for the poor. Certainly
if these perish the rich must be sufferers in the end." The author of a
letter entitled "The Groans of Ireland," addressed to an Irish. Member
of Parliament, thus opens his subject:--"I have been absent from this
country for some years, and on my return to it, last summer, found it
the most miserable scene of universal distress that I have ever read of
in history: want and misery in every face; the rich unable almost as
they were willing to relieve the poor; the roads spread with dead and
dying bodies; mankind of the colour of the docks and nettles they fed
on; two or three, sometimes more, going on a car to the grave for want
of bearers to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches
where they perished. This universal scarcity was ensued by fluxes and
malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts: whole
villages were left waste by want, and sickness, and death in various
shapes; and scarcely a house in the whole island escaped from tears and
mourning. The loss must be upwards of 400,000, but supposing it 200,000,
(it was certainly more) it was too great for this ill-peopled country,
and the more grievous as they were mostly of the grown-up part of the
working people." "Whence can this proceed?" he asks; and he answers,
"From the want of proper tillage laws to guide and to protect the
husbandman in the pursuit of his business." [29]

This writer further says, the terrible visitation of 1740 and '41 was
the third famine within twenty years; so that in view of these and other
famines, since and before, Ireland might be not inaptly described as the
land of Famines. Almost the first object one sees on sailing into Dublin
Bay is a monument to Famine. This beautiful bay, as far-famed as the Bay
of Naples itself, has often been put in comparison with it. More than
once has it been my lot to witness the tourist on board the Holyhead
packet, coming to Ireland for the first time, straining his eyes towards
the coast, when the rising sun gave a faint blue outline of the Wicklow
mountains, and assured him that he had actually and really before him,
"The Holy Hills of Ireland." Nearer and nearer he comes, and Howth at
one side and Wicklow Head at the other define what he, not unjustly,
regards as the Bay. And surely on a bright clear morning, with just
enough of sunlight, it is as fair a scene as mortal eye can rest on. The
Dublin and Wicklow hills, which at first seemed to rise fro