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 peaceful means of help. We personally appealed to the young Conservatives, and Smith O'Brien appealed to the more generous landlords, to shelter their fellow-countrymen from destruction. Butt and Lefanu answered promptly, and Ferguson and Sir Colman O'Loghlen united with them and us in getting together an Irish Council with the sole purpose of inducing the Government and the people to combat the famine. But the Government were deaf, and little was effected. The Irish Council associates itself in my memory with failures sometimes ludicrous. For example, Mitchel, who became chairman of a Sub-committee of Food Supplies, proceeded with a confidence in the middle classes which was ill-bestowed. He sent a circular to the Boards of Guardians throughout the island, summoning each of them to furnish an estimate of the quantity of food produced in the district. The guardians had no training in this sort of work, and it may be doubted if O'Connell, in the height of his power, or the Local Government Board at any time, could have extracted such a return from them. What happened in this case was that not so much as one Board of Guardians in the island sent an answer to the appeal. They neither aided us nor explained their refusal, tut from Donegal to the Cove of Cork ignored the application altogether. The other failure was D'Arcy M'Gee's. He took a strong interest in the Dublin artisans, and thought they might be helped by a pledge to use only national manufacture, and had his design entirely ruined by a dishonest stroke apparently intended to promote it. O'Gorman Mahon, who since the decay of O'Connell had been gradually stealing back into public life, was one of the tellers on a division, and reckoned the ayes in this fashion—" Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, forty, forty-one," and so on. " By G——, sir," he whispered to M'Gee, " I have added ten to your score." M'Gee knew the value of a majority so obtained, and the project was carried no further.

Out of this friendly association, and under the influence of Smith O'Brien, no doubt, many of the gentry began to talk a sort of conditional and speculative nationality. If England did so and so, and Irish Nationalists did something else, then we should see what we should see. A few of them certainly