s true; and the same reverend gentleman, or any
other in any part of Ireland, might make just the same report at the
same period in any year, even when potatoes sold for eightpence the
cwt.:--All the class of small cotters have generally used the produce of
their con-acres at this season, and they commence to buy--the work which
they always have in abundance in the spring enabling them to pay. They
purchase weekly; and the fact that a certain number of them had not a
week's provisions, at the time this return was made, in their
possession, no more implies the presence of famine in that particular
locality, than the fact, that the labourers in London have generally no
greater supply proves the existence of a scarcity in the metropolis.
Both parties purchase weekly, and consequently have never more than a
week's provisions by them.

No doubt, there is a deficiency of provisions in particular
neighbourhoods; but, take the kingdom all over, there is a sufficiency;
and if the government had not, for their own purposes, magnified the
danger, the pressure on the people would now be less than it is.

We express surprise that the assertions of Mr O'Connell and the
agitators continue to be credited by the people, although they have been
a thousand times rejected and belied; but her Majesty's ministers
exhibit a still greater extent of gullibility, _if they really, as they
affect to do_, believe in the statements made by the Radical members and
their organs of the press, after the repeated instances in which those
statements have been proved to be erroneous. On the 20th November, the
Mansion-house Committee proclaimed to all the inhabitants of the British
empire, and in the presence of an all-seeing Providence, "That in
Ireland famine of a most hideous description _must be immediate and
pressing, and pestilence of the most frightfull kind, and not remote_,
unless immediately prevented." And on the 17th of December, Mr O'Connell
announced, that "Some say the crop will last till April. Even those most
sanguine admit that _we will have a famine in April_--others say the
crop will last till March--others that it will not last beyond
February--others that a famine will come on before the month of January
is over--_for my own part, I believe the last_;" yet, here we are,
thanks to a beneficent Providence, now approaching the 1st of May,
neither suffering from famine nor from pestilence, with almost all the
crops sown, and with well-sup