We express surprise that the assertions of Mr O'Connell and the agitators continue to be credited by the people, although they have been a thousand times rejected and belied; but her Majesty's ministers exhibit a still greater extent of gullibility, _if they really, as they affect to do_, believe in the statements made by the Radical members and their organs of the press, after the repeated instances in which those statements have been proved to be erroneous. On the 20th November, the Mansion-house Committee proclaimed to all the inhabitants of the British empire, and in the presence of an all-seeing Providence, "That in Ireland famine of a most hideous description _must be immediate and pressing, and pestilence of the most frightfull kind, and not remote_, unless immediately prevented." And on the 17th of December, Mr O'Connell announced, that "Some say the crop will last till April. Even those most sanguine admit that _we will have a famine in April_--others say the crop will last till March--others that it will not last beyond February--others that a famine will come on before the month of January is over--_for my own part, I believe the last_;" yet, here we are, thanks to a beneficent Providence, now approaching the 1st of May, neither suffering from famine nor from pestilence, with almost all the crops sown, and with well-supplied and steadily-falling markets; and yet the Premier eagerly grasps at any new exaggeration of those men, for the purpose of supporting his own overdrawn pictures of fresh distress. But there is, in reality, neither that distress nor that scarcity in Ireland which we are taught to believe exist there. The people are fond of coarse food, which we think unfit for men, but they prefer it--witness the various insinuations of the paupers against the use of Indian corn flour. That the Irish consider the constant use of "bread and meat" as an infliction, is proved by a rather ludicrous account given of their feelings on this head in his evidence before Lord Devon's Committee, by Mr Thomas Glennon, No. 418, part second. After telling the Commissioners that many persons had emigrated from his neighbourhood to South America, "that they had succeeded there, and sent large remittances to their friends through his hands," he is asked--"Have they sent any statement how the climate agrees with them?" "It agrees very well with them, _and the only difficulty they find is, that they have not potatoes to eat; the bread and meat, and constant eating, is what disagrees with them_." Now, surely, if we ought to consult the political prejudices of the Irish people when legislating for them, as the Premier says we should do, we ought not altogether to disregard their culinary tastes, or force them to eat a diet which they dislike, only because we prize it ourselves.