
all the English members, were excessively severe on the Irish landlords.
Mr. Roebuck, in the course of a very bitter speech, during the debate on
the address, said: "Now let me say a word about Irish landlords"
(sensation). "I had no doubt," he continued, "but that that sentence
would be met by some sort of feeling on the part of those, the Irish
landlords, for whom the British Parliament has been legislating for the
last three hundred years. Yes, it has been legislating for them, as a
body, against the people of Ireland--it has been maintaining them
against the people of Ireland--it has been permitting them to work for
their own personal purposes, the mischief of the people of Ireland."

Sir Charles Napier, in reply to Mr. Roebuck and others who attacked the
Irish landlords, said, that whether the landlords of Ireland had or had
not done their duty, he did not pretend to say; and more than that, he
thought that many gentlemen, who were so violent against the landlords
of Ireland, knew just as much about them as he did. Of this he was quite
satisfied, that if they had not done their duty the Government were to
blame for not having forced them to it, long before the existing
calamity appeared. Had the English proprietors, he would ask, who had
large estates in Ireland, done their duty? It was not enough to tell him
that their agents were doing all in their power, and he maintained that
the presence of such men as the Duke of Devonshire, the Marquis of
Lansdowne, and other large landed proprietors, upon their estates in
Ireland, would do much to relieve the people.

Mr. Labouchere defended the Labour-rate Act, and complained that the
Government had not received from the gentry of Ireland, or from the
Relief Committees, that cordial suppor