With regard to the Treasury minute, announcing the stoppage of the Government works, he expresses his conviction that if they cease the result around Mallow will be starvation and death.  In view of the facts placed before the Commissioners by Mr. Gibson, which could, he says, be verified on oath by every member of the Mallow Relief Committee, he calls upon them not to leave the people to starve, their only resource being their potato gardens, which are utterly destroyed.

Parliament rose on the 28th of August.  The Queen’s Speech was read by the Lord Chancellor.  Her Majesty referred with thanks to the public spirit shown by the members of both Houses, in their attention to the business of the nation, during a laborious and protracted session She, of course, lamented the recurrence of the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, and had given, she said, her cordial assent to the measures framed to meet that calamity.  After the fashion of most royal speeches, she expressed her satisfaction at the diminution of crime—­not throughout the United Kingdom—­but in Ireland.

FOOTNOTES: 

[102] Times of 31st July, 1846.

[103] The italics are the Author’s.

[104] “Grand Juries feared neither God nor man.”—­Times, August 22, 1846.

[105] Mr. Mitchell evidently alludes to the passage so often found in O’Connell’s speeches, commencing—­

“O Erin, shall it e’er be mine To wreak thy wrongs in battle line,” etc.

It is a curious fact that the Liberator, in the lapse of years, forgot where he had originally found the passage, as the following extract from the proceedings of the Repeal Association, on the 12th of April, 1844, will show:—­

“Mr. O’Connell—­As Mr. Steele began by correcting some errors which had crept into a published report of some of his observations, there is quite enough in that fact to justify me in following his example.  The errors to which I allude appear in a book recently published by a Frenchman, the Viscount D’Arlingcourt, whom I met accidentally at Tara, and who felt somewhat surprised and mortified, on being informed that I had not heard of him before.  In his work he speaks of the meeting, and he makes me state to him that six lines which I wrote in an album he presented to me for the purpose, were my own composition.  Now, I am a plain prose writer, and I neither wrote, nor said I wrote, the lines in question.  You may recollect them; they are as follows:—­

O Erin shall it e’er be mine, To wreak thy wrongs in battle line; To raise my victorhead and see Thy hills, thy dales, thy people free,—­That glance of bliss is all I crave, Betwixt my labours and my grave!  (Cheers.)

The rhythm is perfect, the versification excellent, and my disinclination to take the parentage is not because of any defect in them; but it is a matter of fact, there is only one word which I inserted, and which I claim as my own composition—­that word is ‘Erin.’  In the original lines the word was ‘Scotland;’ they are from a poem of Miss Mitford, called ’"Wallace ’—­a poem not as well known as it ought to be.”