Relief to the Irish

The subscription in Liverpool to relieve the distressed in Ireland, amounted, on the 11th of June, to 13116 14s.

Sir James Mackintosh has obtained a pledge from the House of Commons “that it would take into its most serious consideration the means of increasing the efficacy of the laws, by moderating their undue rigour.”

Mr. Hunt has ordered a half a ton of his powder, packed in half pounds, to be sent as his subscription for the relief of the suffering Irish— 5 ewt. has been shipped for Cork, and 5 ewt. for Limerick— This will afford three meals a day for a week, to twenty-two hundred and forty persons, at half a pound each. Notwithstanding the generous exertions made to relieve the Irish, their sufferings continue to augment, in consequence of the operations of the typhus fever, always the fatal attendant upon misery and starvation.

The Dublin Patriot remarks on this subject, “We pledge ourselves to this fact— that the distress, in extent and degree, even in those parishes where it was supposed to be less severe, is frightful and appalling; and that scenes have been witnessed by the visitors, which so far exceeded any idea that had been formed of what human nature could endure, that the beholders were obliged to retreat in dismay and horror. We speak not of a solitary instance of wretchedness such as we have described, but of masses of it, where human beings had not tasted food for six and thirty hours, and where sixteen were only preserved by some morsel of food administered by creatures almost as palid and wo-worn, but who had just as many rags an enabled them to crawl out without outraging decency.”

“At Clare, 50 persons were ill of fever. In the western part of Galway, men, women, and children, dying, of starvation, and the mortality so great that every one who could was dying as from a plague. Sligo was similarly circumstanced. In Cork county a typhus fever of a most malignant kind had already appeared. In Mayo, the deaths from starvation were increasing. In short, a great part of the west and South of Ireland presented the shocking and appalling spectacle of a dense population in a state of famine, and upon the brink of a pestilence. We repeat, says the Dublin paper, “that a million of men, women, and children, are starving— are actually dying of hunger, and in one of the finest seasons ever remembered, a malignant fever, with every appearance of the worst symptoms of pestilence has set in.”