ny great exertions for Irish relief."[65] There was even,
I fear, something behind all this--the old feeling of the English colony
in Ireland, that it was no business of theirs to sustain the native
race, whose numerical strength they regarded, now as ever, to be a
standing threat and danger to themselves.

The sentiments of the leading journals of the Tory party quite coincided
with this view. They kept constantly asserting that the ravages of the
potato blight were greatly exaggerated; and they eagerly seized on any
accidental circumstance that could give them a pretext for supporting
this assertion. The chief Dublin Conservative journal, the _Evening
Mail_, on the 3rd of November, writing about the murder of Mr. Clarke,
"inclines to believe that the agrarian outrage had its origin in a
design to intimidate landlords from demanding their rents, at a season
when corn of all kinds is superabundant, and the partial failure of the
potato crop gives a pretence for not selling it. And if we recollect,"
it continues, "that the potato crop of this year far exceeded an average
one, and that corn of all kinds is so far abundant, it will be seen that
the apprehensions of a famine in that quarter are unfounded, and are
merely made the pretence for withholding the payment of rent." Such was
the language of a newspaper supposed largely to express landlord feeling
in Ireland, and supposed, too, to be the chief organ of the existing
Government, represented by Lord Heytesbury.

Later on in the month, a Protestant dignitary, Dean Hoare of Achonry,
wrote a letter to the Mansion House Committee, in which, whilst he gave
substantially the same views of the potato failure as hundreds of
others, he complained in a mild spirit of the people in his locality as
being "very slow" to adopt the methods recommended for preserving the
potatoes from decay. Another Tory journal of the time, since amalgamated
with the former, made this letter the pretence of an attack on the
Mansion House Committee, accusing it of withholding Dean Hoare's letter,
because it gave a favourable account of the state of the potato crop,
and an unfavourable one of the peasantry--charging it with "fraud,
trickery and misrepresention," and its members with "associating for
factious purposes alone." In reply, it was clearly shown that the
Committee did not withhold the Dean's letter, even for an hour, and as
clearly shown that the _Evening Packet_, the journal in question,
an