ABSTRACT
About five years ago, while surrounded on the shores of the St. Laurence, with the victims of hunger and ship fever, I was given a copy of a lecture delivered in New York on 'The Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine.' I had then before me a truthful commentary to these elegant pages; my only regret in perusing them was, that their illustrious author had not been an eye witness of the scenes in which I was nightly and daily privileged to take an active part. What an inspired energy his eloquence would have caught from their contemplation! What a lesson his revered voice could have read to Europe and America on the working of that government, which but a very short time ago we heard praised up in our midst as the very perfection of political liberality, wisdom, and enlightenment! How the dungeons of Naples and the cruelties of Sicily would have sunk into the shade before the horrid realities of Grosse-Isle!
