In many places the children were kept in bed for want of clothing, as also to enable them to silence, to some extent, the pangs of hunger; some of them had not had any food for a day and a-half.  And such beds as those starving children had!  Of many he describes one.  It consisted of a heap of stones built up like a blacksmith’s fire-place, (these are his words), with a little hay spread over it; bed clothes there were none.  One of the children of this family had died of starvation a fortnight before.  The people in every house were pallid and sickly, and to all appearance dying slowly for want of sufficient nourishment.  Mick Sullivan, a specimen of the labouring class, was the owner of a cabin in which Mr. Gibson found two starved and naked children; this man was obliged to pay a rent of L1 15s. a year for that cabin, and L2 5s. for half an English acre of potato garden, or rather for half an acre of mountain bog.  He paid for these by his labour at 6d. a day.  It took one hundred and sixty days’ clear work to pay for them, and of course his potato garden was no use to him this year.  Mr. Gibson valued the furniture in another cabin, John Griffin’s, at 15d.  A week before Mr. Gibson’s visit, the parish priest had found in the same district, a mother dividing among three of her children that nourishment which nature only intended for their infancy.  And this was the moment at which the Government relief was withdrawn, because the harvest had come in.  It is not matter for wonder that the Rev. Secretary of the Mallow Belief Committee indignantly asks, “Is not the social condition of the Hottentot, who was once thought to be the most wretched of mankind, superior to that of Mick Sullivan, or John Griffin, whose furniture you might purchase for fifteen pence?  I will not compare the condition of such an Irish peasant to that of the red man of North America, who, with his hatchet and gun and bearskin, and soft mocassins, and flashy feathers, and spacious wigwam (lined with warm furs, and hung about with dried deer and buffalo), may well contemn the advantages of our poor countryman’s civilization.  The Irishman has neither the pleasure of savage liberty, nor the profit of English civilization."[120] “I think,” adds Mr. Gibson, “the present the proper time for noticing the panegyric passed by Lord Monteagle on the gentry of this country for their liberality.[121] He gives two or three examples; but they may be the exceptions, instead of the examples of the class; and as his Lordship is one of the class he seeks to protect, his testimony cannot be received as impartial.  I shall now furnish you with more satisfactory data, from which to draw a conclusion.  According to the Poor Law Valuation, the yearly rental of Rahan, the parish a part of which I have already described, is L5,854.  From those who hold the possession in fee of this pauper parish, we received thirty-five pounds; from a gentleman farmer we received three pounds; in all, thirty-eight pounds.  If this is benevolence, the inhabitants of Rahan would soon starve upon it.  If it had not been for the exertions of the Mallow Relief Committee, a number of those people would not be alive this day.”