to become dangerous.

It was a fearful time for men who loved their country, not only with
deep affection, but with a wise and forecasting interest. A revolution
of the worst type was in progress. Not the present alone, but the
future, was being laid waste. The marvellous reform accomplished by
Father Mathew, the self-reliance which had grown up in the era of
monster meetings, and the moral teachings of Davis and his friends were
being fast swallowed up by this calamity. The youth and manhood of the
middle classes were scrambling for pauper places from the Board of
Works, and the peasants were being transformed into mendicants by
process of law. These calamities, related of a distant and savage tribe,
would move a generous heart; but seeing them befall our own people, the
children of the same mother, and foreseeing all the black, unfathomable
misery they foreshadowed, it was hard to preserve the sober rule of
reason.

The gentry, who were responsible in the first place for the protection
of the people from whom they drew their income, insisted that the
calamity was an imperial one and ought to be borne out of the exchequer
of the empire. It was an equitable claim. If there was no irresistible
title of brotherhood, at lowest the stronger nation had snatched away
from the weaker the power of helping itself, and still drew away during
this terrible era half a million pounds every month in the shape of
absentee rents. The demand was put aside contemptuously. The claim of
the Nationalists to reenter on the management of their own affairs,
since it was plain England could not manage them successfully, was
treated as sedition. We were proffered, instead of our own resources,
which were ample--

"Alms from scornful hands, to hands in chains,
Bitterer to taste than death."

All the nations of the earth were appealed to and they gave generously;
but the result was far from being proportionate to the need. During the
year 1846 the contributions fell short of two thousand pounds a week.
And it was not forgotten that after the great fire of London, when the
citizens were in deep distress, the Irish contributed twenty thousand
fat cattle for their relief, which at their present value would amount
to a sum greater than England and Europe sent to the aid of Ireland in
1846.

To lie down and die, like cattle in a murrain, was base. No people are
bound to starve while their soil produces food cultivated by their own
hands. No