aken from us by the high prices
in England, even if we had not to send them there to get money for
the absentees. Food gone, and money gone, what is to become of us?
The stinted relief that England gave us is out. The means voted with
grudging and insult are expended and gone. Her representatives are
pledged to give us no more, and not only to refuse if the government
should propose a further advance, but to call upon the minister to
insist strictly and speedily on repayment of that which has been given.
We therefore have no hope of money from England! Have we then any money
at home? Alas! it is but as the dribblings of the mountain stream when
the winter floods have passed, and the summer heats are exhausting and
absorbing its waters; and had we tenfold what little remains, how are
the rates to be paid, when, according to even the starvation scale of
the government soup-kitchens, the cost of maintaining our poor will
exceed by nearly double the whole rated value of the property in
Ireland! No Whig nor Tory can tell us of the means of meeting the coming
disaster. The members of the ministry have not touched upon it at any
of their elections. The press of England is mute, save when it gives
utterance to calumnies and insults. Ireland is not in the thoughts
of any of our English fellow-subjects. Their own interests, their own
monetary perils, their own necessities, absorb their whole attention.

"Should we not then take counsel from ourselves? Should not our
newly-elected members agree to come together here in Dublin, and consult
for the safety of the country, and decide upon the matters they will
urge upon the reluctant ear of the English parliament? Should they
not meet, if only to concert how best to recall the absentees to their
long-neglected duties at home; how best to compel all the monies of the
country to be spent at home; and thus to give a chance of saving
our unhappy people from being swept off the face of the earth by
widely-desolating famine, or the yet more desolating and dreadful agency
of a bloody, a bootless, a criminal, and all-destroying civil war?

"Again we shall address you, when the time is near that parliament is
to assemble, and ask of you to announce to your representatives your
opinions. We shall carefully make use of the intervening time to collect
and concentrate the expression of your sentiments respecting each
particular point of policy that should be pressed upon your members'
attention,