Bishop and the chaplains were gratified at finding unfit employees dismissed or better regulations made, in consequence of their remonstrances.

The sufferings of the Irish poor, in that terrible year, drew from the most distant nations spontaneous offerings of pecuniary assistance. The United States deserve the first place among the benefactors of that nation. France, Italy and Germany were not insensible to her cries. Mr. Maginn was usually made the agent of this benevolence for his part of the island; and perhaps we cannot do better than give here his eloquent acknowledgment of donations from the Paris Committee. The following letter on this subject is without date, but was evidently written in the summer of 1847:

Dear Sir-I may, I presume, address these friendly, familiar terms, after the kind acquaintance that I have formed with you by your extreme attention to us in the hour of our need. I beg to acknowledge two golden favors from you, the one conveying £160 sterling, the other-the last I had from you-£200 sterling.

To you and the charitable contributors who made you the channel of these remittances, I beg to express the assurance of our undying gratitude, and the unceasing prayers and benedictions of our numerous poor relieved by them. Out of the evils that have befallen our country, God is working this good. He is exhibiting to those that are without, the loveliness and beauty of Catholic communion, with all its endearing practical sympathies. The remotest members of the mystic body, so interested in the common weal, well-being, feeling for and communicating to the wants of their distant brethren, and illustrating by these sweet manifestations of soul of charity that pervades each and all the beneficent sentiments of the Great Apostle of Nations, "who is on fire with whom I do not burn; who is suffering with whom I do not suffer."

France, as became her, being the heart of Catholic Christianity through her magnanimous prelates, the ornaments of the Church of God, not less by their learning than by their charity, has been preeminent in this work of beneficence. In olden times she was the refuge of our exiles for conscience' sake, now she is the benefactress of our starving poor-still the same France to Ireland that she was in the days of the illustrious Vincent de Paul. She then shared with them the bread that was necessary for her own starving poor; she, during the present year, came again to the rescue of our famishing people, even when her own children were suffering from the severest visitations. If ever, in the councils of God, it be decreed for our country to become an independent, prosperous nation, may she forget her right hand's cunning if she forgets her Catholic-Irish France. It is with much pain, dear sir, that I have to inform you that our miseries do not seem to have passed away with the last year's awful catastrophe. No. The present forebodes to us even a more direful story. Last year we had many resources, at home and abroad; this year they are all, I may say, exhausted. The little means the poor people had by them were last year expended to preserve life. They were enabled to seed their grounds and feed themselves. Their crop, therefore, their only hope of subsistence, falls far short of the usual produce.

The landlord, whose rapacity was stayed, stunned as he was by the sudden calamity that befel us, and trembling for the results, the monitor conscience upbraiding him that he was the principal cause of the misery of the Irish peasant, suspended for a season his exactions. Having had, however, time to take breath, and being encouraged by a promise of support from our kind government, to enable him with safety to extort the last morsel of bread from his famishing tenant, he has not awaited even the gathering in of the harvest to force his rents, but, like a hungry tiger, pounces on his victims while collecting the fruits of the earth that God sent them to feed upon for another year, and unrelentingly carries away the small produce of their toil and labor, leaving themselves and their naked, shivering, starving families, in the comfortless cabins to die; or if they cannot find a sufficiency to pay their back rents, regardless of the bitter blast of the coming winter or of the sufferings of the ejected poor forced to wander, without home or shelter, over the land of their fathers, they leveled to the earth their cottages and turned to sheep-walks or pasture-grounds for their oxen, the sacred spots in which beings made to the image of God dwelt, they

and their fathers, centuries before these alien monsters came to fatten on the spoils of Ireland.

To give you some idea of the extent of the misery that is nearing to us with the dark clouds of winter, I beg to submit one or two facts: In the diocese of Derry we have a Catholic population of 230,000 souls; of these, at the present time, there are at least 50,000 in actual starvation. Before the first of March, in consequence of the landlords having forced their tenantry to pay at least, each and all, a year's rent out of the crop of the season, 100,000 more will be in the same destitute condition.

We have, it is true, a poor law. Its principle is excellent. I say it in justice to the Whigs; the excellency of this principle is theirs. The Tories, however, took such care to clog the principle with so many ingeniously devised obstructions, that the law has become inoperative and nearly useless as a mode of relief. They took care to have the victims of oppression handed over to the keeping of their oppressors, making the very persons the guardians of the poor who made them poor. The shorn lamb is being entrusted to the wolf's protection; the helpless dove is being remitted to the falcon and the vulture for the grain of corn that must keep it from starving. This, Sir, is British legislation for Ireland. We are now about to have a coercion bill from them. We cry for bread, and the aid they give us is in thumbscrews, racks and tortures. We call upon them as responsible for the lives of the people they govern, to come at once and feed our famishing poor, and they answer our petitions with a No, as Britain has ever done, and an intelligible hint that they have in readiness for us, instead of provisions, bayonets and musket-balls. They seek their justification for this treatment in a few murders that have taken place in the south -murders which as Christians we deplore, and as Irishmen deeply regret; but that all Ireland should be calumniated, her poor neglected and allowed to die of starvation, because a few in one or two counties, driven to despair by oppression and want, in seeing their wives reduced with hunger to hideous skeletons, and their children dying for want of food in the arms of their famished mothers, their cottages in ruins and themselves deemed an encumbrance on the land of their birth, in their reckless despair, looking on earth and heaven as their enemy, they forget the command, "Thou shalt not kill"-a commandment they see disregarded by those who should most feel its obligation and set to them the example of forbearance-cast themselves upon

