e couplet on these occasions was--

"On our side is virtue and Erin,
On theirs is the Saxon and guilt."

The context of these lines was judiciously omitted from the placards,
but not from the speeches of the electioneering agents and orators--

"Then onward--our green banner rearing--
Go, flesh every sword to the hilt."

If this injunction was not obeyed to the letter, it was nearly so, and
at all events it was carried out in spirit.

Of green banners there was abundance, and if the sword gave place to
the brickbat and the bludgeon, the consequences were pretty much the
same--"Green Erin" gained a great victory over Erin of the Orange
preferences, and over the Saxon in general. The spirit in which this
result was received at Conciliation Hall, and its effect upon the hopes
and aspirations of the people, may be gathered most readily from the
address of the General Election Committee of the Repealers to the people
of Ireland, when the elections had closed.

"_Fellow-countrymen_,--Even in this hour of triumph--even now, when
you have so nobly vindicated at the elections the glorious cause of
repeal--our congratulations must, in sad accordance with the unvarying
fate of Ireland ever since Englishmen have controlled her fortunes,
be mingled with considerations of mournfulness and peril! It is not
merely--and, alas! that such a calamity should have to be treated as of
secondary magnitude--it is not merely that the niggard state charity of
England is now at once to cease and be entirely withdrawn, but we have
to contemplate a still more fearful and far wider-spreading misery at
the end of autumn and in the early winter.

"All-bounteous Heaven has blessed our fields with abundance; but
Ireland's poverty--the unholy doing of man--must cause the produce of
her harvest to be exported away from her starving people, and sold
at the rich markets of England, to meet the enormous rents of cruel
absentees. Five millions of your money go annually to those absentees;
and so many have lately fled from the sight of the calamities their
carelessness for their country had allowed England to inflict, that more
than an additional million must be drained away this year!

"What is there to save our people? The potato has not been sown in
one-third of the extent of former years. The substitute crops, though
promising, will be fearfully short of the deficiency caused by the loss
of the potato; and those crops would be t