is approaching, when the potato pits, most of them, will be opened; the poor people will clasp their hands in helpless despair, on seeing their six months’ provisions a mass of rottenness; there will be no potatoes for seed next season; a general panic will seize all, and oatmeal for food will be scarcely purchasable by the people at any price.  The Goverment, however, have been warned—­let them act promptly, decisively, and at once, and not depend on the people helping themselves; for such is the character of the people that they will do nothing till starvation faces them."[63]

Mr. Foster collected his letters on Ireland into a volume in March, 1846, and says, with justice, in a note to the above passage, “the truth of this prediction, in every particular, is now unhappily being verified.”

Although Mr. Foster is here, as in several other places throughout his letters on Ireland, unjustly severe upon the people—­poor, helpless, unaided, uncared for as they were by those whose sacred duty it was to come to their assistance—­still many of his views, as in the present instance, are full of practical good sense.  He gave many valuable hints for the amelioration of Irish grievances, and several of his recommendations have been since embodied in Acts of Parliament; but when he says the people will do nothing, are apathetic, and so on, he ought to remember that in such a fearful crisis, combined effort alone is of value.  This must come from the leaders of the people.  The best army cannot fight without generals, and in this battle against famine the Irish people had no leaders:  their natural leaders, the proprietors of the soil, did next to nothing—­the Government of the country did next to nothing.  The Government alone had the power to combine, to direct, to command; it was called upon from all parts of the country to do so—­the Viceroy was waited on—­Mr. Foster himself, in the passage quoted above, warned the Government to act, and to act at once, and yet what had it done up to the time he closed his Irish tour?  Where was the real, the culpable, the unpardonable apathy?

Mr. Gregory, writing from Coole Park on the 12th of November, says, he cannot get the people to take precautions against the disease.  By putting drains under his own pits, and holes in them for ventilation, and throwing turf mould and lime upon them, he says they are still safe.  His opinion is, that half the potatoes in his neighbourhood are tainted.  The police-sergeant of the Kinvara district makes a return, the result of an examination of fifty-two acres of potatoes in eighteen fields of from one and a-half to seven acres.  The least diseased field, one of four acres, had twelve tubers in the hundred diseased.  In a field of seven acres, ninety-six in every hundred were diseased, and the average losses in all the fields was seventy per cent.  Charles K. O’Hara, Chairman of the Sligo Board of Guardians, writes to the Mansion House Committee:  “In many instances