in short, they regarded it, like everything Irish, as greatly exaggerated.  The most influential portion of the English newspaper press supported and encouraged this view, making, at the same time, fierce attacks on Irish landlords for not meeting the calamity as they ought, and as they were bound in duty and conscience to do.  Equally bitter and insolent was their tone towards the Irish people, accusing them of many inherent vices—­denouncing their ignorance, their laziness, their want of self-reliance.  Whatever of truth or falsehood may have been in those charges, it was not the time to put them forward.  Famine was at the door of the Irish nation, and its progress was not to be stayed by invectives against our failings, or by moral lectures upon the improvement of our habits.  Food, food was the single and essential requisite; let us have it at once, or we die; lecture us afterwards as much as you please.  But there was something to be said on the other side about our habits and failings; and a liberal English journalist, taking up the subject, turned their own artillery upon his countrymen, telling them that those vices, of which they accused the Irish people, were not an essential part of Celtic nature.  Has not the Irish Celt, he asks, achieved distinguished success in every country of Europe but his own?  The state in which he is to be found in Ireland to-day must be, therefore, accounted for on some other theory than the inherent good-for-nothingness of his nature.  “The sluggish, well-meaning mind of the English nation,” he continues, “so willing to do its duty, so slow to discover that it has any duty to do, is now perforce rousing to ask itself the question, after five centuries of English domination over Ireland, how many millions it is inclined to pay, not in order to save the social system which has grown up under its fostering care, but to help that precious child of its parental nurture to die easy?  Any further prolongation of existence for that system no one now seems to predict, and hardly any one longer ventures to insinuate that it deserves.”

“This is something gained.  The state of Ireland—­not the present state merely, but the habitual state—­is hitherto the most unqualified instance of signal failure which the practical genius of the English people has exhibited.  We have had the Irish all to ourselves for five hundred years.  No one has shared with us the privilege of governing them, nor the responsibilities consequent on that privilege.  No one has exercised the smallest authority over them save by our permission.  They have been as completely delivered into our hands as children into those of their parents and instructors.  No one has ever had the power to thwart our wise and benevolent purposes; and now, at the expiration of nearly one-third of the time which has elapsed since the Christian era, the country contains eight millions, on their own showing, of persecuted innocents, whom it is the sole occupation of every English mind to