e calamity of a famine, _there will
be a substituted food secured for the people at a reasonable price_."

All these suggestions were well worthy of serious and immediate
attention when they were written, and although every mode of saving the
tuber was, to a great extent, a failure, the mode suggested above was at
least as good as any other, and far simpler than most of them. But the
third suggestion, about a county organization to keep the food in the
country was admirable, practicable, effective; but as the poorer
classes, from various causes, could not, and, in some instances, would
not carry out any organized plan, the _Times_' Commissioner warns the
Government to look to it. He says: "I am as firmly convinced as that I
am now writing to you, such is the general apathy, want of exertion, and
feeling of fatality among the people--such their general distrust of
everybody, and suspicion of every project--such the disunion among the
higher classes, with similar apathetic indifference, that unless the
Government steps forward to carry out, to order, to enforce these or
similar plans for the national welfare, _not any of them will be
generally adopted, and nothing will be done_. Christmas is approaching,
when the potato pits, most of them, will be opened; the poor people will
clasp their hands in helpless despair, on seeing their six months'
provisions a mass of rottenness; there will be no potatoes for seed next
season; a general panic will seize all, and oatmeal for food will be
scarcely purchasable by the people at _any price_. The Goverment,
however, have been _warned_--let them act promptly, decisively, and _at
once_, and not depend on the people helping themselves; for such is the
character of the people that _they will do nothing till starvation faces
them_."[63]

Mr. Foster collected his letters on Ireland into a volume in March,
1846, and says, with justice, in a note to the above passage, "the truth
of this prediction, in every particular, is now unhappily being
verified."

Although Mr. Foster is here, as in several other places throughout his
letters on Ireland, unjustly severe upon the people--poor, helpless,
unaided, uncared for as they were by those whose sacred duty it was to
come to their assistance--still many of his views, as in the present
instance, are full of practical good sense. He gave many valuable hints
for the amelioration of Irish grievances, and several of his
recommendations have been sinc