E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Stephen Blundell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) [Illustration: University of London] Presented by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. 1903. FACTS FOR THE KIND-HEARTED OF ENGLAND! AS TO THE WRETCHEDNESS OF THE IRISH PEASANTRY, AND THE MEANS FOR THEIR REGENERATION. BY JASPER W. ROGERS, C.E. This Edition (500 copies bound), has been presented by the Author, as a donation;--to be sold at the Ladies Bazaar, for relief of the famine in Ireland, and distress in Scotland. LONDON: JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1847. FACTS FOR THE KIND-HEARTED OF ENGLAND. In my twentieth year my first visit was made to London--how long since need not be said, lest I make discoveries. I arrived at the "Swan with _two_ necks," in Lad Lane, to the imminent peril of my own _one_, on entering the yard of that then famous hostelry, the gate of which barely allowed admission to the coach itself--and first set foot on London ground, midst the bustle of some half-dozen coaches, either preparing for exit, or discharging their loads of passengers and parcels. Four "insides" were turned out, and eight "outsides" turned in--I, amongst the unfortunates of the latter class, taking possession of the nearest point I could to the coffee-room fire. It is to be recollected that in those days one had but _four_ chances in his favour, against perhaps forty applicants for the interior of the mail--and he who was driven in winter, by necessity of time, to the top of a coach in Liverpool, and from thence to Lad Lane, and found himself in the coffee-room there unfrozen, might be well contented. So felt I, then,--and doubly so now, as I think of the dangers of flood, and road, and neck, which I encountered in a twenty-six hours' journey, exposed to the "pelting of the pitiless storm,"--for it snowed half the way.