In the Queen’s reply to the Dublin address she deplores the poverty of a portion of her Irish subjects, their welfare and prosperity being objects of her constant care; she has, she says, ordered precautions to be taken; she has summoned Parliament for an early day, and looks with confidence to the advice she shall receive from the united council of the realm.

The Corporation of London addressed her Majesty on the same occasion, deploring the sufferings and privations of a large portion of her subjects in England, Ireland, and Scotland, which they attributed to “erroneous legislation, which, by excluding the importation of food, and restricting commerce, shuts out from the nation the bounty of Providence.”  They, therefore prayed that the ports of the kingdom might be opened for the free importation of food.  While the Corporation of London did not, we may presume, exclude the peculiar distress of Ireland from their sympathies, their real object in going to Windsor was to make an anti-Corn Law demonstration.  So much was this the case, that the deputation consisted of the enormous number of two hundred gentlemen.  The Queen’s reply to them was hopeful.  She said she would “gladly sanction any measure which the legislature might suggest as conducive to the alleviation of this temporary distress, and to the permanent welfare of all classes of her people.”

It is a noticeable fact, and one to be deplored, that even the potato blight was made a party question in Ireland.  If we except the Protestant and dissenting clergy, and a few philanthropic laymen, the upper classes, especially the Conservatives, remained aloof from the public meetings held to call attention to it, and its threatened consequences.  The Mansion House Committee, which did so much good, was composed almost exclusively of Catholics and Liberals; and the same is substantially true of the meetings held throughout the country—­in short, the Conservatives regarded, or pretended to regard, those meetings as a new phase of the Repeal agitation.  Then, as the distress must chiefly occur amongst the poor Catholics, who were repealers, it was, they assumed, the business of repealers and agitators to look to them and relieve them.  The Premier himself was not free from these feelings.  In the memorandum which he read to the Cabinet on the 1st of November, amongst many other things, he says:  “There will be no hope of contributions from England for the mitigation of this calamity.  Monster meetings, the ungrateful return for past kindness, the subscriptions in Ireland to Repeal rent and O’Connell tribute, will have disinclined the charitable here to make any great exertions for Irish relief."[65] There was even, I fear, something behind all this—­the old feeling of the English colony in Ireland, that it was no business of theirs to sustain the native race, whose numerical strength they regarded, now as ever, to be a standing threat and danger to themselves.