Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The Irish people have been so trained by the agitators in the art of
deception, that it is almost impossible for those who have not an
accurate and perfect knowledge of their objects, and their practices, to
fathom their intentions, or to detect their impositions. They are always
ready, always prepared, with arrangements to support their statements.
Perhaps a better instance to exemplify their disregard of truth, and the
lengths they will go to attain their objects, cannot be adduced, than
one which we select from a letter of the "_Times_ commissioner," who
visited the property of Mr O'Connell. After describing the general
wretchedness of the population, this gentleman proceeds--"A little apart
from these was the house of T. Sullivan, jun., who, with his twelve
children, a sick cow, and two pigs suffering under some grievous malady,
occupied the same room. In answer to our enquiries as to his condition,
he replied that the food of himself and family all the year round was
potatoes and buttermilk. 'Were the potatoes good?' 'Troth they were
not--bad as could be,' (and he proved the assertion by cutting open a
number of them taken at random from a heap, and showing us the extent of
the disease.) 'Had he plenty of potatoes?' 'Indeed he had not.' 'Of
milk?' 'Never--nor half enough--never had enough for either dinner or
breakfast.' All his children were as badly off as himself--not half
enough of potatoes, and often nothing to drink with them, as he could
only afford the milk of one stripper for his family.' He had no fish,
'and very little of any thing.' This was the substance of his story,
translated to us by an interpreter, Mr Connell; and yet he was a large
holder, though his bed was of straw--his cabin falling to pieces--and
the mud outside percolating to the interior, where it was trodden into a
filthy, adhesive, earthy glue, by the feet and hooves of the semi-naked
children, pigs, fowl, and cattle." Now, can there be a more perfect
picture of desolation and misery than this man's case presents? Could
any rational person raise a doubt as to the truth of the sufferer's
representations?--his potatoes were rotten, "and he proved it by taking
them _indiscriminately from a heap_." Nothing could be more
conclusive--"here there could be no deception"--and the graphic sketch
which the talented gentleman drew of this wretched wight, would no doubt
have formed the groundwork of many leading articles in the influential
journal for which he reported, had he not been undeceived before he had
time to forward his dispatch, and _undeceived, too, by no less an
authority than Mr Sullivan himself_. At the conclusion of the very
letter which contains this harrowing picture, we find the commissioner
writing--"Whilst sitting at the hotel at Cahirceveen, Mr Trant, a
magistrate of the county, entering the room, informed me that Thomas
Sullivan of Aaghenming, whose house I visited on the preceding day, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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