The Irish accounts renew the descriptions of horror,—people feeding on
miserable food, or starving outright ; numbers ejected; dogs ring on dead bodies; and the like. The streets of Lon- don ortd-,the country round strains *ithggroups of Irish, squalid and helpless. The aspect of the 'people, i.wehirer" suggests the observation, that their present extremity, is scarcely an innova- tion; so distinctly do the singularly ill-defeloped features of the clad bespeak a deteriorated race—their mien, a semi-voluntary helplessness.
The local writers and speakers use language which looks as if it were selected to prevent the English credence of the calamity it describes. Certain resolutions, for example, declare that the people tare feeding on " loathsome garbage" ; and then they enumerate " nettles, cabbage, and cresses,"—water-cresses, which are used by all classes in England as a breakfast dainty ; and cabbage, which may appear at the best of tables; while even nettles are sometimes used by the curious housewife. The exclu- sive use of green food is a bad diet, no doubt ; but if you call such good and wholesome things "garbage," what interpretation is to be put upon the rest of your language? will you not call hunger "starvation," and straitened means " destitution " ? The licence of language is only the symptom of a deep-seated disease in the Irish character—the incapacity to look plainly and simply at the facts, and to act upon them. Here we find educated people describing facts by a transparent falsehood, and acting upon the falsehood.
