This letter, written, as all Mr. Trevelyan’s were, by the authority of the Treasury, assumes that the Government had a full knowledge of the state of the food markets.  And, no doubt, it was their bounden duty to collect such knowledge, by trusty agents, despatched at the earliest moment, to investigate and report upon the harvest-yield in Europe and America.  Yet, at the very time it was written, President Polk’s message to Congress, delivered in Washington on the 8th of December, arrived in England, containing the following passage:  “The home market alone is inadequate to enable them [the farmers] to dispose of the immense supplies of food which they are capable of producing, even at the most reduced prices, for the manifest reason that they cannot be consumed in the country.  The United States can, from their immense surplus, supply not only the home demand, but the deficiency of food required by the whole world.”

Was it a money question or a food question?

There was, naturally enough, a mournful sameness in the news from every part of the country:  starvation, famine, fever, death; such are the commonest headings in the newspapers of the time.  Seven deaths from starvation near Cootehill was the announcement from a locality supposed not to be at all severely visited.  In Clifden, County Galway, the distress was fearful; 5000 persons there were said to be trying to live on field roots and seaweed.  A Catholic priest who was a curate in the County Galway during the Famine, but who now occupies, as he well deserves to do, a high position in the Irish Church, has kindly supplied the author with some of his famine experiences.  There are five churchyards in the parish where he then ministered.  Four of these had to be enlarged by one half during the famine, and the fifth, an entirely new one, became also necessary, that there might be ground enough wherein to inter the famine-slain people.  This enlargement of burial accommodation took place, as a rule throughout the South, West, and North-west.  One day as this priest was going to attend his sick calls—­and there was no end of sick calls in those times—­he met a man with a donkey and cart.  On the cart there were three coffins, containing the mortal remains of his wife and his two children.  He was alone—­no funeral, no human creature near him.  When he arrived at the place of interment, he was so weakened by starvation himself, that he was unable to put a little covering of clay upon the coffins to protect them.  When passing the same road next day, the priest found ravenous, starved dogs making a horrid meal on the carcasses of this uninterred family.  He hired a man, who dug a grave, in which what may be literally called their remains were placed.  On one occasion, returning through the gray morning from a night call, he observed a dark mass on the side of the road.  Approaching, he found it to be the dead body of a man.  Near his head lay a raw turnip, with one mouthful bitten