e embodied in Acts of Parliament; but when
he says the people will do nothing, are apathetic, and so on, he ought
to remember that in such a fearful crisis, combined effort alone is of
value. This must come from the leaders of the people. The best army
cannot fight without generals, and in this battle against famine the
Irish people had no leaders: their natural leaders, the proprietors of
the soil, did next to nothing--the Government of the country did next to
nothing. The Government alone had the power to combine, to direct, to
command; it was called upon from all parts of the country to do so--the
Viceroy was waited on--Mr. Foster himself, in the passage quoted above,
warned the Government to act, and to act at once, and yet what had it
done up to the time he closed his Irish tour? Where was the real, the
culpable, the unpardonable apathy?

Mr. Gregory, writing from Coole Park on the 12th of November, says, he
cannot get the people to take precautions against the disease. By
putting drains under his own pits, and holes in them for ventilation,
and throwing turf mould and lime upon them, he says they are still safe.
His opinion is, that half the potatoes in his neighbourhood are tainted.
The police-sergeant of the Kinvara district makes a return, the result
of an examination of fifty-two acres of potatoes in eighteen fields of
from one and a-half to seven acres. The least diseased field, one of
four acres, had twelve tubers in the hundred diseased. In a field of
seven acres, ninety-six in every hundred were diseased, and the average
losses in all the fields was seventy per cent. Charles K. O'Hara,
Chairman of the Sligo Board of Guardians, writes to the Mansion House
Committee: "In many instances the conacre tenants have refused to dig
the crops, and are already suffering from want of food." Mr. Crichton,
of Somerton, Ballymote, says, the disease in his locality is not so bad
as it is elsewhere, but still it is his opinion that many families about
him cannot count on having a potato left in January. Mr. Christopher
Hamilton, Land Agent, of Leeson Street, writing to the Marquis of
Lansdowne, says, he "ascertained by personal inspection that a great
proportion of the ordinary food of the people had become useless, and
that from the nature of the blight it is impossible to depend on any
adequate proportion being saved." Mr. Hamilton praises the submission of
the people under the trial.

On the 24th of November, Sir James