those whom they believe to be the cause of their misery, hurling them before them into their graves, which they saw had been dug and prepared for themselves. Why not trace these murders to their proper causes, and supply the only remedy for the redress of wrongs that have become unbearable? They cry out, "O these Irish murderers!" If they had any other nation under heaven but Catholic Ireland to deal with, schooled by its clergy into patience which has no example in the history of the world, not even among the Christians in the catacombs for the rule of Nero or Dioclesian was nothing to the rule of Ireland—they would have long since experienced that there was a point beyond which humanity does not endure, and the tyrants would have been taught a lesson which would have appalled the earth, making the strong without mercy tremble in the high places. Virginius killed his own daughter sooner than allow her to live a blasted flower of disgrace and misery, and with the bloody dagger at hand, appealed to Rome for his justification. Any other nation but Ireland, ever full as she has been, of faith and of hope, big with immortality, the recompense of patient endurance, would have arisen like one man, and felling with their chains and fetters their oppressors, or perishing in the attempt, would have exclaimed with the ancient Roman, "A day, an hour of liberty, is worth an eternity of bondage!"

Anxious to oppress the people, or allow them to perish through destitution, they wish to silence their clergy by the vilest vituperation against their character. To get at the sheep with impunity, they wish to muzzle the shepherd, knowing well that they will not suffer the oppression of those who are so dear to them without reclamation, without an appeal to the sympathies of the world. By their atrocious imputations they expect to blacken them before men, so that their cries to humanity in behalf of their flocks might pass unheeded and unattended to. They would blacken the whole Irish race, that they might be victimized without commiseration, seeking the justification of their inhumanity or barbarity in the depravity of the race they inmolated. Like the alconda of Ceylon, which is wont to lick over with its forked tongue, and cover with its poisonous slabber the prey it intends to devour, our enemies besmear us with their foul-mouthed slanders, that they may the more easily swallow us down.

When I reflect on the unhappy state of our country; on the wrongs she endured for ages in every locality; on the utter helplessness of our poor, and when I consider that man's rule and not God's was the cause

of this ruin, I have been oft almost forced to forget the character becoming a Christian bishop, and yielding to the feelings of outraged humanity, to cry out to the God of justice, "How long, O Lord, how long?" or to say with the royal prophet, contemplating in the distance of time, something similar to our condition, Babylon's sway in his own beautiful Palestine, the temple raised by his own son a hideous ruin, his own Jerusalem plundered and racked by the heathen invader, the sons and daughters of his people bending down beneath the weight of their slavery, and in their sorrow hang their harps on the banks of the Euphrates, far, far away from the hills of their fathers, and from their own placid, beautiful Jordan, whose banks had so often echoed with their songs of joy," Beatus qui alidet parviculos eorum in petram." The religion of mercy and forgiveness, however, forbids the aspiration and invites us to bow our head in resignation to the will of that God who is patient, because he is eternal, aud who has reserved a day for all things, when the just and the wicked shall be judged. You will, I am sure, sir, find an apology for the length of this letter in the feelings that gave occasion to it. It is the outpouring of a heart deeply sympathizing with its suffering country, and naturally resenting the wrongs it endures and has endured for centuries. After God, there is no consolation so sweet to the wounded spirit as to have friends into whose bosoms we can confidently pour the secrets of our grief—friends who feel with us and for us, and whom we know to be ready to wipe the tear from sorrow's cheek, and pluck, as far as in them lies, the sword of tribulation from the heart.

Permit me, Sir, again, in the name of the destitute of the diocese of Derry, and in my own name, to express to you, in the most deepfelt and warmest emotion of Irish hearts, our thankfulness to you, all the members of the Irish Relief Committee at Paris, and to all the charitable throughout France, who in any way contributed to the relief of our poor. May the God who is charity repay them one hundred fold for their beneficence to us-make them happy on earth, and the coheirs of his own Divine Son in that kingdom, the sure inheritance of all who scatter and give to the poor, who are merciful, compassionate and just, is the fervent, heartfelt prayer of your most faithful, obliged and devoted servant, XE. MAGINN.

From Boston, New York, and Montreal he also received and acknowledged, with his usual eloquence,